I agree about Stars.I wouldn't treat any site as a bank, as many did pre black Friday (myself included at times over the years), even PokerStars, but I wouldn't expect my balance at Stars to really be at risk.One thing to remember, Stars is still facing the largest potential fine out of all the poker rooms in the world and is aligned against the US government.  Those two pieces of information put Stars in the same type of category as most other poker rooms, keep a bankroll online, not an accumulating investment chunk of money that you like to look at as it grows.The fallacy of big numbers in your account is dead, or it should be, time to move on there.

Ryan...how much is Stars potentially getting nailed for? and what do you think are the odds for both to get crushed? 

I thought it was like 1.5 bil stars, 1 bil ftp and 500m UB.No idea where they pull those numbers from, bc UB was not nearly 1/3 or 1/2 the size of the other two.Stars is probably worth at least a few billion dollars, I wouldn't worry too much about them.The Isle of Man has given some legitimate regulation though, evidenced by Stars reluctance to do things like work with p2p transfer sites (FTP, UB, Cake all had no problem doing this, Stars would not and cited regulations), among other similar examples I can think of.It's a more transparent process than some other regulators have shown in the past, including the KGC (Merge is regulated by them by the way, so was FTP for a long time, though Alderney licenses them now, which is a little better I think... and obv UB/AP was KGC regulated and probably partially owned from what we can tell, or effectively owned via crazy amounts of money being given in "server fees" to them by AP/UB).There's a great deal of information about the KGC in 2p2's NVG forum, I forgot the user, maybe kevmath?  He wrote a huge post detailing all the newspaper accounts of KGC "corruption" or "scandal" he could find and it was quite a lot of information.

Oh and for the odds of getting crushed, I dunno, I wouldn't bet against the US department of justice, put it that way.  Party Poker basically paid hundreds of millions of dollars to the DOJ and they pulled out after the UIGEA passed.  One of the big financial firms also paid a 500m fine recently to the DOJ and there was no indictment.  It was basically legalized extortion if you read the stories about it, I think it was Goldman Sachs.  The DOJ has bankrupted better run, larger businesses I believe before, but PokerStars looks as good of a contender as possible, located in a stronghold, lots of international law/agreement to back them up with what they did and (hopefully) the links they make between buying banks and using processors are just based on that jailed Aussie processor idiot kid (his words obv mean very little, but if he has real evidence of links then that's not good, bank fraud and money laundering are serious charges, remember, they weren't indicted on internet poker charges or anything like that, it's not about online poker being legal it appears, but the extent of which they went to to evade banks blocking transactions).

It's difficult to say because it varies by network.There were some Euro poker room scandals over the years.  Google TUSK or a Eurosomething poker room (on the Microgaming Network), these are skins that went out of business and Microgaming basically ignored all inquiries about this (really shady).Some networks are better than others.  Party is publicly traded, funds I believe are held in segregated accounts.  PokerStars is private, but funds are segregated, so I would consider both of those extremely safe.There are some threads on 2p2 where people dug into this, check the "Internet Poker" and "Poker Legislation" forums there and search for posts made over the last 90 days, a fair bit of people dug into a lot of this post black friday, for obvious reasons.