More questions

Phil Gordon interviews Howard Lederer about the apparent death of the Reid bill on ESPN Radio here.

At about the 21:30 mark, Gordon asks Lederer when he first became aware that a 15-month blackout period would be part of the bill. Lederer says, casually, "A couple of months ago." Aha! This would seem to confirm that (1) Reid had this thing cooking for a while, and (2) prior to the election he had tipped off some insiders about what was coming.

This may be the answer to the question I asked last month: "What am I missing?" Reid had been an opponent of online gaming, so it made no sense to me that in the closing days of the election we suddenly heard from Lederer, Andy Bloch, and Barry Greenstein that Reid would be a champion for online poker.

But, of course, this answer (assuming my inferences are correct here) just leads to more questions. First among them is why Reid kept this under wraps. He apparently recruited poker insiders to speak up for him in an effort to win votes of poker players. So why not publicly announce what he was planning to do?

Second, I'm still completely baffled by the actions of the Poker Players Alliance. One would assume that if Lederer knew about Reid's intentions prior to the election, then so did the PPA. But when the Reid bill was announced, the PPA sure as hell looked like it was caught completely off-guard, with its first public statement being utterly devoid of any indication of support for the proposal. Today the PPA did a press release wagging its finger at Congress for not passing the legislation. Uh, well, if this bill was such an obvious win for poker, why was your first statement on it so carefully neutral? And I still continue to wonder what then happened in the subsequent 24 hours to change that bland "we dunno about this thing" attitude into salute-the-flag enthusiasm? Something very strange was going on behind the scenes there, and they're simply not being candid about it. Hey, PPA: Candor is a prerequisite for trustworthiness. Your credibility is awfully low here.

Yet another question is the overall timing. The UIGEA passed in 2006. What took Reid so long to decide to do something for poker? He gave himself very few opportunities for passage, waiting until so late in the congressional session. Was the idea for the bill a last-minute thing when he realized that he was polling behind Sharron Angle, and he became desperate to attract more votes? If so, how strong is his commitment, now that he is safe for another six years?

As an aside, you can make a fun game out of counting how many times Lederer says "y'know" during this podcast. Caution: Do NOT make this a drinking game.