Candidates on poker

The Epic Poker web site has put up two pieces in recent days about the presidential candidates' positions on online poker (and/or online gaming more generally).

First is Jen Newell's short assessment of where the candidates stand. Not surprisingly, Ron Paul is, as always, for maximal personal freedom, so he opposes not only prohibitions on online gaming, but any governmental attempt to control the Internet. Also not surprisingly, Mitt Romney is opposed to any expansion of gambling. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have not taken official positions. Which, if you ask me, means that they can't be counted on to be supporters. Also, given their naked appeals to hard-core religious conservatives, who think they are tasked by God to impose their moral values on the rest of the world by force, it's hard to believe either one would ever come out in favor of online gaming.

Last in the "not surprisingly" category is candidate Barack Obama, who has never lifted a finger to help poker players or even bothered to promise that he would. (Not that his promise means anything, given the appalling rate at which he breaks them.) And if you think he gives a rat's ass about personal freedom as a general principle, well, you just haven't been paying attention the last four years, have you?

Second is Dan O'Brien's opinion piece, explaining his support of Ron Paul. He nails the reasons that poker players specifically, and fans of personal liberty generally, should vote for Paul.

My only disagreement with O'Brien comes at the end of his essay, where he says that if Paul is not on the ballot in November he won't vote. Hey, why not vote for Gary Johnson, who is likely to be the Libertarian Party candidate, and thus on the ballot in all 50 states? Sure, he's probably not going to win, but why not use your vote to show your enthusiasm for freedom, rather than sit out the election? Johnson is as good as Paul on leaving people alone to live their lives the way they choose to, which includes playing poker online. As Newell reminds us, Johnson was the only candidate to show up at the World Series of Poker to make an explicit appeal to poker players for their support. He's solidly, unquestionably on our side.

Addendum, February 7, 2012

One of my Twitter followers told me that Santorum was on local channel 3's show "Face to Face" with reporter Jon Ralston last week. I found the January 31 program online here:

http://www.mynews3.com/content/programming/local/facetoface/default.aspx

Ralston asks him directly about online gaming, and Santorum's response is completely negative. He is opposed to it, thinks it's "dangerous." The discussion starts at the 15:00 mark (note that the counter runs backwards), and goes on for about three minutes.

Santorum has gone on record as saying, "The essential issue in this race is freedom." By his own standard, then, he loses. He is decidedly not a champion of freedom. He has openly denounced the "idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do...that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom (and) we shouldn't get involved in cultural issues."

So if you relish the thought of having the federal government force your most personal decisions to go just the way Rick Santorum thinks they ought to, by all means, throw him your vote. Me? I'd vote for a mummified Richard Nixon before I'd support a would-be tyrant like Santorum.

Hope y'all saw this

I haven't been following Twitter much during this trip, but back in the hotel room for the night, I looked to see if I had any mentions or direct messages, and boy did I! Everybody who knows me, it seems, was trying to make sure I knew about a hand played at the Epic Poker main event today, in which Joe Tehan's Mighty Deuce-Four knocked out both Faraz Jaka with A-A and Vanessa Rousso with Q-Q, three-way all-in pre-flop.

Read the details here (don't miss the Twitter messages from the principals at the end of the story) and here. The three of them talk about the hand on camera here.

My only gripe with the coverage is how some people refer to Tehan's move as a "bluff." How can moving all-in with the most powerful hand in poker be considered a bluff?

Plenty of ickiness to go around

I'm not sure why I continue to be interested in the Epic Poker/Michael DiVita situation--I have no affiliation with the league (except that my friend Jen gave me a nice EPL baseball cap), and expect that I never will--but I am. I listened to the interviews with DiVita and with Stephen Martin (consulting ethicist and head of the Standards and Conduct Committee) on Quadjacks.

Both of them left me feeling icky.

