Bloomberg.com Supports Online Poker Legalization

We poker players have been shouting to the heavens about our desire to see internet poker become officially recognized as a legal pastime in the United States and for the federal government to establish regulations so that players can be protected. And while many individual voices have been heard, it is nice to see louder, highly respected voices support our side. That happened Sunday night, as the editors of Bloomberg.com posted an op-ed piece on the influential business and finance website supporting the legalization and regulation of online poker.

We won’t reprint the entire piece, but we thought the introduction was particularly well written:

“The odds of winning the grand prize in the Powerball lottery are 1 in 195,249,054. State governments, by and large, encourage participation in this monopolistic enterprise, even though it randomly rewards a very few people with a very large amount of money for doing very little.

“Oddly, most states, and the federal government, consider wagering online on a card game — in a fair fight, against other players of varying skill — a moral outrage.

“A small but growing number of states are considering legalizing online poker within their borders, hoping to increase tax revenue. An intrastate approach may lead to useful innovations, but it would limit competition among gambling operators and restrict the available pool of customers for a given service to in-state players. It would also result in a crazy patchwork of regulation for an online activity that is inherently interstate.”

The editorial proceeds to then briefly cover the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) and Black Friday. After that, a couple paragraphs followed, discussing how online gambling could provide a much needed cash injection for the federal government and how regulations would protect players.

The article concludes, “This approach would allow a transparent U.S. market in online gambling to grow, subject to strict and predictable regulation. And it would recognize that the future of the gambling industry — just like the future of retail or entertainment — will be online. That’s nothing to fear. It offers far better odds for success than a lottery ticket.”

The comments following the piece were generally positive and, unlike most comments following articles on major news sites, intelligent. One commenter compared online gambling to online stock trading, saying, “To those who oppose licensing and regulating online poker in the U.S, I have a question. What is the actual moral difference between gambling on a game of chance requiring some skill, and an individual sitting home playing highly volatile, perfectly legal, online markets requiring some luck? Are cards really that much more evil than say, forex, or minis? Is the potential for problem gamblers that much different? I defy you to say that one is not gambling and the other is.”

Bloomberg is one of the world’s foremost providers of financial and business information to schools, commercial enterprises, and other news outlets.

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Poker lexicon:

OPENER - The player who opens the betting, especially in draw poker. A hand may have no openers, in which case it is PASSED OUT, i.e., new hands are dealt.
POT LIMIT - A game where the maximum bet is determined by the size of the pot at the time. Note that a player wanting to raise first calls the bet, then totals the pot to determine the maximum amount he can raise.
BUNNY - An eight. So named because one can easily draw "rabbit ears" above the numeral 8, "paws" in the middle and "feet" at the bottom. (Do this only at home, and not on cards that will be used for play.)
OVERCALL - To call a bet after one or more players already called.
SPLIT [THE POT] - To split the pot between two or more players. Related term: QUARTER.
FREEROLL - [1] A poker tournament that does not charge a buy-in fee; players must earn buy-in credits through previous play at the same establishment. [2] Having a lock on part of a pot (sure to win a greater fraction of the pot than one is betting) and playing to win more or all of it.

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