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About one year ago, PocketFives.com had Michael Bolcerek, President of the Poker Players Alliance, on its weekly Podcast. One of the very first political guests the show ever had, Bolcerek spoke about his plans to build something at the time most people probably didn’t think was possible – a formidable lobbying force composed of online poker players. Fast forward one year to May, 2007, and you’ll see that the PPA is nearing the half million member mark. Driven largely by no-cost memberships and the arrival of former Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato as its Chairman, the PPA’s membership has quadrupled in recent months. PocketFives.com sat down with PPA President Michael Bolcerek during a busy day on Capitol Hill to discuss this explosive growth.
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Program description:

“Is he our new hero? Join us for an exclusive interview with Rep. Barney Frank on Wednesday, May 9th at 7:00pm West 10pm East Coast on “Pumped on Poker”. Rep. Frank is working tirelessly to overturn the ban in internet gaming in the United States. Tune in to see what he has to say, what he’s working on and what you should be doing to help.”

Click here to listen (05/09/07, 7PM PST)

The United States will maintain a ban on Internet gambling services despite an adverse World Trade Organization ruling, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office said on Friday.

The move opens the door for other WTO members — ranging from tiny Antigua and Barbuda to the 27-nation European Union — to seek potential damages at the WTO.

However, Deputy U.S. Trade Representative John Veroneau told reporters the United States did not believe there was any basis for other countries to receive compensation.

Veroneau argued that a case brought by Antigua and Barbuda several years ago took advantage of a drafting error made by the United States as part of its commitments in the early 1990s to open its recreational services market.

Even though U.S. law has banned interstate gambling for decades, the United States failed to make clear its commitments “did not extend to gambling,” Veroneau said.

Having exhausted other options to fight the case, the United States will exercise a rarely used right under WTO rules to modify its 14-year-old services commitments and explicitly exclude gambling, Veroneau said.

Antigua’s finance and economy minister, Dr. L. Errol Cort, called the U.S. move an unprecedented, deeply disappointing and “almost incomprehensible” action.

“We are now reviewing our options and will be proceeding to use the WTO institutions to get full compensation for our citizens,” Cort said.

“JUST NOT TRUE”

Mark Mendel, Antigua’s lead counsel in the matter, dismissed the United States’ claim that it never intended to open its gambling market.

“More than a dozen countries were able to expressly exclude gambling from their commitments, and many dozens more excluded the commitment in other ways. For the United States to say this was a mistake is just not true,” Mendel said.

The U.S. announcement on Friday followed a WTO decision in March that said the United States had failed to comply with an April 2005 ruling against a portion of its ban having to do with online gambling on horse racing.

In fact, the U.S. Congress moved in the opposite direction last year and passed additional legislation to ban online gambling by making it illegal for banks and credit card companies to make payments to online gambling sites.

The chairman of U.S. House Financial Services Committee, Democratic Rep. Barney Frank (news, bio, voting record) of Massachusetts, has introduced a bill to lift the online gambling ban. But he conceded there is not enough support currently to pass it.

The WTO case could leave the United States open to paying damages in the form of reduced U.S. market access in some services sector of the WTO member seeking damages, USTR officials said.

The United States believes it should not have to pay compensation because countries did not bargain for access to the U.S. gambling market as part of world trade talks in the early 1990s, Veroneau said.

Also, the long-standing U.S. ban on interstate gambling makes it “nonsensical” for countries to believe the United States was opening that market, even though it did not explicitly say that it was not, Veroneau said.

Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics, said he doubted the United States could persuade the WTO it doesn’t owe anything.

“Maybe they can do it. It sounds fairly far-fetched to me,” Hufbauer said.

(additional reporting by Peter Kaplan)

In another effort to roll back an Internet gambling ban, Rep. Shelley Berkley on Thursday introduced a bill calling for a one-year study of online wagering by the National Academy of Sciences.

“One of the advantages of this legislation is that it doesn’t take a side,” she said. “It doesn’t say Internet gambling is good or bad. It says ‘Let’s study the issue.’ “

But Berkley, D-Nev., acknowledged she wants to repeal the Internet gambling ban approved last year by Congress.

“It’s very difficult to unring a bell once it has rung in Washington,” Berkley said. “But the ban was sneaked onto a port security bill, and the people who voted for it, including myself, were not contemplating a ban on Internet gambling.”

The measure was passed and signed into law in October.

Berkley’s bill comes one week after Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., proposed legislation to repeal the Internet gambling ban and require the Department of Treasury to regulate the $13 billion online wagering industry.

