America remains the largest market for online poker, despite the 2006 passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). After the passage of UIGEA, many online poker companies decided to focus on the European market and some pulled out of the United States altogether. Despite that, online poker is thriving in America.

Market research company Poker Players Research (PPR) reports that the United States still has 10 million players competing in online poker using real money, five times more than the UK, who has the second largest market at 1.9 million. The report states that Germany and France have 1.6 million and 1.3 million players, respectively, and the growing Scandinavian market has 1.4 million real-money players.

So it seems that the United States’ ban on “unlawful internet gambling,” whatever that means, is no more effective than its ban on drugs. The international aspect of the internet allows Americans to play online poker on websites located overseas. It should be noted, however, that the data in this report is somewhat misleading. The United States, with over 307 million citizens, is the third most populous country in the world, behind China and India. In comparison, Germany has about 82 million citizens, France has just over 65 million, the UK has around 61.5 million. The Scandinavian population, consisting of the citizens of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, totals approximately 19.5 million people.

Because there are so many more Americans, it can be expected for them to have a larger number of online poker players. A little simple arithmetic shows that both the US and UK have 3% of their population playing online poker, Germany and France have 2% of their population playing, and a surprising 7% of Scandinavians are playing poker online. Regardless of the percentages, though, UIGEA has clearly not been completely effective, since 3% of America’s population is still able to play poker online. Now, about the “war on drugs”…