Category: Poker Law

Sheldon Adelson has evidently appointed himself the new crusader against the legal U.S. online poker revolution. Even as New Jersey gets ready for the “soft” launch of its legal online poker operations – which by the way will not include online poker bigwig Poker Stars – the billionaire who owns Las Vegas Sands Corp (no conflict of interest there) has let leak to The Washington Post that he will be launching a major public campaign against legalizing online gambling.

The Washington Post piece revealed that Adelson will launch in January a Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling. He aims to include in the group advocates for women, children, African-Americans, and Hispanics.

The bent of Adelson’s crusade will be that legal online poker would exploit the poor, and endanger kids. In a Forbes op-ed that ran last summer, Adelson called online gambling a “toxin” and a “plague” to society. What’s he call land-based gambling?

In addition to influencing the 2014 presidential election with this campaign, Adelson also aims to provoke congress to create a federal law banning online gambling before other states follow New Jersey, Delaware, and Nevada’s leads.

While Adelson has not disclosed the budget for this crusade to prevent competition for his land-based casino activities, it’s worth noting that he spending nearly $100,000.000 on a recent major political campaign. Though, if we remember right, that didn’t go so well for him. So maybe it’s a good bet this campaign won’t either. Any online gambling site got a line on that yet?

Washington poker players were disappointed this week to learn that the latest bill aiming to legalize and regulate online poker has died in committee. The announcement came from the bill’s sponsor, Washington State Representative Paul Harris on Thursday, February 21, 2013 that the bill is officially dead for the duration of the year. He added, however, that he has been assured the bill will get a second hearing come the next session of the state congress.

The House Government Accountability and Oversight Committee held a hearing on the bill that lasted nearly an hour before the decision was made to kill the bill for this year’s session due to too many questions raised during the hearing.

The new legislation would soften the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act (UIGEA) to turn  recreational at-home online poker from a felongy into merely a class 3 civil infraction, the penalty for which, according to Washington law, is a maximum fine of $50 and something called “statutory assessments”.

When asked why they should take the trouble of changing the current law if no one in the state has yet been arrested for playing online poker, Harris told the committee that his ultimate aim is to legalize online poker in the state but that he thought decriminalization was a reasonable first step to take toward that larger goal.

Harris, who made a statement in his hearing that online poker could generate for state as much as $400 million, is still optimistic about this bill’s passage.

The Poker Players Alliance (PPA) is watching the developments on this story closely.

The latest U.S. poker bill that will be considered by Congress at some point presumably in the next session is nicknamed the Reid-Kyl bill, after its coauthors Senators Harry Reid, a Democrat, and Jon Kyl, a Republican. Before that bill ever makes it before Congres, however, one of the biggest voices in Washington for the online poker player, the PPA (or Poker Player’s Alliance) has already written the two Senators a letter requesting modifications to the existing draft of their bill.

The November 2nd letter from Chairman Alfonse D’Amato of the PPA praised the two Senators as well as many aspects of the bill, but also listed 6 areas in which the bill can improve. One point is that states already offering commercial poker live through non-tribal gaming outlets should already be considered opted-in to the proposed federal program without having to take any other specific action to opt in.

In addition the PPA opposes the proposed 15-month waiting period operators would be subjected to before being allowed to deal cards online. The PPA also encouraged allowing international players to join the player pools the bill would open to U.S. players, thereby increasing revenue and player liquidity. The PPA letter also recommended a provision directing the IRS to come up with guidelines for poker players to file income taxes on money won playing online poker. The PPA also stands behind Indian tribes and state lotteries that want to get in on the action too, asserting that any federal poker bill cannot exclude those entities from receiving federal online poker licenses.

A New York federal judge ostensibly ending the long raging argument over whether poker is a game of luck or a game of skill. Of course the honest answer is Both, but the question remains of which influence is more significant in the game, as that determination will play a major role in how (and whether) the game of online poker may be legalized in this country. And the ruling is: it’s more skill than luck.

This is of course a huge boon to poker players everywhere as it vindicates an oft-ridiculed vocation as lacking in any intellectual or competitive value. The common definitions of gambling, explained the judge (and that used in formulating the long-hated UIGEA that effectively made online poker illegal in the United States) is that the predominance of the element of luck is what defines a game as “gambling”. Now that a federal judge has ruled the game of poker more skill than luck it no longer so easily falls under the caption of gambling and hence may soon no longer be restricted by the law.

The case involved a Staten Island man charged with running an illegal gambling operation out of his basement. But as that “operation” was actually a Texas Hold’em game Judge Jack Weinstein determined in his ruling on Tuesday, August 21st, 2012 that the man had not violated the federal anti-gambling law.

This is the first time a court ruling has examined poker’s status as a game of skill or luck.

Last Thursday, July 5, 2012, Delaware became the 1st U.S. state to enact legislation legalizing online poker and other forms on online casino gambling within its states borders. Nevada was actually the first state in the country to make moves toward legalizing online poker, but Delaware is now the first state to legalize online poker as part of a larger law legalizing all online casino gambling within the state, including games like blackjack and roulette.

The state’s Democratic Governor Jack Markell signed this bill into law. It’s called the Delaware Gaming Competitiveness Act of 2012 and it was passed by the state Senate just the morning previously, with a slim margin of victory.

Supporters of the bill, now law, felt that this move, which will allow full-service websites to offer real money online poker and other forms of online gambling, would help bolster the struggling land-based casino industry in the state, which has been dealing with tough competition from neighboring states, specifically Pennsylvania and Maryland. Opposition to the law argued that expanding gambling to the Internet would further permeate the social ills that have been associated with gambling into the culture. The governor countered opposition with the assertion that this move would help save or create a couple of thousand job.

All Delaware websites offering real money online poker or online casino gambling to state residents will be regulated through the state’s Lottery Office. As part of the law, the state will also now be able to sell lottery tickets online through a separate state-run site.