The Gutshot Poker Club in Clerkenwell used to be a cool place in its heyday. It helped if you were 5 feet tall and wafer thin to play there though as the place was often as cramped as Josef Fritzl’s basement. Many great poker careers were launched from there, including ours if you include min cashing in the Micro Millions Hyper Turbo last month, probably the most notable being that of Liv Boeree.

Technically the club could not charge rake as it did not hold a gambling license but they got round this by making contributions ‘voluntary’, although not proffering a fee was frowned upon. Nobody really had an issue with this as it was entirely understandable that the club had costs to cover for dealers and tournament direction etc.

The club was eventually shut down but the spirit remains with the International Private Members Club N1. Before the closure of the original club a venture into online poker was made with the added convenience of being able to deposit and withdraw in cash at the club itself.

The problem with being vaguely legal as the live club was is that it doesn’t go down too well when you move into the online sector. Most fly by night operators have either been closed or gone bust and, in this era of regulation, the rogue operators should be few and far between, especially after Black Friday. We’re not claiming that Gutshot are a rogue operator as such but they have had more clients than Heidi Fleiss and a reputation within the industry to go with it.

GUtshot Poker has now done the rounds of nearly every online network going having been evicted from several for illegal rakeback deals and bonuses and now, presumably due to those same issues and Playtech’s general dislike of winning players, iPoker seem to have given them the heave ho. It doesn’t fill us with confidence that Gutshot have now joined Merge – who illegally take USA players and Enet who illegaly accept Italian players and charge the most outrageous rake going.

We can’t see this ending well and as and when Gutshot leave or are pushed the only network left for them might be the Cartoon Network. That’s all folks!

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