The Politics of Poker

The Politics of Poker Radley: All right, thank you to everyone for coming out tonight. Welcome to Reason’s event, The Politics of Poker. I'm here at Reason headquarters in Washington D.C. with our guests. We also would want to thank for coming out tonight Andy Bloch and Chris “Jesus” Ferguson. You guys probably know more American card game than poker, those adapted from other games. Poker evolved into its current incarnation over the course of the Civil War then flourished in bars and salons up and down in Mississippi River and throughout the western frontier. It's odd then that in a country where every State has a lottery, where horse racing, fantasy football, an NCAA office schools thrive, the government has basically put poker in across here as of like—you probably know by now the Federal Government took another crack, another attempt at prohibiting online poker at the end of 2006 with the unlawful internet gaming gambling enforcement acts which was passed under dubious circumstances to a detail end of the year. But local governments are getting into the act too. Across the country, police departments are sending heavily arms, SWAT teams to break up games where consenting adults have gathered to play. Many of these games are of high stakes, mafia sort of type of games but low and medium stakes game with people caught up in the Texas hold-em craze. Reason’s own Drew Carry did a video a few months ago about one of the SWAT raids on an American Legion post near Dallas, Texas. The government’s campaign against poker ought to concern even those people who aren’t interested in poker and who don’t play poker. The raise of concerns about privacy, individual freedom, freedom of association and contract and even issues about government surveillance given your banks your financial institutions, we’re going to have to start watching your transactions to see if you're gambling online. The fallout even spills into free trade. The US Government has attempted to ban online poker has triggered complaints from many of our trading partners. We are privileged tonight to have with us two guys who are not only renowned and accomplished poker players; they’re also both scholars and articulate advocates for the game. I’ll introduce them both and then I’ll let each of them give a couple of remarks. First Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, he’s probably one of the most recognizable faces in poker. He is also a very good having brought it more than $6.5 million in current winnings at least when I checked his bio today, that’s what it was at. Including five World Series of Poker bracelets and Ferguson won the prestigious World Series of Poker main events in 2000. Ferguson also has PhD in Computer Science from UCLA. He’s a scholar of game theory and I'm also told that he’s an accomplished swing dancer. Ferguson can also throw a playing card to slice a carrot from 10 feet away which we’ll hope to see a little bit later tonight. Andy Bloch has two degrees from MIT and a Harvard law degree. He is a stock trader and he’s also an expert in game theory. His poker winnings thus far total $2.8 million. Andy: That’s all just $3.2 now. Radley: It's now $3.2 million? Andy: Probably add $50.00, $100.00 to that tonight. Radley: Bloch is also a banned from playing Blackjack at nearly every casino in America that’s because Black was on the renowned MIT Blackjack team that figured out how to beat the Vegas casinos. Bloch and his MIT pals are the inspiration for the movie 21 which I believe is currently the top grossing movie in the country. So welcome gentleman and Chris, we’ll start with you and a few comments about the game of poker. Chris: Thank you so much for having me here. I'm really proud to be here and glad to be here. What we really came—hill today to visit the defending the game of poker from the attacks that have occurred and in particular the UIGEA which passed the other night in late 2006. That’s really had a negative impact on poker. A lot of the online sites that were operating poker games in the US have pulled out. Some think that’s a good thing. I personally don’t think it's a good thing and I personally believe that what you do in the privacy of your own home shouldn’t concern the Federal Government if you're not hurting anyone else, if you're not affecting anyone else. Why is the government trying to tell us what we can do in the privacy of our home? It's a very bad the president has said. The president really affects me personally. And so I'm very much against this. I'm very much against these types of legislations. They’re trying to tell us what we can't do. Radley: What has been your experience in last year? You’ve been here a few times now blabbing on behalf of the game. What are your sorts of general impressions of how the sausage gets made here? Chris: I'm really impressed with how things work around here. Everybody I've met has been very friendly and even the opposition. Everybody has charisma. I guess that's why there are elected officials. But, it still affects me. It also impresses me how hard working everyone is. The people on the opposition really believe that this is the right thing to do. It's not that they don’t have a good conscience. I just think they are wrong about it. They do a job that I could never do. Radley: Okay, table is yours. Andy: Well, I guess I’ll start with the recent logo here, “Free Minds and Free Markets”. Well I think those are two of the reasons I'm here. I play poker because I have a free mind, because I like to play a game that allows me to think that thinking will actually gain you an edge in the game. There’s a lot of ways that one of the fascinating things about poker is there’s a lot of ways that you can gain an edge, not just mathematical reasoning but also logical reasoning and psychological reasoning where you can try and figure out your opponents on what strategy they have. On the free market’s side, it's a very basic issue of personal freedom that you can go online and play for relatively low stakes that you should be allowed to go and play relatively low stakes poker or in your own, house between your friends and not be afraid of the police would battering in, knocking down your front door without even knocking. Of course, they don’t need to do that. All they need to do is knock on the door and say “hey, are you guys playing poker?” and you say “yeah”, “okay, we’ll write you a ticket” and that would be it and stop doing it. People will stop doing it. But in reality, you shouldn’t have to stop doing it. One of the most basic things is that the ability for people to agree to do things