Wendy Nutting’s love of poker has her in a whole new game – advocating in a state that outlaws gambling.

The 35-year-old Coeur d’Alene native recently was selected as a state director for the national Poker Players Alliance, an advocacy group for the game based in Washington, D.C.

Within days, Nutting learned she was unintentionally breaking Idaho law by betting for cash during weekly games in friends’ living rooms and kitchens.

Idaho outlaws gambling – including poker – regardless of whether it’s played in the bar or the basement with work buddies over beer and pizza.

Nutting is left not only with the mission of promoting one of the most popular games in America, but also one of advocating for a state law change to make friendly in-home games legal.

In the meantime, Nutting vows not to play in any illegal games – not wanting to jeopardize her advocacy for legal poker or become a hypocritical influence for her two teenage children.

“It’s asinine,” Nutting said Tuesday while logging in to PokerStars.net to play Texas Hold’em with fake money. “How can I be vocal about something I know is illegal?”

Kootenai County Chief Deputy Prosecutor Marty Raap said he didn’t realize in-house poker games were illegal until he considered having one at his Post Falls home. Before he invited friends he checked the law. The game was canceled.

“I can’t think of a case I’ve ever seen where friendly home games with other buddies are prosecuted,” he said, comparing laws regarding poker to those outlawing adultery and sodomy – Idaho laws that aren’t prosecuted.

He thinks the Idaho Legislature should clean up some of these antiquated laws.

Raap said it makes no sense, especially when he can cross the state line and, within 10 minutes, get in a live poker game at Hooters Owl Club Casino in the Spokane Valley. Friendly wagering is allowed at in-home games in Washington as well, provided the host doesn’t charge anything simply for offering the game. Poker is also legal in Montana.

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Government has all sorts of creative ways to strike a balance between enhancing your life and regulating it to death, and this two-year legislative session is no different.

“There are more inane laws introduced than you could shake a stick at,” House Majority Leader Jim Merrill, R-Daniel Island, said. “Somebody at the grocery store says they’re having trouble with this or that, and they (some legislators) feel they need to introduce a law about it.”

Among the several thousand bills filed this session were proposals to stop parents from smoking in cars if a child younger than 10 is riding along, suspend driver’s licenses for high school students who are absent too often and require restaurants to post notices if they serve food with trans fats.

There’s also a proposal that would prevent people from suing restaurants if they get fat.

Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, hosted Sens. Robert Ford, D-Charleston, and Larry Martin, R-Pickens, on a recent edition of his weekly news conference sponsored by ETV, a half-hour show where legislators discuss what’s going on around the Statehouse.

On the show, the panel talked about “laws that go too far,” with a focus on South Carolina’s gambling legislation.

McConnell and Ford co-sponsored a bill that would update what some consider to be the state’s outdated anti-gambling laws, which by extension stop people from playing Monopoly at their kitchen table and holding cake raffles at church.

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As the final straggler takes his seat at one of three kidney shaped tables, Russell Bjerke, co-owner of the Downtown Poker Club, begins the Tuesday night tournament by uttering the legendary words, “Shuffle up and deal.”

The room goes silent and it suddenly seems that the quiet and the cards are the only things this group of people has in common — there is a representative from almost every gender, age group, class and ethnicity.

Actually, there is one other common thread.

Each player paid $40 for the chance to pit their skill and wit against twenty four competitors in order to win the top prize worth 50 percent of the entry fees which is around $1,000 on this particular night. Second and third place receive 30 percent and percent respectively.

While this scenario might seem to be something you could only find in a casino, the Downtown Poker Club is anything but. It is in fact a non-profit corporation and, because of Ashland’s gaming laws, is just as legal as your Friday night games around the kitchen table.

“The reason the games are legal is that this is a social game played in a private environment,” says Bjerke.  “We are not soliciting the game for business purposes; we are soliciting it for general fellowship and gamesmanship.  We’re not in the business of profiting or the business of marketing a casino style environment, we are a fellowship environment.”

The club offers tournaments almost every night of the week as well as nightly cash games.

