Lee Jones Blog

[Important note: I am speaking not as an employee of Cake Poker or as an industry representative. I am speaking as a long-time player and lover of online poker.]

As you are almost certainly aware, Sen. Harry Reid from Nevada is attempting to get a law passed in the lame-duck session of Congress that would legalize and regulate online poker in the United States.
Much to my astonishment, many people on the forums are violently opposed to the bill because it contains a black-out provision that clearly prohibits online poker in the United States for a period of time (15 months is the current rumor).

I think we must have this law and should do everything in our power to support Read and the PPA to get it passed.

1. Nobody in the poker community (including me) is happy about the blackout period. But compromise is an immutable fact of life and as compromises go, this is a very good one. It will be a dry 15 months for online poker players in the U.S. But after that, we will have monsoons such as we’ve never seen – better even than the Good Old Days of Party Poker (the vets all nod solemnly and remove their baseball caps).

2. The status quo will not survive. The anti-Reid crowd is succumbing to the fallacy that the absence of this bill is a return to business as usual. As one online pro recently told me, “Ever since the UIGEA, I’ve felt a hand tightening around my throat year by year.” He’s right; that hand will continue to tighten until it dries up the lifeblood of the industry: money movement. The DoJ is bolder than ever and Washington State has set an ugly precedent. It will come down to payment processors who have no more scruples than your average Mexican drug or African arms dealer. In fact, those upstanding citizens may decide that online payment processing is a great way to launder money. I believe that if this bill doesn’t pass, we will see the end of online poker in the U.S. as we know it within 2-3 years.

3. Legalization will bring unimaginable benefits to the industry. Many of those benefits will trickle down to the players. For instance, the bill creates criminal penalties for cheating online (just as exist for state casinos now). When the FBI or state bureau of investigation shows up at a poker cheater’s door, that’s a hell of a deterrent.

4. Online sites will pay far less to payment processors. Rather than the here-today-gone-tomorrow payment processors, they’ll be using Mastercard and Visa. Their costs will drop substantially as will their losses to fraud. There’s no rule that says they have to pass those savings onto you, but competition for business will be fierce. Every legal casino entity in the United States (MGM, Mirage, Commerce, Sands, Boyd, Trump, Terrible Casinos, Indians, et al) will be eligible to have a license and virtually every one of them will get one. Once they have that license, they’ll need players. I don’t know if rakeback will be the standard discount model; in fact, I’ll be a bit surprised if it is. But believe me, the comps and discounts will flow – you, the player, will be in a buyer’s market and all the online sites will know it.

Is this bill perfect? Is it everything that we want? Of course not. But, as Mick Jagger told us 40 years ago, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes, you’ll find you get what you need.” This bill is far better than anything we’re going to see for at least four to six years and it’s damn sure better than nothing passing at all – that’s a dead end road.

Online pros, go thee to ground. Get a j*b and go to w*rk for 15 months. But gather your friends for poker discussion groups, study your books and training videos, and play home and B&M casino games to keep your skills sharp. Because if (and only if) this bill passes, then sometime around March of 2012, we will see a new dawn of online poker such as none of us can imagine.

[Again, I’m speaking as Lee Jones, the private individual. Obviously, I get paid by the online poker industry, so its health is vitally important to me. But I believe that my interests as an employee and your interests as a player are closely aligned.]

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