E-Lottery-Jackpot.com

Poker continues to gain ground on Capitol Hill! On Monday, Gambling Compliance reported some excellent news (click here, subscription required) in an article entitled Reid Says DoJ Opinion Gives Congress Incentive for Internet Poker Bill.

The article quotes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) as follows: “It [the Department of Justice’s clarification of its interpretation of the scope of the Wire Act as not including online poker] (will) give us an incentive to get something done. We cannot have a series of laws around the country related to [Internet] gaming, I know a lot about gaming. I’m a former chairman of the Nevada [Gaming] Commission, and I think it’s very important that we have a national law.” The article further states that Sen. Reid has confirmed that he is negotiating with Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) on a federal online poker bill bill!

When articles like this goes public, lawmakers always look at public reaction. So, let’s all do our part and tell both that we wish for them to push forward with appropriate online poker legislation! Fortunately, we can do this quickly and easily.

Take Action

1. Let’s send Senators Reid and Kyl prewritten, editable tweets requesting action on poker legislation. They are HERE and HERE.
2. Please be sure to visit the PPA Take Action page.

Interviews

PPA comes before poker media to take on the tough questions as often as possible. I hope you will find these interesting and informative. This past week’s interviews focused on the Justice Department’s Wire Act decision and its impact on Capitol Hill momentum.

Recent appearances:

• OnTilt Radio: Poker Advocacy with Rich Muny, with guest PPA Board Member Linda Johnson (1/16/2012) (listen here).
• Short Stacked Radio: I come on at time point 1:29:55 (1/10/12) (listen here).
• Short Stacked Radio: I come on at time point 1:31:05 (1/3/12) (listen here).
• Website: Poker Advocacy with Rich Muny, with webcast archive (here)

Thank you for your continued support!

photo by James Berglie

Joe Barton’s online poker: “And then he three-bet me on the turn with — get this — jack-high! How sick is that?”

US Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) will be in Las Vegas for Friday’s shuffle-up-and-deal … and possibly to unveil his new online poker (only) bill.

The Texas Republican has taken the baton from Barney Frank (D-MA), by way of John Campbell (R-CA), to lead the charge for licensed and regulated online poker in the House, with a new bill his office says he plans to “drop” either Friday or closer to the July 4th weekend.

It’s still probably too early to make decent predictions, prognostication, and prop bets — haven’t even seen a draft yet — but the forces lining up this go-round are indeed different than before.

This time we’re talking about an online poker-only bill, with a different committee path, and a conservative Republican — perhaps looking to put a bipartisan feather in his cap before the ’12 elections — charged with rallying support on his side of the aisle.

The Frank bill was initially about all online gambling, which brought necessary concessions to the NFL and others — forcing Frank to dilute his argument that his bill was a matter of 21st century consumer protections and civil liberties. The Reid bill was poker-only but something different altogether — arguably a strategic bone or carrot or pawn in bigger political games. But it did provide valuable data on who still needed checks from Caesars and MGM to properly play ball where various members stood.

When Barton symbolically took over the cause last month at the PPA’s Washington DC fly-in, he wasn’t exactly addressing a groundswell of revolt … at least not one ready to amass on the Washington mall screaming “give me PokerStars or give me death!” But to that extent, the real story, imho, wasn’t so much who was there, but who wasn’t …

No Full Tilt, no PokerStars, and certainly no UB, lol.

For all the good these banished poker sites may or may not have done since the UIGEA, it had become apparent that they also complicated the political effort they championed. So now, with a bill conceived before April 15th but written afterwards, Barton may be addressing the same poker players Barney Frank spoke to before him, but he will be navigating a different mix of motivated interests in the effort to make online poker special.

Not their funniest effort, but expresses the insta-change in the poker world well. Some things are just made for cartooning:

Last week, word broke around the industry that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was planning to introduce legislation to legalize and regulate online poker in the United States. The bill, dubbed the Internet Poker Act of 2010, remains in draft form, but plenty of organizations have weighed in on its merits. Among them was the Poker Players Alliance (PPA), which spoke in favor of the bill on Monday.

The PPA’s Executive Director, John Pappas, commented in a press release that the process of pushing pro-online poker legislation through Congress has been a long road. Pappas admitted, “As news stories circulate about a potential bill that would license and regulate online poker, it is important to remember that the Poker Players Alliance has been actively pursuing such legislation for more than five years. If nothing else, this shows that lawmakers are acknowledging what the PPA has been saying all along – that Americans want to play the great game of poker in any venue they choose and they deserve to be afforded the basic consumer protections that regulation can provide.”

The bill has received a considerable amount of mainstream attention, as media outlets from the New York Times to Associated Press have printed articles on Reid’s bill. The Internet Poker Act bars existing sites that service the U.S. market from obtaining a license for two years, potentially shutting out Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars, and others. This feature of the bill has drawn the ire of many in the online poker community, while land-based casinos like Harrah’s and MGM have come out in favor of Reid’s proposal.

Pappas, however, charged that securing a legislative framework was critical: “The status quo is not tenable and legislation is needed to clarify and correct current laws and provide a regulated U.S. marketplace for players. Failing a federal legislative solution, the future of internet poker remains unpredictable. However, a regulated market that offers competition, consumer protections, and clarity will undoubtedly provide the greatest benefit for players and long-term stability to the internet poker experience.”

