When William Holley of Middletown holds a barbecue at his house, a few friends often will sit down for a game of Texas hold ‘em poker at $2 a hand.
Holley never thought he or his friends were committing a crime.
“I let them go have their drinks, have their fun,” said Holley, 42. “It’s a barbecue. What are your friends supposed to do when they get there, play hopscotch?”
So Holley was shocked when his town’s newly formed police force busted up a poker game in a suburban cul-de-sac of mini-mansions. While allegations surrounding the arrests of the home’s residents sound like the game was more than a few friendly hands of poker, many in the state were surprised to learn that there’s nothing written in Delaware laws that allows even penny-ante gambling in the home.
State Attorney General Beau Biden’s office put out a brief statement that said gambling in Delaware is illegal except through state-run lotteries, horse betting at race tracks and charitable gambling licensed by the state. Although Biden’s office added that it considers other factors when deciding whether to prosecute, it gave Holley and other poker aficionados cold comfort.
“It would really [tick] me off if the cops came up and raided a game at my house,” Holley said. “Don’t you think there’s better things to do?”
Unlike many other states, there’s no exception in Delaware law for social gambling, which is described as games at a private home where the winnings go to the players, said I. Nelson Rose, an authority on gambling law and a professor of law at Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa, Calif. But the police rarely make arrests in friendly card games, he said. John Mancus, past chairman and now a member of the Delaware Gaming Control Board, said there hasn’t been an arrest in recent memory. “It’s one of the laws on the books that nobody wants to enforce,” Rose said.
The Delaware situation illustrates the tension that arises when changing social trends butt up against gambling laws from the 19th and early 20th centuries, legal experts said.
Not only have Americans increasingly come to view gambling as legitimate entertainment, with the rise of state-sanctioned lotteries and casinos, but poker has become a national craze with televised tournaments of the popular Texas hold ‘em game, according to William Eadington, professor of economics and director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno. “The trend has been to legalize it through legislation — or just ignore it,” Eadington said.
As a result, most players tend to believe it’s legal. Take poker lover Phil Shernofsky, 42, of Dover, who has played cards at friends’ homes.
He, like many, always believed that such games are legal unless the house is taking a cut of the action. “I don’t think it ever came up in conversations that something we were doing was illegal,” Shernofsky said.
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