Oklahoma’s Iowa Tribe to Offer Internet Poker by the Fall?

Following two years of delays, the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma has finally obtained an international online gaming license from the Isle of Man. As a result, the tribe is now preparing the ground for its online poker site to be made available for real money play to those people based in foreign countries, with the operation run from the tribe’s sovereign land within the US.
Currently, the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma offers just free play games from its website called PokerTribe, but according to reports, that is all set to change after a gaming license was granted by the Isle of Man Gambling Supervision Commission. While, Iowa tribe Chairman Bobby Walkup has not released any details on which products may be made available when its real-money games are launched, on previous occassions he has expressed an intention to offer a range of games, including blackjack, bingo, slots, and baccarat.
All being well, Walkup said that real money games should be launched in the fall, and elaborating further on the long journey so far to even get to this point, he explained:
“The process has taken longer than we may have envisioned when we began this journey, but, because we are a Native American tribe and held to higher gaming legal and regulatory standards, we had to ensure that we met all these standards.”
The Iowa tribe, which currently operates two land-based casino in Oklahoma, originally touted their idea for real money poker back in 2015. They then had to overcome the objection of the state of Oklahoma, with a federal district court in Oklahoma City subsequently giving its approval in April of 2016, thus allowing the tribe to resume its project. Walkup and represenatives from the tribe subsequently visited Isle of Man regulators in August 2016, and after submitting an application in February 2017, finally received approved on June 13th of this year.
Despite its success so far, PokerTribe.com has many challenges ahead if it is ever to attract enough customers to become a viable online poker site,though. Firstly, it will only be available in those place which have legalized online poker industries, which in the case of the United States includes the three states of Nevada, New Jersey, and Delaware. Nevertheless, these regulated states only allow business from customers based within their borders or from other states with an intrastate compact in place. Wider afield, international countries already have numerous online poker sites for its citizens to choose from, making the tribe’s attempt to crack the international market that much more difficult.