Berkley is a co-sponsor of Frank’s bill and Frank has said Berkley’s bill is “perfectly complementary” to his.

While Frank’s bill has 11 co-sponsors so far, Berkley claims to have 60 co-sponsors, including Frank and Nevada’s two other House members — Reps. Dean Heller and Jon Porter, both R-Nev.

Other Berkley co-sponsors include Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee which is likely to review Berkley’s bill, and Rep. Frank LoBiondo, a New Jersey Republican who represents casinos in Atlantic City.

Another bill, which would carve out an exemption from the ban for Internet poker players, is being drafted by Rep. Bob Wexler, D-Fla.

The National Research Council, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, would conduct the Internet gambling study, according to Berkley’s bill.

Among other things, Berkley’s bill would:

* Assess the impact of the ban approved last year.

* Examine technological methods used by other countries which license and regulate Internet gambling.

* Analyze recent rulings on Internet gambling by the World Trade Organization.

Porter, who introduced a bill last year calling for an 18-month study of Internet gambling by a federal commission, said Berkley’s bill is more specific.

“I would say this (Berkley’s) bill has a better chance of passing because this time there will be more discussion and debate,” Porter said.

Prof. Nesson and Others Stress the Skill Involved; Why It’s a Legal Issue

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Four-time poker champion Howard Lederer makes a plush living playing cards. His scholarly calm at the table has earned him the title “The Professor,” along with $3.3 million in tournament prize money.

Just don’t call him lucky. To describe poker as anything but a game of skill, he says, “is just wrong.”

Now poker fans in academe are jumping in to help prove that point, most recently with a daylong “strategy session” at the Harvard Faculty Club bringing together poker pros like Mr. Lederer, game theorists, statisticians, law students and gambling lobbyists.

“The purpose of this meeting,” said Harvard University Law School professor Charles Nesson, kicking things off beneath the dusty visages of long-dead Harvard poets and divines, “is to legitimate poker.” To do that, Prof. Nesson and his fellows hope to show, statistically, philosophically, legally and otherwise, that poker is a game in which skill predominates over chance.

It is the straight flush of poker theory — and just about as elusive.

The skill debate has been a preoccupation in poker circles since September, when Congress barred the use of credit cards for online wagers. Horse racing and stock trading were exempt, but otherwise the new law hit any “game predominantly subject to chance.” Included among such games was poker, which is increasingly played on Internet sites hosting players from all over the world.

By making the case for poker as a skill, aficionados hope to roll back the law, and even win the game newfound freedoms in states where wagering on poker is currently banned.

Poker has been on a tear for years in the U.S. and is “rampant, in a good way,” among Harvard law students, Prof. Nesson says. Poker-players-turned-celebrities vie for million-dollar purses on ESPN and the Travel Channel. Millions of Americans now play the game with some regularity. The Department of Labor last year recognized “professional poker player” as an official occupation. Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who sent his regrets for the Harvard session, plays in a regular game.

Yet poker, in many corners, retains its image as a smoky pastime of gamblers and cheats. More pernicious to some is its modern incarnation on the Web, where play also boomed until Congress passed its September ban.

Supporters of the law, which was slipped into a port-security bill, argued that Internet casinos feed addictive gambling and lead college students to rack up huge losses on their credit cards. They also cited concerns that the sites were run by offshore companies outside the purview of U.S. law.

Leading a Counterattack

Mr. Lederer and his sister, Annie Duke, one of the country’s best female poker players, are helping lead the counterattack. Joining them is the newly muscular Poker Players Alliance, the game’s lobbying group, whose membership has swelled to more than 400,000. The group has targeted unsympathetic lawmakers and launched letter-writing campaigns to overturn the ban. The group’s Web site features the photo of a brain and the line, “It’s Better to Be Skillful Than Lucky.”

Now academics like Prof. Nesson are joining the cause. “It’s about time poker became a subject of academic inquiry,” says the Harvard professor, an amateur poker buff who at 67 buzzes about campus on a moped.

Prof. Nesson has jumped on the poker cause largely as a personal-freedom campaign. He says he has received no money from the industry, but the Poker Players Alliance did pay for the faculty club rental and food for the day.

Poker is at heart a betting game in which players compete against one another for a growing pot of money. Players win either by getting the others to fold their cards or by having the best hand, ranked according to a hierarchy. Poker’s name most likely derives from an ancient French bluffing game called poque, from the antiquated French verb poquer, which meant “to bet.”

