This
is Part I of a two-part column about political action and poker’s
future. Coming in Part II is a specific action plan for players and the
industry.

My writing partner John Bond says he’s a moderate, but the country has
moved so far right that he looks liberal. He describes himself as a
liberal-ish libertarian. From where I sit, he’s a flaming left-winger,
and hasn’t liked any Republican since Teddy Roosevelt.

So, it surprised me when he called me and praised the choice of
conservative former U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.) to lead the
Poker Players Alliance’s fight against governmental interference with
poker.

The New York Times, in a recent article (March 5, 2007) about D’Amato,
questioned the PPA’s wisdom, given the Democrats control of Congress.
But John notes that the most significant foes of poker are special
business interests and faith-based moralists, and says D’Amato is
particularly wellpositioned to woo them and the legislators who cater
to them – or beat them over the head and do whatever it takes. D’Amato
has a reputation for being a hard-knuckle scrapper who doesn’t give up.
He’s a poker player, and loves the game. Like John, I’m pleased to have
him as our frontman in the political tussle that lies ahead.

Poker’s problems are a matter of politics rather than law. Many lawyers
have pointed out that the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement
Act) doesn’t make online poker illegal, and none more lucidly than my Card Player
colleague Allyn Jaffrey Shulman. Nonetheless, the fact is that the
UIGEA and various enforcement agencies have moved online sites and
e-wallets like NETELLER from the U.S. market. Like the problem, the
solution is political.

I wrote long ago that our industry must unite to fight governmental
restriction of poker; I called for an association of players and
industry to lobby against legislation affecting poker. My thinking – in
part based on John’s lobbying experience – was that you beat a bill in
the drafting and negotiating stage, via access to the staffers who do
the real grunt work of legislation. It’s much easier to affect
legislation before passage than to change it after passage. I suggested
that the industry put up the bucks to lobby during drafting for an
express exclusion of poker from any definition of gambling. Alas, that
didn’t happen. As is the case when a turn card comes that cripples but
doesn’t kill our hand, we must play on from the current situation,
regardless of what happened before.

We need to approach our current situation like playing a hand, using
tried-and-true strategies. What is our opponent thinking? What does he
think we think he’s thinking? What does he want us to do? How can we,
by our decisions and actions, increase our chances of taking this pot?

Unfortunately, our biggest enemy doesn’t have a face or a strategy to
counteract – as it is inertia. It is easier for politicians to just
leave things the way they are, not invest energy and effort into
changing things, and not rock the boat. And poker’s supporters have
lives to live, and limited resources and energy to devote to this
fight. We must induce action, and overcome this natural tendency toward
inertia, which is not an easy task.

A subset of the inertia issue is that Democrats are well-served by the
current situation. Whatever grass-roots political heat the UIGEA and
other antipoker governmental actions generate burns Republicans. If the
Democrats do nothing, they reap the political benefit of the poker
community’s outrage, without having to incur any political cost by
changing things. This sad reality suggests that any strategy regarding
federal legislation and regulation needs to be targeted at the 111th
Congress in January 2009, after the 2008 elections, and perhaps a more
accommodating attorney general.

But not all of our adversaries are faceless. Somebody lobbied
then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to attach the UIGEA to the Safe
Ports Act.

Who wants us shut down? Why? To beat them, we must know them. Just
after passage of the UIGEA, Radley Balko wrote in Reason Magazine, “I
think the main motivation for the bill was simply the moral aversion to
gambling held by its chief sponsors – Goodlatte, Kyl, and Leach – and a
desire to impose that moral rectitude on the rest of the country.”
(Oct. 26, 2006). Balko also points out that the anti-poker constituency
goes beyond the self-righteous right, and includes, among others,
clients of the nefarious and notorious Jack Abramoff, whose business
interests compete for dollars that go (or went) to Internet poker. I
agree that our adversaries are a strange-bedfellows alliance of those
who want to tell us how to live and gambling-related business interests
that compete with poker.

However, poker has its own constituency – the 70 million American poker
players, including 23 million online players. Our adversaries have
ignored that poker and politics have often gone together. Just look at
the very incomplete list in this column of prominent American
politicians who played poker. Indeed, one of the first poker rulebooks,
Draw. Rules for Playing Poker, was written by U.S. Rep. Robert C.
Schenck in 1880.

Besides identifying our adversaries, we must know our allies. A simple
beginning in lobbying the feds for changes in laws, regulations, and
Justice Department actions affecting poker is to identify who in power
plays poker. We need a database of who among our 535 senators and
congressmen is a player – in home games, public games, Internet games.
And equally as valuable is who on their staffs plays. More business of
government than you know is done by staffers. Come 2008, 80 or 90
congressional seats may be “in play” – meaning there’s a chance for
either party to win. We must identify those who might be pro-poker
among incumbents and challengers, and wield what political muscle we
can accordingly. The PPA and the industry will be doing this, but you
can help. If you have knowledge of a congressman, senator, candidate,
or staffer who has played poker, e-mail me the details:
[email protected] I’ll make sure that the info gets in the right
hands. There may be a Harry Truman or Sam Rayburn in the bunch!

Roy Cooke has played more than 60,000 hours of pro poker and has been
part of the I-poker industry since its beginnings. His longtime
collaborator, John Bond, is a freelance writer in South Florida.