The difference between tournaments and cash games is that in a tournament each player begins with the same amount of chips and the winner is the person with all of the chips at the end of the night; in other words, the chips have no cash equivalent.  In a cash game, a player may begin with as many chips as he or she chooses to pay for, each chip is worth a specific amount and a player can begin or end play at any time during the game.

In order to play at the club, each member must pay annual dues of twenty dollars.  In addition, players pay a twenty dollar table fee each night they play which is deducted from each pot in the cash games.  These monies are used for upkeep and improvements to the facility.

While this may resemble a ‘rake’ to anyone familiar with casinos, whenever this fee exceeds twenty dollars per person, it is automatically kicked into a player fund that is used as the members see fit.

The Downtown Poker Club is located underneath the Elks Lodge on Will Dodge Way and actually rents their space from the Lodge, the only other place in Ashland to host poker tournaments.

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Is it luck of the draw in poker? No, says Michael DeDonno, a doctoral student from Case Western Reserve University. He suggests putting your bets on skills over luck when playing the card game.

DeDonno’s findings from two poker-related studies with college students have implications for the gaming industry, and possibly even legal cases that challenge the theory of luck over skills. According to DeDonno, the person who takes home the winnings is likely to pay higher taxes when money is considered earned by luck.

His article, “Poker is a Skill,” written with Douglas Detterman, Case Western Reserve psychologist, caught the attention of the journal, Gaming Law Review, which has been examining this luck-skill debate and recently published psychologists’ findings.

“This article provides empirical evidence that it is skill and not luck,” concluded DeDonno from his two studies.

In the first study, DeDonno had 41 college students play eight games, totaling 200 hands, of Turbo Texas Hold’em, a computerized simulation of 10-player Hold’em poker. The game consists of being dealt two cards in the first round. The player must decide whether to play or quit based on the hand. If the person decides to play, then three cards are dealt for the community pot. Again, the player has to decide whether to play or stop. The player must also consider the betting patterns of the other players in making a decision in moving to the next round. If continuing, then the player sees another card and has to decide again to bet or lay down the cards. This is repeated until there are five cards on the table.

Overall most of the students had little experience playing poker, said DeDonno.

Half of the students in the first group were given charts that ranked the two-card combinations from best to the worst and also learned that professional poker players typically play about 15 percent of the hands dealt them. The other group was given background on the history of poker with no strategies.

He found that students given some strategies to make decisions did better than those without the strategies.

When starting the study, almost two-thirds of the students (64 percent) felt that winning at poker was 50 percent luck.

“If it had been pure luck in winning, then the strategies would not have made a difference for the two groups,” said DeDonno

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Click here to read “Poker is a Skill” by Michael DeDonno and Douglas Detterman (pdf)

After a four-hour delay with parliamentary wrangling, a legislative committee has recommended this afternoon that lawmakers reject Governor Deval Patrick’s casino proposal by a vote of 10-8, with one abstention, according to one committee member who was told of the results.

House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi and Representative Daniel Bosley, a committee co-chairman, have a press conference scheduled shortly to discuss the vote.

The action by the committee will allow the full House to take up the measure as early as Thursday. Traditionally, the recommendation of a committee vote carries great weight on the floor.

A vote from the committee had been expected at noon.

Bosley, an ardent gambling critic, refused to disclose the initial vote, but other committee members said the vote was tied – 9 votes in favor, 9 votes against, and one person abstaining. The additional four hours gave DiMasi, Patrick, and labor unions time to convince several fence-sitters.

Much of the focus had been on Representative Robert Rice, a Democrat from Gardner who abstained in the initial vote, according to Representative Brian Wallace, a South Boston Democrat who has been the House’s chief casino supporter. Rice did not immediately return calls for comment.

Supporters also felt they could sway Representative Thomas Conroy, a Wayland Democrat who voted no in the initial vote, but Conroy said in an interview that he was not changing his mind despite intense pleas today from union and administration officials.

Bosley and other casino critics did not expect they would have to be concerned with the parliamentary maneuverings, but the vote was extraordinarily close. Further complicating matters, Bosley erred by allowing the committee to attach six other casino-related bills to the governor’s legislation.

Three committee members called foul, sending an e-mail message out this morning saying that bundling the governor’s bill with other amendments violates procedural rules.

