Poker players are political wimps

In the nearly one year since passage of the abominable "Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act" (UIGEA) I have overheard quite a bit of discussion on the subject of politics around the poker table, as well as on TV, among well-known professional players, on "High Stakes Poker" and "Poker After Dark" (the only two poker programs that have a lot of table talk). I am repeatedly astounded by how players so readily forgive--or forget?--those who tried to make online poker difficult or impossible to play.

I don't play online much, because I'm just not very good at it. (Not that anybody cares, but I think the main reasons are that (1) live players give off oodles of information, and I seem not to function well without it, (2) I get bored and impatient with nothing to do but stare at the screen, and feel compelled to play hands that I should just fold; real people are a lot more interesting to watch, (3) players enter and leave virtual tables much more quickly than real ones, not giving me the time I need to figure out how they're playing. At least I'm in good company; both Daniel Negreanu and Barry Greenstein admit that they're similarly handicapped.) But there aren't very many more victimless "crimes" than sitting at home in one's underwear playing $0.05-0.10 limit hold'em on the computer. It's insane for "the land of the free" to be making this activity of questionable legality and putting up hurdles for casual players to jump over.

I guess what brought this to a head for me was hearing Daniel Negreanu and Doyle Brunson chatting, during a "Poker After Dark" episode, about presidential candidates, with both of them endorsing Barack Obama. There aren't many people in this country who were more negatively affected by the UIGEA than these two. Both of them had online poker sites that were about a year old, and both operations went belly-up shortly after the legislation was signed. I have no idea how much money they may have lost, but it must have been millions of dollars of potential revenue. And then they're openly talking about their support for a guy who voted to close them down!!! Have you guys lost all sense of reason???

The usual canard is that this was "must-pass" legislation, because Senator Bill Frist, seeking to polish his reputation with social conservatives for an abortive presidential candidacy, used his position as majority leader to push an unrelated bill about port security into conference committee, where he attached the UIGEA. This forced members of Congress in both houses to vote on the whole package. (Never mind what might have been done in that conference committee to prevent the attachment.) So even poker players who are reasonably informed about how this law came into being tend to go easy on the politicians: They had to vote for the port security legislation, and the online gambling unfortunately came along for the ride.

I don't buy it. I won't let them off the hook that easily. There is no such thing as a "must-pass" bill, in my view. Suppose that instead of a gambling provision Frist had attached, say, a bill repealing the 19th amendment (which gave women the right to vote). Would any senator or representative have said, "Well, we have to pass the port security stuff, so I guess we'll just have to hope that women don't notice this other little provision"? Of course not. They first would have prevented Frist from attaching that amendment in conference committee, or, failing that, they would have denounced it from the hilltops, voted against it, then quickly pushed the port security bill back through committees and to a floor vote, this time unencumbered by the anti-suffrage bits.

So why didn't they have the fortitude to do the same when the unrelated amendment was about gambling? Because they either actually liked the measure, or at least decided that few of their constituents would care deeply enough about it for it to hurt them at the next election. To be blunt, even those who might have thought the bill to be bad public policy put their fingers to the wind and decided that they could be more hurt by political opponents saying "He voted against making our ports secure" than "He voted to make it really difficult to put money into one's online poker account."

They could have kept the ports bill and the gambling bill separate if they wanted to. They just didn't care about the matter enough. I, for one, think that they should have to answer for such lack of integrity when it comes to protecting individual liberties.

So who voted for the combined bill? Here's the full, official legislative history of the bill. (The part about online gambling is the “Conference Report” stuff on 9/29/06.) http://www.congress.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HR04954:@@@X

Here’s the roll-call vote from the House of Representatives:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll516.xml. For Nevada residents, you’ll note the names of Jim Gibbons (now our illustrious governor, with more scandals accruing before he took office than most governors get in a full term), Jon Porter, and Shelley Berkley all voting for the bill. In the Senate, they were so cowardly that they passed it by “unanimous consent,” meaning that there was no roll-call vote recorded. Therefore, every member of the Senate gets the blame for it.

Even the politician I like the most, Ron Paul (http://www.ronpaul2008.com/) (I'm a strongly libertarian kind of guy--live and let live, and all that jazz), voted for it. I was surprised to learn that last night when I was poking around at the details of the history, because I've heard it said and seen it written that he voted against it. To be precise, he voted against a similar separate bill that the House defeated earlier in 2006. But as the links above show, he voted for it when it was attached to the ports security bill. Shame on you, Ron Paul.

But at least he has since then come out strongly in favor of either repealing this legislation or reducing its impact by carving out a provision for licensed gaming companies. There are at least two bills in the House that would have such an effect. See http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-2046 (listing Paul as a co-sponsor) and http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-2610.

Now, I'm opposed to federally licensing gambling establishments, because it's just not a proper or necessary role of the federal government, and it will inevitably lead to the licensees being subjected to more and more regulation as time goes by. That's the way of all federal regulations and licensing, unfortunately. But at least I can be confident that if outright repeal of the UIGEA ever managed to get put to a vote, Paul would unquestionably support it, as either a congressman or as president. See http://www.gambling911.com/Ron-Paul-Internet-Gambling-042707.html.

