Following a move in September aimed to reposition its business model as separate from the poker sweepstakes system, the legal status of ClubWPT Gold was placed in somewhat of a gray area.
For players in New York state, that ambiguity has been removed, suddenly and unequivocally, with the news that the players in the state are prohibited from accessing the online operator.
The news is a consequence of Senate Bill S5935A, delivered to the Governor on December 1 and signed into effect on the 5th, which prohibits dual-currency gaming, including poker.
As the ClubWPT Gold support site now states, New Yorkers with balances on the site are now required to be physically located outside the state, such as in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts or Vermont, to access their account and exchange their chip balance.
Fall repositioning does not protect ClubWPT Gold
It was just several months ago that ClubWPT Gold revealed plans seemingly designed to reposition the brand as a non-dual-currency model of online poker.
Where previously the operator had offered the sale of gold coins to play for fun — purchased alongside sweeps coins which could be exchanged for cash — the pivot replaced gold coins with ‘hand analysis credits’, allowing players to spend these tokens to access GTO solver analyses of their poker play.
That these credits came packaged with ‘chips’ — tokens which could be used to buy-in to games and cashed out for real money, as with sweeps coins before them — appears to have been sufficient to impact ClubWPT Gold as the New York ban on dual-currency operators came into force.
The move towards a positioning as a training site was not mere lip service; shortly beforehand ClubWPT Gold acquired the established poker strategy site Upswing Poker from its now-ambassador Doug Polk, in a move which bolstered its claims to be an educational resource.
Those credentials have not been sufficient to allow the brand to continue operating in New York, however.
A similar dual-currency ban is on the horizon in California, where bill AB831 will come into force in January. How ClubWPT Gold will adapt in order to continue operations there is still to-be-announced, with the site claiming it is ‘committed to continuing to operate in compliance with California law’.
