They called his bluff and forced him to fold.

Special agents from the state gambling commission arrested the owner of a Mill Creek restaurant Monday night, accusing him of holding an illegal game of Texas Hold ‘em poker.

The owner of Jet Bar and Grill in Mill Creek, an Edmonds man, 31, was booked into the Snohomish County Jail for investigation of operating gambling activity without a license, a felony.

“They did not have a gambling license, and the reason we regulate is we want to make sure it’s run fair and honest,” said Susan Arland, a commission spokeswoman.

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The Gambrills Elks Lodge busted by police for an illegal low-stakes poker game was reprimanded last night for violating its liquor license, but the club faces no other sanctions.

“All the fraternal lodges that I know are good neighbors to the community,” said Thomas E. Riggins of the county Board of License Commissioners, the agency that oversees the club’s license and could have revoked it. “And I refuse to believe that you guys were not acting as good neighbors.”

The club faced losing its liquor license and additional fines for an eight-man Texas Hold’em game held weekly in the back room of the lodge.

Acting on an anonymous tip in August, the liquor board dispatched investigators to the billiards room of the private club, where police detectives seized $400, a casino-style poker table and a cache of poker chips.

Gambling anywhere in Anne Arundel is illegal, and the practice also violates provisions of the county’s liquor laws.

“They thought it was a friendly game of pok-er,” said county police Detective Elmer Aulton, who made the bust.

The anonymous tipster who set off the bust had walked up to liquor board Chief Inspector Van Lee as he pumped gas at an Edgewater service station, Mr. Lee testified.

“How much longer will the liquor board allow the Elks Club to hold poker games?” Mr. Lee recalled the man asking.

Although the August bust was the second time in a year that the liquor board received an anonymous complaint about poker games in the club, the three-member commission accepted the explanation of club leaders.

“We can call it being naive,” Eugene D. Mattison, an attorney and the Elks’ leading knight told the commission. “Needless to say, we hadn’t read the law. We have now.”

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Not so long ago, poker was just a game. A few years back it emerged as a fad. Then, largely because of television, it morphed into a national phenomenon, if not an industry.

Is it any wonder, then, that some are aiming to turn it into a higher cause?

A Harvard Law School professor and a group of his students formed an organization this fall — the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society — dedicated to demonstrating that poker has educational benefits. They argue that the game, which is probability-based and requires risk assessment, situational analysis and a gift for reading people, can be an effective teaching tool, whether for middle school math or in business and law classes.

“I see great advantage in hitting kids as early as sixth grade, when they’re dropping out of math,” said Charles R. Nesson, the Harvard Law School professor who began the society with a group of his students. “I’m thinking of kids who are into their video games but instead of Halo-3 and World of Warcraft, we lead them into a game environment that has real intellectual depth to it, and feeds their curiosity rather than snuffs it out.”

The society has been working to establish chapters at campuses nationwide. This semester, it has sponsored seminars at Harvard featuring academics and authors to evangelize the wonders of poker. In the spring it plans to hold a workshop on using poker to teach math to children, to be held at the Smith Leadership Academy, a Boston charter school for at-risk kids in the sixth through eighth grades. “We see great potential for reaching our students in an innovative way,” said Karmala Sherwood, the school’s headmaster.

Others see great potential for creating gambling addiction. Chad Hills, a gambling analyst for Focus on the Family, the conservative Christian group, described as “moronic” any policy that encourages more school-age children to gamble.

“Kids are extremely vulnerable to gambling addiction,” said Mr. Hills, who likened poker to a “gateway drug” that leads to the harder stuff like craps and slot machines.

Professor Nesson, who also helped to found the law school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said that even before creating the society he consulted with Howard Shaffer, director of the division on addictions at the Harvard Medical School, to better understand the downside of the game. “I don’t intend to push these problems away,” he said.

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Antigua and Barbuda expects to receive a big damage award from the World Trade Organization in a long-running Internet gambling dispute with the United States, a lawyer for the Caribbean nation said on Monday.

“We feel pretty confident about our case, to be honest. We really feel like we have the upper hand here,” Mark Mendel, a private attorney representing Antigua, told Reuters ahead of an expected ruling by a WTO arbitration panel on Friday. In an April 2005 ruling, the WTO found a U.S. law allowing only domestic companies to provide online horse-race gambling services discriminated against foreign companies.

