The Politics of Poker: Why It’s Time To Legalize Online Gaming

When California State Senator Roderick Wright attempted to legalize online poker with SB 1463, he sold it as a way to aid patch up California’s busted budget , which is indeed inward dire trouble. Surprisingly, the strongest resistance came not from the ever-more-irrelevant anti-gambling moralists, but from powerful pro-gaming special interests clinging to lucrative state-granted privilege.

“There’s no way that we can do something that might be the death knell for our manufacture,” says David Quintana, lobbyist for the California Tribal Business Alliance, which opposes any shape of online poker legalization on the grounds that it could negatively affect the economical activity of California’s Indian tribes.

Reason.tv talked with Quintana as well as with poker player, entrepreneur, and pro-poker lobbyist Steve Miller about the complicated politics of online poker, which is regulated on a federal level by the 2006 Unlawful cyberspace Gambling Enforcement Act (or UIGEA), a vague piece of lastly-minute legislation that prohibits financial institutions from accepting transactions related to “unlawful cyberspace gambling.” The problem is that the legislation fails to define “unlawful cyberspace gambling.”

Predictably, this legal limbo has led U.S. financial institutions to steer clear of online gambling and led to the rise of off-shore gaming sites, which Miller says can be unreliable and untrustworthy.

“Online poker play will continue,” says Miller. “It’s available from sources who are unlicensed, who may not be reputable, who may not be offering a fair game.”

Legalization of online gaming inward California would likely strength legislators to take another appear at the flaws inherent inward UIGEA. But despite the financial and practical sense that legalization makes for the California, and the seeming inevitability of legal online poker play, the anti-online gaming special interests take hold won out inward the short term, with Sen. Wright killing the bill before it l-l made it to the flooring for a vote.

“You take hold to combat it as long as you can,” says Quintana. “Why speed up the inevitability, right? Put it off as long as you can.”

About 5 minutes.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by Tracy Oppenheimer and Weissmueller.

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