The luck-versus-skill debate is a lot more recent. Under U.S. common law, games that are predominantly chance are considered gambling, while those that are mainly skill are not.

In 1989, in a case enthusiasts love to cite, a California circuit-court judge ruled in favor of poker as a skill, allowing the state’s famed card rooms to stay in business. But in 2005, a North Carolina state judge smacked down a local card club, calling poker a game of chance. Case law in other states is just as mixed. Judges in Colorado, for instance, have taken both sides.

‘Mini-Version of Life’

Prof. Nesson’s gathering quickly agreed that poker is clearly a game that some excel at and others don’t. “Poker is a very structured mini-version of life — and also an incredibly difficult game to get good at,” says Mr. Lederer, who took up cards at 18 and dropped out of Columbia University two years later to play full time. Both he and his sister now consult for online poker sites, and both attended the Harvard gathering.

Mastering the game, particularly the dominant version these days known as Texas Hold ‘Em, can take years. Its complexity of betting and bluffs has long exasperated computer programmers who have tried to mimic the best players.

But defining that skill is just as tough. Is it an ability to bluff? Is it largely a mathematical knack at calculating the odds of getting a certain hand, and then betting accordingly? Or is it a combination of those skills?

Scientific Solution

Some hope the solution can be found scientifically. Jay Kadane, a statistician at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, doesn’t play the game. But he was drawn to the Harvard session by the idea that one could show, statistically, what makes some players better than others. The online poker companies have reams of minute-by-minute data on the decisions and bets of thousands of players, and Mr. Kadane has pitched to potential sponsors a project that would crunch those data in search of proof that poker is a game of skill.

University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, who co-wrote the best-selling book “Freakonomics,” is already in the midst of a similar quest. His project, called Pokernomics, seeks to analyze the electronic data from more than a million hands of Texas Hold ‘Em with the goal, he says, “of understanding what makes a person a good or bad poker player.” Mr. Levitt, who is doing the project without assistance from the poker industry, has invited players to email in their own electronic data from games on the Internet but wants a minimum of 10,000 hands per player so he can analyze their moves in depth.

In the absence for now of any scientific proof, Prof. Nesson urged the group to come up with more legalistic arguments. Ms. Duke has won more than $3 million in tournament prize money. One sure sign that poker is a skill, she says, is that unlike roulette or the lottery or betting on football, “you can purposely lose at poker if you choose.” To lose requires skill, she says — or at least an ability to affect the outcome.

Her brother offers another proposal, which he suggests might impress a future judge. The “vast majority” of high-betting poker hands, he says, are decided after all players except the winner have folded. So if no one shows his cards, Mr. Lederer says, “can you legally argue that the outcome was determined by luck?”

The poker industry may get lucky anyway. Last week, Rep. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, introduced a bill the poker industry supports to overturn the September ban and regulate online gambling. Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler says he has drafted a more specific bill after being besieged by poker players in his South Florida district. “My bill will say that poker is a skill,” he says.

After his strategy session wrapped up, Prof. Nesson led the group to a bar for drinks. He was delighted, he said, at how the group “pushed game theory to the level of metaphor.” Sipping a scotch on the rocks, he tossed out the idea of creating a poker university, with himself as one of its teachers. Then, “we could infuse all levels of education with the skills that come from poker,” he said.

Is poker predominantly a game of luck or a game of skill?
Vote at WSJ.com (click here)

They’ll win your hearts, steal your blinds and bluff fearlessly, but
the 2007 Queen of Hearts Team, packed with a powerhouse list of famous
women poker pros, celebrities and noted executives, is set to marshal
their prodigious talents on behalf of two great causes at this year’s
World Series of Poker—raising funds for the American Heart
Association’s Go Red for Women Campaign and the Nevada Cancer
Institute, Official Community Relations Partner of the World Series of
Poker.

Lisa Tenner, co-caption and founder of the Queen of Hearts Team, today
announced that she will share the captaining duties with actress and
talented poker player Mimi Rogers. They will be joined by another TV
and film star, Jennifer Tilly (who returns to the team for her second
year,) along with such female poker luminaries as J.J. Liu, Vanessa
Rousso, Jennifer Leigh, Clonie Gowen, Isabelle Mercier, Mary Jones and
Susie Isaacs. Also aboard are poker journalist Lisa Wheeler, high
powered real estate broker Elizabeth Shepherd, attorney and Florida
magistrate Mary Magazine, the president of luxury watchmaker Corum USA
Stacie Orloff, and accomplished amateur champions Anne Spinetti and
Mylene Leitner.