The United States has argued Antigua is entitled to only $500,000 in compensation because of that ban. But Antigua — which built an online gambling industry to replace declining tourist revenues — has asked permission to impose $3.44 billion a year worth of “cross-retaliation” on the United States.

It specifically wants permission to suspend copyright protections on American movies, music and software so its domestic manufacturers can export those products to the United States and potentially other markets, Lendel said.

“I think we provided plenty of proof to justify our figure … We feel pretty confident it should be a high number,” Mendel said. “I think there’s no doubt that we’re going to get the ability to cross-retaliate.”

Last year, the U.S. Congress tightened restrictions on Internet gambling by making it illegal for banks and credit card companies to make payments to online gambling sites.

In addition, the Bush administration announced in May it was retroactively excluding gambling services from market-opening commitments it made as part of the 1994 world trade agreement.

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Dan Michalski likes nothing more than to sit at a table and play Texas hold ‘em.

But it’s been harder for the North Texas man to find a good game lately, because Dallas police keep raiding everything from VFW halls to underground poker games, ticketing players, arresting operators and confiscating everything from the chips to the tables.

Players fear that the crackdown on poker won’t stop at city borders, but spread throughout the state as long as Texas outlaws the games where the house gets a percentage of the pot.

“It’s a shame,” said Michalski, a poker blogger, player and editor of pokerati.com. “It’s not like the people running these rooms are getting rich. A lot of people in good rooms are just trying to provide a service. What’s wrong with them being able to pay the rent, buy food, with the money?

“This is frustrating, to say the least,” he said. “These laws themselves are questionable.”

Police say they are following the law, which says poker games in which the house gets a percentage of the pot, a rake, are illegal.

And police say they’re going to track them down and bust them.

In recent years, raids of organized poker games where the house gets a rake have picked up in Dallas, and now Tarrant County law enforcement is pledging to shut down illegal gambling.

“If we find it and it’s in our jurisdiction, then we’re going to work it,” said Mike Johnston, executive chief deputy of the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department. “We haven’t run across an ongoing poker situation where the house gets a cut.

“But with all the World Series of Poker on TV, it’s naive to say it’s not going on,” he said. “If we find it, we’ll get warrants and shut them down.”

This in a state where former gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman once joked, “We invented Texas hold ‘em here, [but] we can’t even play it.”

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Chip Reese, whose mix of intellect, poise and nerve propelled him to renowned eminence among the minuscule club of humans who convene to wager millions on poker games, died Tuesday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 56.

His friend Doyle Brunson, also a renowned poker player, said Reese, whose birth name was David, appeared to have died of a heart attack after learning he had pneumonia the same day.

At age 6, Reese was beating fifth-graders at card games. He so dominated poker play at his Dartmouth fraternity that it named the card room after him. He was admitted to Stanford Law School but gave up plans to go there after stopping in Las Vegas and turning $400 into $66,000. His placid sans-souci mien was a professional gambler’s dream.

“I can bet $100,000 and feel nothing,” he said in an interview with People magazine in 2003. “If you think about the money and what it means, you’re gone.”

Reese won three World Series of Poker events, the crown jewels of tournament poker, but his preference was for high-stakes private games with high rollers. Even as better-known poker players appeared under bright lights for television, he lurked off camera in games with considerably more remunerative potential.

“Many consider Chip the greatest cash player who ever lived,” said Jeffrey Pollack, commissioner of the World Series of Poker.

Brunson, who billed himself as Texas Dolly in winning 10 World Series events, added that Reese was “arguably the best poker player who ever lived.”

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Congressmen from New Jersey, Washington, and Connecticut on Tuesday joined 41 other co-sponsors of the IGREA, the Bill designed to legalize and regulate Internet gambling, officially overturning the UIGEA, which is a Bill that unsuccessfully attempted to ban online gambling.

Rep. Robert E. Andrews [NJ-1], Rep. Adam Smith [WA-9}, and Rep. John B. Larson [CT-1], have agreed that this is an important law that will ensure certain freedoms of Americans and goes a long way to resolving WTO issues facing the United States.

Rep. Andrews, who hails from the 1st District in New Jersey, is a 10-term congressman and a leading voice on fiscal restraint, education, and national defense. He is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions. He also serves on the House Armed Services committee, the House Budget Committee, and subcommittees on Oversight and Investigations and Terrorism and Unconventional Threats. He supports women’s rights, ending employment discrimination, civil rights, and many other issues involving freedoms and protections.

