POKER FACES WEAK HAND

PROSPECTS DIM IN ONLINE BID

Poker players who descended on Capitol Hill last week face long odds in trying to convince Congress to legalize playing the card game on the Internet.

But one wild card could force Washington's hand: an international trade dispute with Antigua over online gambling that could end up leaving the U.S. on the hook for billions of dollars.

The World Trade Organization recently ruled that the U.S. violated its international treaty commitments by going after offshore online gambling outfits without cracking down on American operators offering remote betting on horse and dog racing.

After the ruling, Washington said it would remove Internet gambling from its WTO treaty obligations. That raised the ire of such allies as Europe and Japan, which filed separate compensation claims against the U.S.

"In a matter of months, you're going to see billions of dollars in trade sanctions coming down against the United States," former New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, chairman of the lobbying group Poker Players Alliance, told The Post.

"Then, I believe we will start to have a profoundly new and different group lobbying, saying you've got to stop this prohibition [on Internet gambling]," he said. "We look like the ugly American."

Playing poker online for money isn't explicitly illegal in the U.S. And Congress stopped short of passing an outright ban on Internet gambling sites last October.

Instead, lawmakers cracked down by banning credit card companies from making payments to online gambling sites through legislation snuck on to a late-night bill on port security.

The Poker Players Alliance, which fronts Chris Moneymaker, Annie Duke and many other poker champions, met with about 50 members of Congress to try to build support for two pro-online gambling bills.

One bill from Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) would broadly legalize and regulate Internet gambling. Another more narrow proposal from Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) would allow Internet poker bets by grouping poker with other skill games, such as backgammon and chess.

News Added: 29 October, 2007

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