Why don't any major poker rooms accept Bitcoin?

Cryptocurrency is taking over the world, so why are online poker rooms taking their time to adopt it?

I’ve only recently started taking an interest in Cryptocurrency but I know it is going to figure heavily in poker (it already is) so I’ve been teaching myself about it, interviewing experts in the space and I now have enough of my own net worth in it to care about how it goes. I want to share what I’m learning on this site, but please don’t class me as an expert because I’m probably only a few months ahead of a complete newbie.

The benefits of Crypto in poker seem too many to mention. It clearly seems to have a number of advantages when it comes to security, as well as being a much easier way of moving money around anywhere in the world. The Ethereum based smart contracts also seem likely to revolutionise poker in a number of exciting ways.

So why is it that we haven’t seen a mainstream, regulated, online poker room accept Bitcoin yet?

Volatility

Probably the single biggest reason is the volatility of Crypto right now. Bitcoin doesn’t just fluctuate wildly in a day or week, it does so in the space of an hour. Every day there is a story in the news to the effect of '$100 of Bitcoin seven years ago would be worth $72 million today' and it has increased almost tenfold in the last year. While this is all great news for those that have it, almost everyone expects a crash to be coming at some point.

So it is understandable why a poker would be reluctant to accept a Bitcoin deposit at the moment. Somebody might deposit $100 worth of Bitcoin into a room but by the time they get it to the table it could be worth half or double that. Managed well this could obviously work out favorably for the poker room, but why take the risk? They are not in this to be currency traders. I know somebody outside of poker who accepted Bitcoin for his own business and he told me dealing with this volatility was too stressful, so he stopped doing it.

When I spoke to Ryan Gittleson at Virtue Poker he introduced me to the idea of Stable Coins, which is like a form of options contract, which would guarantee the currency would stay at the same value. Until such time that the value of Crypto stabilises (if it ever does), it does seem that something like this would need to be in place for a poker room to accept large amounts of Bitcoin.

The poker world becomes the Crypto world

And it probably would end up being large amounts too, as every day it seems more and more evident that a big percentage of the serious poker communities’ collective bankrolls are invested in Crypto. Whenever there is a big spike or drop in Bitcoin’s value, the reaction to it is all that dominates poker Twitter. It’s been fascinating to watch because it has turned a lot of poker players into de facto traders. Poker and trading have always been closely linked with similar skill sets, though I do wonder how many poker players are unwittingly gambling, confusing their poker skill for trading skill (I almost certainly am guilty of this overconfidence).

The serious poker player who dabbles in Bitcoin is also probably not the ideal customer for a poker room to accommodate anyway. As we have seen almost all poker rooms move further towards incentivising recreational depositing new players, anyone who wants to use Bitcoin probably self selects as a tough grinder. Another reason for the main poker rooms to not take Cryptocurrencies just yet.

Then of course you simply have the wider legal issues that are involved that make Bitcoin a massive headache for an operator. Several countries have already said they don’t want their people using Bitcoin nor do they consider it a real currency, others have suggested creating their own national Cryptocurrencies. It’s already a big enough headache to adhere to every single country’s regulatory requirements before also factoring in this new disruptive form of money.

Bitcoin is changing the world and is quickly changing poker, it is only a matter of time that a major online poker room accepts it. Whether that happens because the price stabilises or they simply cannot ignore it any further remains to be seen.

Do you think we will see a major regulated poker room accept Bitcoin next year? Let us know in the comments: