New Zealand Rules in Favor of .net Ads

A New Zealand Court made a critical ruling this week, determining that .net advertisements are not gambling promotions – and perhaps just as importantly, that poker tournaments are a form of competition, not gambling. These decisions could prove vitally important for poker players living in New Zealand, as they may help guarantee access to free online poker.

The case started when New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs brought charges against TVWorks Limited, a company that owns two television stations in the country. They alleged that advertisements for PokerStars.net – the free, no real money version of PokerStars – were in fact promoting Pokerstars.com, an overseas gambling operator, and that these advertisements would induce New Zealanders to gamble overseas. These actions would be illegal under the Gambling Act of 2003.

However, Justice David J. Harvey dismissed all charges, rejecting the argument that a Pokerstars.net advertisement was a de facto advertisement for Pokerstars.com. Justice Harvey rejected this argument, stating in his decision that the websites being advertised did not involve gambling, because the sites in question only offered free poker. In addition, he pointed out that the .com website was never mentioned in the ads, and that though the names may be similar, the two are separate entities.

Many of the ads in question included advertisements for the Asia Pacific Poker Tour, which brought the nature of poker tournaments into question as well. The defense made a rather interesting argument that poker tournaments did not constitute a form of gambling. They used the following analogy: while betting on a horse race is most certainly gambling, it is not gambling to pay money to enter a horse into a race, and then collect prize money if the horse wins.

In the end, it seems that this argument won the Justice over. In his decision, Justice Harvey stated that a poker tournament “involves the splitting of a sum of money derived from the payment of entry fees between the winning players,” and that “because players do not make side bets on the outcome of each hand, that element of wagering upon the outcome…is not present.”

As a result of the decision, .net websites remain free to advertise both their own sites, and promotions related to poker tournaments and tours such as the APPT. In addition, it may become a model for other nations with similar anti-gambling laws that have yet to see legal challenges related to free play online poker sites.