Nobody who wasn't already a friend of Mr. DiVita will have become one as a result of his appearance on the podcast. It was as if he were deliberately trying to make himself look bad, and maybe even more guilty than he actually is. He had convenient and implausible lapses of memory when asked about his criminal history. He made multiple attempts at humor, all of which failed miserably, and many of which were frankly offensive--not least of which was mocking a Mexican accent when told that he was being asked a question from Jonathan Aguiar. His recounting of his criminal history was frankly not credible in many ways, such as claiming that he went to prison for three years on a parole violation because he changed which counselor he was seeing, with that counselor's consent. (How do you end up in prison for three years for a parole violation on what he repeatedly claimed was just a misdemeanor conviction?) The entire thing was cringeworthy, from start to finish. Maybe he's as innocent as he claims, but his approach to the interview left at least this listener with a strong impression that he was not even trying to explain his past with any degree of frankness and honesty.

That said, Mr. Martin's interview had its own troubling aspects. (Among them, it could have been compressed into half the time it took if he would have just refrained from saying "y'know" ten times in every sentence. SO annoying.)

Highest on my radar is that I see no way around the conclusion that he lied in either this interview or the one he gave to Bluff magazine. Compare these answers:

BLUFF: Had he decided to play, would there have been a subsequent meeting with the Standards and Conduct Committee regarding whether or not he was allowed to take part?

SM: We don’t generally make the discussions of the committee public because the players on the committee want to be able to have confidential discussions about the players, so since he chose to withdraw, I don’t think it would be fair to speculate about what would’ve been the next step.

And here's my own transcript of one section of the Quadjacks interview:

SM: I explained the process to him. I explained that if he attempted to play in the league, in the main event, that it was gonna be very likely that the Standards and Conduct Committee would then suspend him pending a hearing and that y'know he would then have a formal disciplinary action against him by the league, and he didn't want that.

QJ: So the committee had made its decision, despite, like I suggested, not having taken any action yet, the committee had made a preemptive decision of how it would act if Mr. DiVita was to refuse to withdraw. Is that right?

SM: The committee did not take any official action, but the committee would have taken action in Mr. DiVita's case y'know if he had attempted to play. Yes.

So to Bluff magazine he claims that it would be just speculation what the committee would have done had Mr. DiVita not withdrawn. But to Quadjacks he explicitly agrees that the committee had made a "preemptive decision" and that it "would have taken action." I don't see any way to reconcile those two stories.

I'm left with a smattering of loosely associated thoughts on this whole mess:

1. I'm not a lawyer and don't even play one on TV, but my guess is that DiVita has practically zero chance of prevailing in any legal action.

2. EPL has a completely untenable situation on its hands, in terms of having a set of moral/personal eligibility criteria for being allowed to buy in to its event, but opening a satellite to that event to anybody who hands over the entry fee for it. It seems to me both morally wrong and horrible PR to take somebody's money to play in the satellite, then, if and only if he wins a seat to the main event, tell him, "Sorry, you're not eligible," and if he loses, you just keep his money, let him walk away, and let him enter again the next time. Who in his right mind would want to play the satellite if the league is going to reserve the right to exclude you after you win, based on infinitely flexible, purely discretionary, totally arbitrary standards by which anything in your entire past life might be judged to make the league look bad?

3. The right to "due process" that Mr. Martin kept boasting about being a feature of their process is pretty much meaningless in a case such as this. They were prepared to suspend him from eligibility to play, pending a hearing. But how fast could they conduct the kind of inquest described? Surely not quickly enough to allow the affected player back into the tournament. And after it's over, even if the allegations were found to be groundless, the league would undoubtedly tell him, "Sorry, but there's no recourse for your lost opportunity in the event that recently concluded. Thanks for paying your entry fee. Buh-bye."