together, have a contract and not have the government saying “that’s not acceptable” especially when it's a game like poker. I'm not talking about sports betting. I'm not talking about prostitution. I'm talking about poker. It's between two people and what happens there, we won't affect anybody. There are no sexually transmitted diseases that we have to worry about. We maybe have to worry about colds that you can pass between two people but then again, you have to worry about that for just about any time when people get together. If I sneeze right now, I might give you a cold. So I guess this conversation should be out. We’re almost buddy in poker, so. Radley: Right. You made your name in Blackjack before moving on to poker. Briefly, could you tell us a little bit about the differences between the two games? Andy: Well in blackjack, you're playing against the casino and because of that, when you start winning, you can get in as you blackjack. As you can see in the movie 21 and you guys might be thinking it is completely illegal but the casino doesn’t like to lose money. So once they realize that you're a snuffle player, they stop you from playing. Politely sometimes, sometimes not so politely, they usually don’t beat you up but sometimes they’ll probably have you arrested on some tramp up charge to get you to stop playing. Poker on the other hand is more of a social game. You're playing against other people who are trying to beat you just like you're trying to beat them. The better player you are, the more offers you get to play. People want to play against the big players because it's a challenge. I think that’s why both of us play this game is because it's a challenge. I enjoyed playing against Chris Ferguson even though he’s the toughest opponents I can possibly face because it's a challenge, because it's a mental challenge. Radley: Great! Let’s take some questions from some of the people in attendance. Female: So, when we go back to the policy, what the internet has allowed is a lot of people who did not have access to any form of gambling to play. Opponents of online poker I think are trying to protect people from themselves. Protect people who might be kind of gifted, spend the rent money, not feed the kids and they haven't called, they are banned on home shopping networks yet. So, but I'm interested in what you have to say about that because I think opponents of it are really trying to make sure that they prevent bad things from happening. Chris: Right, yeah, first of all, they’re not going after casinos. I mean, breaking more of casinos basically and I think they mentioned that I don’t think they really understand the internet. I believe that they are mistaken about it. They have this idea and they say “click your mouse and lose your house”. That’s very, very hard to do around the internet. You can walk into any casino and bet just about any amount of money you want to, you take all the money out of your bank, put it on rent, and then they’ll give you a fair roll. It's very hard to do online. You're just not going to get large amounts of money online. These sites have limits to the amount of money you can put. Usually from credit cards, it might be $300.00, $600.00 a week and that depends on the card. But they have usually limits buy no more than $2,500.00, maybe $3,000.00 a month that people can lose on these sites. That’s much smaller than the casino. You're also trying to protect problem gamblers. That’s more of the reasons that they would bring out who were betting online. One thing about online is you can actually from a lot of these sites, you can actually excuse yourself, you’d say “I'm a problem gambler. Don’t let me gamble on this site”. You just click the mouse and you're never allowed to gamble on that site again. Do that and it would be very difficult and you’d get a new name, a new address, new computer probably and so it's much harder to do that. You can go into a casino and I bet you're going to say “don’t let me play here again”. What they will do is maybe they won't cash your check. They won't take your credit card but they’ll let you walk in the door. They’ll let you take money out of your bank. They’ll let you walk on the door and they’ll let you put it in ready. They’ll let you bet on the blackjack. It's much easier to prevent these problem gamblers online than it is in the freaking world and I think that's what the legislators don’t understand at this point. Underage gambling, I think it's actually a lot harder to get money on the site and what you need is a credit card. They actually have a very good age verification technology these days. They can verify that you're actually don’t have the legal age depending your jurisdiction to play on these sites. It's yes, you could steal a credit card but then that’s going to be a fraudulent charge. The sites are going to understand. There is a fraudulent charge. It's going to get back up. The sites don’t want that. So they’re not going to allow, they don't allow underage gambling. It's going to fraudulent and again, it's actually a lot easier to police online than it is in the casinos. The other thing I really think the politicians are going about this all wrong. Instead of trying to put a prohibition on poker and what they’ve done is they’re basically driving companies offshore where they don’t have control of these companies. What they should be doing instead is regulating online poker. Now, if someone doesn’t follow the rules and allows underage betting, allows problem gamblers on playing on the site, they have a recourse of something. The government has recourse of something they do in those cases. It allows personal freedom. So those of us who don’t have a problem to play the game that we love. So I really see the regulation’s side and the other thing is you can actually tap these, the online sites. I think huge amounts of revenue are being lost by the government every month that they do not have some regulations on the online sites. That’s should be taken, that's the approachable— Radley: You just lost our audience with the tax there. Just an interesting disclosure, I mean these has great arguments and they stand on their own, but you guys are both affiliated with online sites, is that correct? Chris: Yup. Radley: We just want to make sure we got that. I want to thank both of our pros for coming out tonight. They’re going to play a little poker and we’re going to watch Chris cut a carrot with a—and thanks also to everybody who came out tonight. I'm Radley Balko, Senior Editor with Reason Magazine. This is the politics of poker at Reason headquarters in Washington. Thank you.