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Nourish International has canceled its annual Hold ‘Em For Hunger 2008 Tournament in the face of concerns about the legality of the contest.

A person who administrators describe as “an expert in the industry” sent a letter to the chancellor’s office informing them of the University’s potential for criminal liability.

“The University’s policy is certainly clear,” said Winston Crisp, assistant vice chancellor for student affairs. “If they’re sponsored or recognized by the University, then they have to follow all federal and state statutes.”

Gambling of any kind is listed as a Class 2 misdemeanor by the N.C. General Assembly.

With only six weeks until the April 20 event, organizers are scrambling for other ways to raise funds for Nourish, which relies on the event for about 70 percent of its annual budget.

“Because of the time period with which this happened, there is no way we can … do a big event,” said Graham Boone, the tournament director.

He said the group is determined to raise money for Nourish projects through a variety of other smaller events, including auctioning poker chips with the Hold ‘Em For Hunger logo on them.

“I have 20,000 of these chips in my apartment, and it breaks my heart every time I look at them,” Boone said.

Nourish uses the tournament money to fund international summer service projects implemented by its members.

This year’s service workers planned to construct a community center in Mexico, implement a water system in a remote area of Peru and start a microfinance initiative and build greenhouses in Honduras.

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Illegal poker operations have been around for quite some time. But with the recent popularity of Texas Hold’em, bars and restaurants have found ways to offer legal tournaments. Texas Hold’em Tournament Director Beth Connell says they work closely with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

“They’ll give you good guidelines and good information about what’s player friendly,” Connell said. “They’ve always been very helpful and communicative with us with regards to how we can keep a tournament running so that our legality is never in question. And the TABC has always been right there on the spot for us where that’s concerned.”

When we first heard about businesses giving away cash and other prizes for winning poker tournaments, we thought it was too good to be true. So we spoke with Potter County Assistant Attorney David Kemp.

“There are two restrictions on gambling,” Kemp said. “What makes something gambling is you pay considerations to participate in the game and you win something of value at the end of the game. So if those two things exist, there could possibly be a problem under the gambling laws.”

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For Immediate Release                
March, 18, 2008                            
                                     
Contact:  
Taylor Gross
(202) 347-7943
tgross@theheraldgroup.com

Washington, D.C. (March 18, 2008) – Poker players from across Massachusetts today held a rally outside of the Massachusetts State House to protest a provision in Governor Deval Patrick’s casinos bill that makes playing poker on the internet with other adults a crime punishable by jail time. The rally was organized by the Poker Players Alliance (PPA), the leading poker grassroots advocacy group comprised of almost one million online and offline poker players nationwide, and held in prior to a hearing before the Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies focused on H 4307, the Massachusetts Casino Expansion Bill.
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A former Chugiak High School vice-principal was sentenced Friday morning for his role in operating a Valley poker room raided by Alaska state troopers in April 2007.

Superior Court Judge Eric Smith didn’t give James McDowell any jail time and said his record will be cleared if he doesn’t break the law for two years. He also fined McDowell $5,000.

That didn’t stop defense attorney Josh Fannon from having his say.

“This is the most overcharged, over-investigated, worthless case I’ve ever seen,” Fannon said in court. “After eight months of surveillance by many cops, 27 officers carrying machine guns and wearing ski masks” raided the place and “turned up nothing.”

Later, Fannon called the investigation a despicable waste of resources. He claimed lawyers, doctors and even cops played at the poker parlor on Bogard Road and were charged up to 5 percent of the take to “pay the mortgage and keep the lights on.”

Assistant district attorney Alison Collins offered no rebuttal in court to Fannon’s allegations and did not return a message left Friday afternoon.

During the raid, troopers reported finding more than $9,000 in cash, 14 poker tables, gambling ledgers and piles of chips. Eleven people were playing cards at the time.

McDowell was one of eight charged, most on misdemeanors, after the April 15 raid. Only Samuel Henry remains to be sentenced, on April 16. Henry is accused of running the games for McDowell, the owner of the property.

Unless Henry is jailed on a felony for promoting gambling, none will have been sentenced to time behind bars.

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