“We are sponsored this year by the Poker Player’s Alliance, which has
provided the first donation to the team and the charities,” said
Tenner, known in poker as the leading creator, packager and marketer of
unique poker events. “Thanks to our sponsor and this great group of
women who have accumulated individual winnings well into the millions,
our Team expects to exceed its 2006 total. “

The Poker Players Alliance (www.theppa.org) is a
nonprofit membership organization comprised of poker players from
around the United States who have joined together to speak with one
voice to promote the game, ensure its integrity, and to protect poker
players’ rights. The Poker Players Alliance promotes and protects poker
through advocacy work in Washington, D.C., and throughout the nation.
Mary Magazine sits on the board of the PPA.

Each of the Queen of Hearts team members will play in the World Series
of Poker Ladies’ No Hold’em Event June 10-11 at the Rio All-Suite Hotel
and Casino in Las Vegas, an event that was won in previous years by
Jones (2006), Tilly (2005) and Isaacs (1996 and 1997). The players will
also commit funds from any winnings in the Ladies event. Funds raised
by the Queen of Hearts Team will benefit the Las Vegas Office of the
American Heart Association and Nevada Cancer Institute.

Noted Tenner: “In our second year, we are proud to add Nevada Cancer Institute whose research and care benefit everyone.”

“It is truly an honor to be associated with this incredible group of
women, playing on behalf of such a worthy causes,” said Rogers, who has
competed in several World Poker Tour Championships. “Getting into the
money in order to make a financial contribution is important, but even
more critical is putting the spotlight on America’s health. Heart
disease and cancer are for the most part preventable and we can all do
something to reduce the risk. Risk is essential in poker, it isn’t in
health.”

The Queen of Hearts Team will meet for a reception dinner the night
before and get a little coaching from poker champion Phil Laak and from
veteran poker player and entrepreneur Mark Tenner.

The team will cheered on by executives from the Las Vegas office of the
American Heart Association (www.Americanheart.org) “The Queen of Hearts
Team is a royal flush for our National Go Red for Women campaign, “said
Tammy Lier, American Heart Association volunteer and 2007 Las Vegas Go
Red for Women Committee Chair. “This program provides great visibility
to our efforts encouraging women to get check ups and make lifestyle
changes that will give them greater longevity. We really appreciate
these busy and successful women coming together for our cause.”

Nevada Cancer Institute executives also lauded the effort. “We
appreciate the support of the community and of the Queen of Hearts
Team,” said Clark Dumont, Vice President of Communications and Public
Affairs for NVCI. “This financial support will help us in pursuing our
mission of preventing, detecting, educating, caring and curing cancer
throughout our communities.”

For more information on The Queen of Hearts Team, contact Tenner and
Associates, at www.tennerandassoc.com or call (702) 792 9430.

(Woman Poker Player Magazine)

The Two Talk About New Gambling Legislation

Alfonse D’Amato, former senator and chairman of the Poker Player’s Alliance,
along with poker professional Howard Lederer, discuss Barney Frank’s
new bill that would help legalize and regulate online poker in the United States in a video released today on Card Player TV.

D’Amato served in Congress as senator from  New
York from 1980 to 1999 and recently took a position with the PPA to
lobby his former colleagues on the issues of poker legality. An avid
poker player, D’Amato is working to bring the battle for poker to the
frontlines.

He has recently become known to the poker
community for his stance on the new legislation against online poker.
Since becoming involved with the PPA, the membership grew from 60,000
to over 428,000, thanks to the media boost and his familiar face.

Both D’Amato and Lederer talked with Card Player’s Allyn Jaffrey Shulman about poker legality, Barney Frank’s new act that would legalize and regulate online gambling in the United States, and why online poker should be legalized here.

Like D’Amato, Lederer is becoming a face of the PPA and for legalization of online poker in America.
Lederer talks about Frank’s bill and how it would affect everything
from sports leagues to states rights. Lederer is always a compelling
speaker, and what he has to say on this issue is worth the 10 minutes
viewing the video.

To view the report, click here or type www.cardplayer.com/tv into your browser.

HB 3186 was voted out of the House Licensing and Administrative
Procedures Committee. We will be seeing our first Texas House vote on
Poker as early as Friday. More to come, but for now please contact your State Representative and ask them to support HB 3186, The Texas Poker Act.

links:
PPA President’s Message to Texas Members
List of State Representatives
Track HB3186

Players have lined up behind Michael Bolcerek as he pushes their agenda on a nationwide scale.