Recent funds seizures in states like Maryland and Washington have complicated the process of depositing and withdrawing from major online poker sites. Also coming under fire in recent weeks has been eWalletXpress. Under a regulated scheme, these problems could, in theory, be mended.

According to the Wall Street Journal, land-based casino companies have been nearly diehard in their support of Reid, who was reelected in 2010 to another six-year term. The Journal explained, “Gambling interests and casino executives gave the Senator more than $700,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, ranking fifth among all industry contributors. His biggest single benefactor: MGM Resorts International, whose executives and political action committee gave Reid more than $190,000 in combined campaign donations, according to the same data. Harrah’s Entertainment ranked fourth, with more than $83,000 in campaign contributions.”

The news publication The Hill revealed that the “lame duck” Congressional session will likely end on Friday, December 17th. It added that this week’s focus would be on healthcare for first responders on September 11th and “the DREAM Act, which provides U.S. citizenship to children of illegal immigrants.” Online poker legislation could potentially be added as a “pay-for” to a separate bill.

We’ll keep you posted right here on Poker News Daily.

Here are my thoughts on the most interesting stories in the gaming sector over the past week or so:

1. New Jersey Moves Forward on Intra-State Gaming – Yesterday, Monday, November 22^nd, the New Jersey State Senate passed S490, the succinctly-named “An Act permitting Internet wagering at Atlantic City casinos under certain circumstances and amending and supplementing the ‘Casino Control Act.’” The vote was 29-5 in favour. This bill authorizes Internet wagering at AC casinos; it would allow New Jersey residents and persons located outside of the US to place wagers on casino games by means of the Internet. All games that are permissible in a bricks and mortar AC casino could be offered over the Internet under this bill. S490 also provides for the imposition of a tax on such intra-state Internet wagering, monitoring and regulating the Internet offerings, and licensing fees. Now the bill will be taken up by the State Assembly’s Regulatory Oversight and Gaming Committee. New Jersey has elections in November of each odd-numbered year, so there is still considerable time to see this bill through to passage by the Assembly. It is looking more and more like the legislative i-gaming action in the US for the next little while will be at the state level and perhaps not in Congress. [NJLeg.state.nj.us]

#

2. Quebec Launches Government Gaming Site – Loto-Quebec’s new Internet gaming site, www.espacejeux.com, went online last week. (It looks terrible, which is to be expected of a government-run casino site.) as of next week, Quebecers will be able to wager up to Cdn$9,999 per week on sundry interactive games. The poker offering will eventually share liquidity between Quebec and British Columbia, but only Quebecers are supposed to be permitted on Loto-Quebec’s site. [Montreal Gazette]

#

3. New Zynga Game – Zynga, the popular social gaming developer, released CityVille. I haven’t played yet, but apparently it’s SimCity meets FarmVille. It will go live globally in the next few weeks. More proof that Zynga (and the social gaming sector, more generally) are key things to watch in the gaming industry as we go forward. [TechCrunch]

#

4. The Status of Congress – Congress is currently in the lame-duck session between election day and the start of the 112^th Congress in January. Frank Fahrenkopf, President of the American Gaming Association and as keen an observer of the gaming industry in the US as anyone, said during G2E in Las Vegas last week that he doesn’t see online gaming legislation passing during the lame-duck session, but he left open the possibility that Internet gaming legislation could pass.  No surprise, but Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV) thinks that, if anything passes during the lame-duck, it may be limited to legalizing Internet poker only: [Las Vegas Sun; Las Vegas Review-Journal]

#

5. Las Vegas Cut-and-Paste Lawsuits – Righthaven LLC is a firm in Nevada that has sued dozens of parties over posting content on the Internet from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Some have alleged that Righthaven’s actions have been abusive. Comes now Righthaven with an indication that it will narrow its litigation campaign after a Nevada judge ruled that a realtor’s use of part of an LVRJ article constituted fair use. (The realtor reproduced 8 sentences of a 30 sentence news article on his blog.) See: http://www.scribd.com/doc/39767798/Righthaven-v-Realty-One-Order This is fascinating enough by itself, but the Nevada attorney who is a principal of Righthaven (Steven Gibson) is the same lawyer that is a member of the law firm Dicknson Wright PLLC, an international law firm with a respected gaming practice and now with a Las Vegas office. [Wired]

Related Posts

• Full Tilt out of Washington, Jersey shores up i-gaming bills, Party fights back, GTECH-who? & Domain event

  (November 16, 2010)”>GamingCounsel’s Weekly Briefs
  

  Full Tilt out of Washington, Jersey shores up i-gaming bills, Party fights back, GTECH-who? & Domain event

  (0)

• Another Shootout in South Carolina: Player Killed (6)
• Midterm elections, Tzvetkoff’s Vegas loans, Polish gambling, Zynga mobile

  (November 10, 2010)”>GamingCounsel’s Weekly Briefs
  

  Midterm elections, Tzvetkoff’s Vegas loans, Polish gambling, Zynga mobile

  (0)

• Violent standoff and hefty charges in uncertain battleground state [Pictures]

  (November 4, 2010)”>Poker Raid in South Carolina: 1 Player, 1 Cop Shot
  

  Violent standoff and hefty charges in uncertain battleground state [Pictures]

  (29)