Chris Fordney: Internet poker is bad bet

The line between legal and illegal gambling can be narrow, such as along the main drag in South Lake Tahoe, where Cindy and I passed through a few years ago.

One side of the street is in California, the other in Nevada. Cross into Nevada and there's only room for the sidewalk before you run into the brick wall of a multi-story casino. We went in on a whim and lost $10 in the slot machines in as many minutes.

Other than dropping a buck a week into a Powerball pool at another newspaper, that's the extent of my gambling career. So I was surprised at how easy it is to pull up an online poker site, where you sign on, open an account with a credit card and start playing.

Not that I did. Online gambling has been illegal in the U.S. since 2006, when a couple of U.S. senators, in a nifty bit of legislative sleight of hand, tacked on a bill originally crafted by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-6th, to a port security law. The bill passed in the final, late-night minutes of the congressional session, with many lawmakers unaware they had voted for it.

Goodlatte said in a news release at the time that offshore Internet gambling sites "take billions of dollars out of our economy each year, damage families, and serve as vehicles for money laundering." Critics say the law won't stop people from gambling online and that the better approach is to regulate and tax it.

That might help stop the kind of scam described in a joint "60 Minutes" and Washington Post investigation recently. Two poker pros got suspicious when they lost tens of thousands of dollars to another player who seemed to be able to see their hole cards during online games. With no regulator to turn to, they did their own investigation and exposed a cheater who had cracked the site's software. The site, based in Costa Rica, was forced to refund $1.6 million.

Poker is all around us, with even Barack Obama confessing to games with his hometown political buddies. Poker tournaments get large cable audiences, and you can win an all-expenses-paid trip to one by playing the Virginia Lottery. A Fort Valley man recently won $100,000 in a World Poker Tour scratch-off game.

It's that fine line again, and even Goodlatte has been fingered for straddling it. The Post said he "has played a role in helping the horse-racing industry keep its exemption allowing Internet bets" and pointed out that he has taken $20,000 in contributions from the industry in the past eight years.

I asked Goodlatte's office about that, and he said in a written response that he did not take any money from the industry while his anti-gambling bill was pending before the House of Representatives.

"Any attempt to link contributions from the horse industry to my anti-gambling legislation is red herring created by Jack Abramoff and since continued by the Poker Players Alliance and other gambling interests in an attempt to defeat anti-gambling legislation," he said in the statement.

He said an old law still protects interstate horse bets, but that the new law will give the feds the tools to block illegal transactions across state lines and curb other forms of online gambling.

Good luck with that.

NVDaily.com

News Added: 15 December, 2008

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