At his monthly Silicon Valley poker game in February 2006, Michael Bolcerek was dealt a life-changing opportunity.

One of the guys at the table had helped raise $18,000 for a local school in a charity poker tournament only to learn that California prohibited that kind of fundraising. Frustrated, he had turned to the Poker Players Alliance, an advocacy group with about 5,000 card-playing members.

Bolcerek asked whether there was anything he could do to help.

“Well, they’re actually looking for a president,” his poker buddy said. “You’re not doing anything right now; why don’t you put your resume in?”

It was no bluff. A few weeks later, Bolcerek, a former technology company executive who lives in San Francisco, was the alliance’s president.

By last fall, he was holding a fateful hand: After years of trying, Congress had passed legislation to stamp out online gambling by making it illegal for banks and credit card companies to process payments to those sites. Poker players’ outrage, combined with some aggressive outreach, has since built the alliance’s membership to more than 360,000.

With numbers like that, the San Francisco-based Poker Players Alliance is becoming a political player, and it’s acting like one. It commissioned a poll showing that angry poker players helped defeat one of the law’s chief sponsors, Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), who narrowly lost in the November elections in what the alliance called a “green-felt revolution.”

Now, Bolcerek is aiming for a membership of 1 million as the group tries to persuade Congress to exempt poker from the online gambling law.

Becoming the alliance’s president seemed an unusual career move for the 45-year-old Bolcerek, a husky man with a bald pate and an easy smile. Despite a love of poker, he isn’t a big-time gambler. The stakes aren’t high at his monthly games with technology industry pals: The most anyone wins or loses is a couple of hundred dollars.

But Bolcerek is viewed as a wild card in the conservative world of chief financial officers, a post he’s held at several small technology companies.

“He’s very different from most CFOs that I’ve ever worked with,” says Timothy Jones, who hired Bolcerek at two high-tech start-ups. “He’s willing to embrace risks to get higher returns.”

Bolcerek had just finished a temporary CFO stint at a Colorado computer storage company when he heard about the Poker Players Alliance job. He was all in, jumping at the chance to build an organization, even if his wife, Julia, initially reacted by asking quizzically, “Poker?”

She came around. “He always wanted to get into politics, and I think this is a great way to do it without having to go through an election,” she says. “Although you do get sick of hearing poker 24/7.”

Bolcerek learned the game at 15 in Concord, Calif., from his grandmother Florence, a fervent Bingo and pinochle player.

“We played for nickels and quarters,” he said. “I wish I had learned statistics before I started playing with her because I probably lost more money than I should have.”

Poker wasn’t big at Brown University, where Bolcerek earned an economics degree. He started playing regularly in Silicon Valley about a decade ago.

For him, poker nights are as much about the mental challenge as male bonding or fattening wallets.

“It’s one of the weirdest things,” he says, “when you have a group of 10 40-year-old men who will sit together for four hours and no one will have a beer because you’re so competitive at the table you don’t want to lose a bit of an edge.”

Even in the high-powered group, Bolcerek’s poker mind stood out, says Theodore Tanner, a regular before he left Silicon Valley for a job with Microsoft Corp. in 2000.

“You could see him analyzing the hands,” Tanner says. “I never did seem to beat him.”

Looking back, Bolcerek says the Poker Players Alliance job wasn’t a radical departure for him. “It was really just another entrepreneurial venture, another type of Internet entertainment.”

Working to raise the group’s profile and wield influence, Bolcerek brought a trio of well-known professional players, including Howard “The Professor” Lederer, to Washington to convince lawmakers that poker is a game of skill, unlike craps and other gambling. Then, in March, the group hired as its board chairman former Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), an avid poker player with deep Washington connections.

And although it was unable to stop the federal law, the alliance helped persuade the California Legislature last year to permit charity poker events.

Bolcerek says his intense travel schedule means he now often misses his monthly game. He doesn’t play online often — he prefers the live game — but believes anyone should have that right. And his appreciation for poker has deepened as he has become immersed in it.

“I’ve done a lot more discussion on strategy. I’ve done a lot more reading on poker,” he says. “By leaps and bounds, I’ve become a better player.”

Lederer, who has joined the group’s board, has noticed.

“I’m not saying Michael’s turned into a shark in the last year,” Lederer says. “He’s just someone who gets poker now, and that passion comes through.”