But what about the other presidential candidates? It's hard to say, beyond the fact that all of the ones who are currently senators or repesentatives voted for the UIGEA, and therefore must be presumed to be enemies of poker players, absent strong contrary evidence. And, frankly, there just isn't much contrary evidence, except for Paul.

The very fact that it's hard to find clear, definitive position statements from any of them supports the theory that they are counting on this not being much of an issue in the presidential election. For those willing to invest the reading time, there have been at least three lengthy threads in the 2+2 poker forums on the subject, though, as always, the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low, and nobody seems to have found much clear information:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=11872919&an=0&page=0#Post11872919

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=12016409&page=0&fpart=1&vc=1

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=10351539&an=0&page=2#Post10351539

Bill Richardson appears to be the only candidate, aside from Paul, who has openly supported repeal of the UIGEA. See http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2007-04-30-4052419200_x.htm (page down to the third story).

Rudy Giuliani has reportedly received the most money from the gaming industry. But that's hard to interpret. It was the brick-and-mortar casinos that first pushed through the law several years back that made it nearly impossible to use credit cards to fund online gambling accounts. (And their lobbyists did this on the ironic grounds of the immorality of expanded gambling!) Unless Harrah's, Station Casinos, MGM/Mirage, Wynn, etc., start running online operations themselves, they're likely to see Internet gaming as competition to be stifled, rather than as part of the same industry. Giuliani was definitely part of the crackdown on New York underground poker rooms, so his track record is pretty suspect.

As for the other candidates, it's a crap shoot (pardon the pun). They haven't committed themselves. But to me that's pretty telling. If a politician is dodging an issue that he knows a relatively small constituency cares passionately about, it is most likely because his position will anger that group, so he decides it's better to keep quiet. In my view, this is definitely in the "if you're not clearly with us, you must be against us" category.

If you love poker and you love personal liberty, you can't logically support any current presidential candidate except for Ron Paul or Bill Richardson. As far as I can tell, there aren't any other supporters out there. If there are, we have to wonder why they're keeping mum about it.

While I'm on this rant, just a word about one of the other related things I read in poker magazines frequently. The relatively new Poker Players Alliance (http://www.pokerplayersalliance.org/) is actively seeking federal regulation in exchange for recognized legality. Other writers repeatedly urge Congress to "regulate and tax" online poker specifically, or all online gambling generally. I think this is dangerous and completely wrong-headed.

As I said before, regulation always begets more regulation. Regulation means expense to the operators--and in this case that would translate to lower profits for the players. Opponents of anything who can't get it completely banned always go for regulation, incrementally making the regulations more onerous and expensive as time goes by. Look at abortion, cigarette smoking, alcohol, nuclear energy, mining, logging, or a zillion other examples. Inviting federal regulation is letting the camel's nose into the tent, and sooner or later, inevitably, the whole camel will be in there.

We also don't need regulation to protect us. The businesses that run online gaming risk bankruptcy if they are caught cheating or letting others cheat, because their customers will flit away in a heartbeat. They have much more to fear from loss of their investments than from not following every federal regulation. Despite the number of people I have heard calling for regulation, I haven't heard even one specific proposal of what these folks think the regulations should do, in terms of protecting players, that the online poker sites aren't already doing. Not even a phone-book-sized set of regulations would make me feel any safer about online play than I already do.

The same is true, but even more so, for those who casually say "regulate and tax it." Taxation would even more surely sound the death knell. The amount of the tax would simply get ratcheted up over time, and we would be spending our political energy trying to prevent that creep. But it would happen anyway. Just look at how the Nevada legislature treats the casinos--as cash cows to hit up for more revenue every time there's a budget shortfall. Just look at how tobacco taxes have moved over the years. The so-called "sin taxes" are the very easiest ones for politicians to support. If you think it's hard to make money playing poker now, when even good players have a fairly small percentage return on total wagers, wait until the feds hit you with, say, a 10% tax on every pot, on top of the house rake. Of course, it would start out at, say, just 1%, but there's no doubt in my mind that it would slowly increase until nearly all of the profit has been squeezed out of the game.

The message from poker players to politicians needs to be this: Leave us the hell alone. Don't ban it, don't make the financial transactions illegal or difficult, don't regulate it, don't tax it. Leave it alone. Let us play our little games in peace. You get your share from our income taxes, and that's more than enough.

As others have pointed out, it is now easier and more clearly legal to play online poker in Russia than in the United States. That's crazy. It should be unthinkable. It has come to this because we poker players haven't exercised any political muscle. Politicians have no reason to seek the support--or, alternatively, fear the wrath--of poker players, as they do with the NRA, the AARP, labor unions, etc. We're political wimps. That has to change.


Addendum:

I posted a link to this rant on the http://www.allvegaspoker.com/ forums, and soon thereafter found posted this interesting and thoughtful response, which is well worth reading, if this whole subject interests you:
http://www.allvegaspoker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=27128#27128

Addendum, November 18, 2007:

I just stumbled across this nice summary of where both parties' presidential candidates stand on internet gambling, so far as it is known:

https://pokerplayersalliance.org/news/newsandarticles_article.php?DID=289