SOURCE: Las Vegas Sun

Don't cry for the brand-name poker pros, or for the online hotshots who make a good part of their living hustling poker on the Internet.

They weren't hurt much when President Bush signed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act last year.

They got off unscathed compared with thousands of "regular" poker enthusiasts in the U.S. who were essentially locked out of the poker scene when the law passed, according to Jay Lakin of Poker Source Online, one of the world's largest Internet poker affiliate sites.

The law did not make playing online poker illegal in the U.S. By restricting certain financial transactions, it just set up extra hoops for players to jump through before they could compete at the virtual tables.

For poker's big guns, there was nothing to those gymnastics. For others, the hoops might as well have been hogsheads of fire.

"There are people in wheelchairs, people who are shut-ins, people who don't live anywhere near a casino," said Lakin, vice president and co-founder of Poker Source Online.

"Their enjoyment in life is sitting at a laptop, sitting at their computer and playing poker with other people from throughout the world.

"They don't have the resources to set up a foreign bank account or anything like that. The pros are still funding their accounts and taking money out. It's the guy in a wheelchair in South Dakota who's getting hurt."

Because of the nature of his business, which acts as an intermediary between online poker sites and poker players, Lakin is tracking - much more closely than most - the progress of fou r congressional bills and a legal challenge that could negate the gambling act, including:

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