4. The way we as a society treat sex offenders who have completed their sentences is both shameful and counterproductive. See here for the best essay I've read on how things like sex-offender registries are "a triumph of outrage over reason." I don't know exactly what Mr. DiVita is accused of having done in 1991, nor whether he actually did what he was accused of. But I don't care. First, he has done his time and not been convicted of anything since then, so I consider it over and done with. Second, it could not possibly have any meaningful impact on how he conducts himself as a poker player in 2011.

5. His arrest in 2008 also should be ignored, in my opinion. People get arrested for all sorts of reasons, including, e.g., mistaken identity and people concocting false accusations for their own nefarious purposes. The presumption of innocence should actually mean something. Drawing an inference of guilt based on an arrest for which charges were later dropped is, I think, grievously wrong.

6. Neither Mr. Martin nor anybody else from Epic has explained to my satisfaction exactly what conduct from a person's past renders him ineligible for participation in EPL. To repeat the oft-asked question, why is DiVita's criminal record disqualifying, but Mike Matusow's isn't? Why is Chino Rheem owing money to other people in the poker community worthy of suspension, but Dutch Boyd's "PokerSpot" history is given a pass, and Team Full Tilt members are welcomed with open arms not only to play in the league, but to sit on the Standards and Conduct Committee in judgment of others? Can you say hypocrisy? I knew you could.

7. Mr. Martin's emphatic insistence that Mr. DiVita "chose" to withdraw is a classic example of a half-truth. Suppose I put a gun to your head and tell you that you can either hand over your wallet or I'll pull the trigger, and you do the former. I can later claim that you "chose" to give me your wallet, and there is some kernel of truth to that claim. But that does not make the use of that word a particularly useful or accurate description of the transaction.

Now if somebody could hand me a jug of Clorox, I'd like to go douse it over my head to get rid of the sense that the filth from this ugly episode is clinging to me.

Update on the Epic Poker League ethics situation

Michael DiVita now claims that he did not withdraw voluntarily from the EPL, and he plans to sue the league if they don't fork over the $20,000 he believes he is owed. He says he was forced out. If true, this directly contradicts what the league's ethics consultant, Stephen Martin, said in his interview with Bluff magazine. Yesterday I expressed my skepticism that Martin was being honest in his description of events. Though I have no firsthand knowledge of what occurred, DiVita's version of the story sounds more plausible to me than Martin's.

Epic Poker got some splainin' to do

You've probably heard a thing or two about the Epic Poker League and its out-of-the-gate problems with ethics and qualifications. Between Chino Rheem winning the first event and the controversy surrounding Michael DiVita's exit, a whole lot of questions were raised about the league's much-ballyhooed code of conduct.

In an apparent attempt to address such questions, Stephen Martin, ethics consultant to the league, granted an interview to Jess Welman of Bluff magazine, which was published a few days ago here. I read it last night, and at the end had more questions than answers. (I expect that this has been hashed out ad nauseum in places like Two Plus Two, but I have not read any of that. What follows is just my own reactions.)

The first uncertainty with which I was left was whether DiVita's withdrawal was actually voluntary on his part, as Martin takes pains to insist, or involuntary. DiVita submitted a comment to the Martin interview which, taken at face value, contradicts Martin's account. DiVita speaks of the Standards and Conduct Committee's "decision," while Martin is claiming that no decision was made: "[W]e didn’t take any official action since Mr. DiVita chose to withdraw."

But if Martin is telling the truth about that, then it's hard to understand his answer to the final question:

If Mr. DiVita wants to take part, he would have to request eligibility from the league based on his criminal history. We’ve set up a process where people can request a hearing and appear in front of the Standards and Conduct Committee and ultimately appeal to the Commissioner if they feel like regarding eligibility issues or for disciplinary action. If he wanted to play in our league going forward, he would have to go through that process…There is no guarantee that someone will be eligible to play.

DiVita was presumably eligible to play when he played. If the committee made no decision and took no action, then logically it must be the case that DiVita's eligibility remains intact and he would be able to show up and play at any Epic event anytime he wanted to do so. How can it simultaneously be true that the committee/league made no decision and took no action on his eligibility to play, and that if he chose to play in the future he would have to first request eligibility via a hearing?

