KNPR show about online gambling

Yesterday the local public radio station featured a discussion on whether online gambling should be legal. You can see the show notes and download it here. For some reason, the page doesn't mention that Howard Lederer is one of the main guests. I think he may get more air time than any of the others, in fact. As usual, he is the voice of calm and reason. The whole thing lasts about 37 minutes.

Lederer mentions that the average online poker player spends about $10 per week and plays for about 90 minutes. I have not heard those numbers before, though perhaps they're commonly known. An amusing moment happens when the program's host asks Lederer where he got those figures. The answer pretty obviously is from his day job running Full Tilt Poker, though he hedges and says they come from all the big online poker sites.

The host, Dave Berns, repeatedly says that it is a violation of federal law for people to gamble online. He has previously been told that this is wrong, and shown the evidence that it is not true, but he continues to make this assertion because, as far as I can tell, both he and the station lack any intellectual or journalistic integrity. (See here and here for previous rants on exactly the same point.)

If you listen to the show, be prepared to throw heavy objects at the computer when you get infuriated over the moronic arguments made by the two gambling opponents. For example, one of them says that it's fine to play poker online, his group is only opposed to doing it for actual money. This is clearly a man who has never played free poker. It is simply not the same game when nothing of actual value is at stake. The incentive to play better than one's opponents vanishes, and the game degenerates into farce.

Another idiotic argument is that the average online player doesn't know who he's playing against; it might secretly be a--GASP!--professional! He says that he wouldn't get into the pool against Michael Phelps, and he doesn't want to play poker against Howard Lederer.

Lederer gives one good answer to this: just play 5-10 cent games like the majority of casual players do, and you won't risk running into him, because he can't make a living playing those stakes. (This seems to give the lie to FTP's banner claim that even low-stakes or free-site players can play against Team Full Tilt. Is Lederer exempt from taking his turn at these duties?)

But the other answer is that many casual players would love to play against the pros they see on TV, the same way that amateur golfers would love to play a round with Tiger Woods--even if they know they'll probably lose. The difference is that in poker you can actually do it.

Yet another dumb argument you'll hear is that the sites are predatory, as evidenced by the "fact" that 90% of their revenue comes from 10% of their customers. This is a dubious factual claim. But even if it were true for poker, one perfectly plausible explanation is that the 10% are not addicts squandering their life savings, but professionals making a living from the vast numbers of casual players.

Anyway, it's a moderately interesting discussion, worth the listening time if you care about the public policy questions that online gaming raises.