Rep. Adam Smith [WA-9], has been in Congress since 1996, is chairman of the Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee and also serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Rep. John B. Larson [CT-1], is serving his fifth term in the House. the congressman is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee which has jurisdiction over the nations Tax Code, Trade Policy, Social Security and Medicare. He also serves on the Subcommittees on Trade, and Select Revenue Measures.

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Some politicians and Internet gambling opponents argue that the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) has reduced online gambling among college-aged youth, but others beg to differ.

During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Internet gambling earlier this month, witnesses–committee members among them–referred to an Annenberg Public Policy Center study suggesting that the UIGEA has done what it has set out to do: Eliminate the bad element from U.S. shores and protect the youth of America from immoral and addictive behaviors.

Data from the study shows that weekly Internet gambling among college-age youth (18 to 22) declined from 5.8 percent in 2006 to 1.5 percent in 2007, but Keith Whyte, the executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling said that while the numbers appear to coincide with the enactment of the UIGEA, the only definitive result the study showed was that the UIGEA affected the availability of such sites.

“It seems to me they saw a drop in self-reported poker players and they attribute it to the UIGEA, and it probably parallels the drop off in participation that people saw after the act went through,” Whyte said. “But I don’t know that it’s a permanent drop. I think it’s much more that it made it inconvenient. From what I hear from the industry levels are back up, if not exceeding what they were (before the UIGEA).”

Whyte added that problematic behavior probably hasn’t changed either.

“As we know, participation has now reached or exceeded pre-UIGEA levels, and it would be likely that it wasn’t necessarily a shift in students gambling preferences and risk for gambling problems; it was merely a dip in the availability,” he said. “I would suspect that if another survey was done in 2008, we’d see levels rise again.”

The study also quantified other types of gambling among the same age group, such as card playing. Data showed that other forms of gambling are not necessarily declining. “It’s not that kids have suddenly stopped gambling,” Whyte said. “What I suspect is that the law had a temporary effect on Internet use and/or Internet card playing, but that’s probably going to ramp back up.”

Sarah Beth Hensley, a student journalist at Ohio University, investigated Internet gambling on campus for an article. She reported on students who are profiting on playing poker online at sites such as Full Tilt and PokerStars without compromising their academic or social standings.

One student said he has made a profit of $10,000 since January of this year, while another has earned $12,000 in five years. Both said they have used their winnings to pay for tuition, textbooks, rent and loans. Neither said he has suffered in terms of grades or social relationships.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., is one lawmaker who does not agree with the assessment that the UIGEA has stopped college kids from gambling online.

As a witness in the Judiciary hearing, Berkley challenged the proclamation of Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas.

Quoting the study, Smith said the law has reduced gambling by young people.

But Berkley fired back, saying, “Mr. Smith, if you think for a minute that the kids on college campuses and the dormitories aren’t betting online you need to go visit some of them. They all are.”

Whyte questions whether studies such as the oft-quoted Annenberg study do anything to support the lawmakers’ claims.

“There are a number of reasons why it (the Annenberg study) doesn’t support that (the UIGEA),” Whyte said. “Legislation and enforcement certainly has an impact on gambling availability. It always has. Gambling has always been a regulated industry and it’s always waxed or waned dependent on what the law allows. There is no doubt the UIGEA had an impact, but whether that impact is sustained you cannot tell just from one year’s worth of data.”

Source: Interactive Gaming News

Investigators on Thursday broke up an allegedly illegal Texas Hold ‘Em poker operation at Front Range Poker Supply on East Mulberry in Fort Collins.

Authorities, who investigated the case for four months, say participants were playing Texas Hold ‘Em on a regular basis and that the house was receiving a percentage of the money, according to the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office.

Three people were arrested in the case: Dustin Santino, 28, who was the owner of Front Range Poker Supply and charged with possession of a weapon by a previous offender and running a professional gambling establishment; Troy Vernon, 33, who was charged with running a professional gambling establishment; and Michael Trujillo, 24, who was charged with running a professional gambling establishment.

Sixteen others were ticketed for unlawfully engaging in gambling. One woman was ticketed for possession of marijuana.

Gambling is considered legal when it is a social gathering, in which members are part of a true social relationship and no profit motive is present, according to the sheriff’s office.

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