Secondly, I'm puzzled by a set of apparent contradictions. First, Martin claims that past conduct, criminal or otherwise, will not be considered disqualifying unless it affects the league in some sort of ongoing manner:

Initially when the league and the Standards and Conduct Committee were formed, we made a general decision not to take action against players for pre-league conduct and things that happened before the league was founded, with some exceptions. One [exception] being that if an action by a player was so severe or significant that we needed to take a look at those issues or something that had an ongoing impact on the league after it started.

Yet there is no explanation of why DiVita's convictions from 20 years ago, nor his arrest (with charges subsequently dropped) in 2008, have "an ongoing impact on the league after it started." Why does Mike Matusow get a pass for his conviction on drug-trafficking charges, but DiVita has to answer for his far older convictions? Is it because the latter are categorized as sex crimes, and Epic Poker has made an institutional decision that sex crimes are worse than drug crimes? If so, where is that determination to be found in the EPL's documents?

Speaking of the league's documents, you can view online the "Players' Code of Conduct." It includes this laudable sentiment:

While criminal conduct is clearly outside the scope of permissible professional conduct (and persons who engage in serious criminal conduct are subject to League discipline), our standard of conduct as professional poker players is considerably higher. It is not simply enough to avoid being convicted of a serious criminal offense.

OK, great. But it's hard to imagine a squishier, more flexible standard than that.

Let's consider the EPL's commissioner, Annie Duke. The first time I heard of her, I believe, was when I read James McManus's great book, Positively Fifth Street. He documents having witnessed Duke picking up another player's cards from the muck and looking at them (page 181) during a satellite to the WSOP Main Event. Even though I was a novice at the game when I read that, I knew that such an action constituted a major breach of both rules and etiquette. Why does the EPL have a known cheater as its commissioner, if the standard of conduct is as high as this Code of Conduct implies?

And what about her criminal connection? She was a paid representative of Ultimate Bet both before and after the UIGEA passed in 2006. What's more, she renewed her position with them after the company was discovered to have engaged in the most extensive cheating scheme the online poker world has yet had brought to light.

In a recent TV appearance, Duke conceded that online poker was "illegal." Let's grant the assumption that this is limited to the United States and to real-money play. Let's further grant the assumption that she is not talking about players violating any federal statute (they are not, though some may be violating state anti-gambling statutes), but rather about the sites spreading the games and/or receiving deposits in connection with the same. Nothing about the legal status of the online poker offerings has changed since 2006. (April 15 of this year saw some enforcement action, but nothing about the legality--or lack thereof--changed that day.) Duke is essentially admitting on national television that the company for which she was a paid shill was engaging in criminal conduct for years, with her knowledge and blessing. How in the hell does that conform to the league's goal, as stated in that Code of Conduct, to "further...the positive public reputation" of poker?

Of course, as Commissioner, Duke is not a player. But that particular Clintonesque dodge won't work, given the Code's broad wording:

Everyone associated with the Epic Poker League is expected to avoid conduct detrimental to the integrity of and public confidence in the game of poker and the League. This expectation applies to all players, tournament officials, employees and anyone else associated with the operations of the League.

So the League's commissioner got paid by a dirty site to continue to bring them business after it was publicly known that the site was dirty, while she knew that the company's core function (even when conducted honestly) was illegal. Can somebody please explain to me how this constitutes "avoid[ing] conduct detrimental to the integrity of and public confidence in the game of poker"?

Or does Duke get the same "let bygones be bygones" pass that Matusow and other former criminals in the League get, but that is somehow not granted to DiVita?

My final question is this: How does a professional ethicist such as Martin, brought on board specifically to keep the organization's reputation white as the driven snow, fail to see these issues?

Addendum, September 14, 2011

See update on the story here.