Oh, Yeah... Online Poker

Was asked yesterday about what the election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president might mean as far as online poker in the United States is concerned.

It’s a good question, although as I thought about it I quickly realized that if I were to make a list of issues to be concerned about regarding Trump’s taking over, there are probably 70 or 80 others I’d rank higher importance than online poker. Then again, it is an issue I am at least attentive to, given how much of my life is affected by the vagaries of poker’s place in the culture.

My first instinct was to say it probably didn’t matter much at all who won on Tuesday, as neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton were going to be huge proponents of any sort of federal regulation permitting online gambling and/or poker in the U.S.

I remember my shuttle ride from Atlantic City to the Philly airport last weekend. My loquacious driver was a Trump supporter, and even had a little Trump/Pence sign he held up and shook at me when making one of several points about the current state of his state and of the nation as a whole.

Thanks to the event from which he was driving me -- the inaugural PokerStars Festival New Jersey series -- we’d gotten onto the topic of online poker in the U.S. He was insistent Trump was the candidate to support for those wanting online poker up and running again. I expressed doubt, though, saying I wasn’t sure either candidate was going to be all that excited about such a cause.

I was thinking in part of the possibility of someone like Sheldon Adelson, the deep-pocketed Trump supporter and anti-online gambling lobbyist, perhaps influencing a Trump regime in a certain unpleasant direction. Then again, there’s New Jersey governor Chris Christie now standing by Trump’s side who signed NJ’s online gambling bill into law three years ago. Meanwhile VP Mike Pence has openly supported the Adelson-backed Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA), if that might be said to tip the balance.

In any event, the Obama administration obviously has not viewed online gambling a cause to support, and if you think about certain measures like the surreptitious “Operation Choke Point” that targeted online gambling (in part), the evidence suggests an outward (if not so evident) antagonism toward it. I wouldn’t imagine a Clinton administration would have been so excited to adopt an alternate position than the current one allowing for the slow, slow trickle of state-by-state legislation with no federal push.

Like I say, it probably doesn’t matter much. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act -- the 10-year anniversary of which just recently passed -- has effectively reduced online poker in the U.S. to the point of near-insignificance, at least on the federal level. That could change one day, but just as I felt a week ago, there’s no more reason to think that it will anytime soon.

Even so, there’s a whole lot else to worry about first.

Image: “poker-online-logo” (adapted), texasholdempoker. CC BY 2.0.

Spring in the Garden State for PokerStars

At long last, PokerStars is returning to the United States. Or at least to part of the United States. One of the states. It’s a start.

We first started hearing about New Jersey as a possible initial post-Black Friday reentry point into the U.S. for the world’s largest poker site way, way back in late 2012, even before New Jersey finally had an online gambling bill get signed into law in late February 2013.

You might remember how Governor Chris Christie kind of surprised us with his non-veto of the bill back then, deciding at last to change his tune on the issue. (Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise to see Christie abruptly changing his mind regarding another subject earlier today.)

It was a couple of months before that PokerStars had been talking to the Atlantic Club in Atlantic City, negotiating to buy the failing casino as a prelude to getting an NJ license to offer online games. That deal fell through, and the Atlantic Club stopped just failing and failed altogether in January 2014.

In mid-2013 PokerStars partnered up with the Resorts Casino Hotel, and after New Jersey held up their application for a license later that year the Amaya purchase in July 2014 helped change things in a positive way for Stars’ prospects in the Garden State. After many months of back-and-forthing including tentative launch dates being frequently bandied about, the NJ license finally got preliminary approval last September.

Then yesterday came the news of a concrete date for PokerStars NJ to go online -- March 21, 2016, the first day of spring. PokerNews summarizes the announcement, while the Online Poker Report offers a comprehensive discussion of what happens next, including some speculative thoughts about both the near-term and long-term.

From the latter, I’m most intrigued by the prospect of a PokerStars-branded live poker room being constructed at the Resorts (the plan for which was announced some time back), as well as the possibility of live PS-sponsored festivals happening there down the road. In the meantime it’ll be interesting to see how the NJ-only site fares, knowing of course that in relative terms it’ll be super-small change like every other U.S. regulated site has necessarily been.

Image: PokerStarsNJ.

Remember a Day, Before the UIGEA

Fantasy sports actually came up as a topic during last night’s debate among Republican presidential candidates, although only long enough for one candidate (Jeb Bush) to make a weak joke about his own fantasy football team then add a generic reference to the need for regulation, and another (Chris Christie) to complain about it being a trivial issue then add a generic reference to the need for the federal government to leave fantasy sports alone.

It reminded me a little of people in poker back in the day sometimes wondering -- usually in a humorous way -- if online poker was going to come up in debates or speeches. Of course the topic never would, being so tangential, so it was kind of remarkable to think that daily fantasy sports (DFS) had made its way far enough into the cultural center to get that mention last night.

Of course, it took a few weeks worth of drama including lots of legislators on both the state and federal level wanting to examine DFS for that to happen. Against that backdrop, ESPN shared an interesting article yesterday titled “The true Congressional origin of daily fantasy sports” that provides some historical perspective on the legality of fantasy sports, in particular looking at the years preceding the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 which some have argued made the DFS industry possible, even if the bill’s authors never quite envisioned what that industry has become.

After looking into that history for several weeks, ESPN points out how the inclusion of fantasy sports as a so-called “carve out” in the UIGEA wasn’t actually the result of lobbying by the NFL or other sports leagues (as many have stated). About a month back I posted a list of UIGEA-related items here without comment that perhaps suggested as much, but according to ESPN this really wasn’t the case.

In that post I quoted the line from the UIGEA stating how “the term ‘bet or wager’... does not include... participation in any fantasy or simulation sports game or educational game or contest in which (if the game or contest involves a team or teams) no fantasy or simulation sports team is based on the current membership of an actual team that is a member of an amateur or professional sports organization.” Remember the UIGEA prohibits businesses from facilitating the funding of “unlawful Internet gambling” which refers to placing, receiving, or transmitting a “bet or wager” online, so saying fantasy sports doesn’t involve bets or wagers means funding online fantasy sports is not prohibited.

The whole idea for what eventually became the UIGEA arose in response to the growth of the internet in the 1990s and the initial appearance of gambling sites, including both poker and sports betting sites. But as the ESPN article points out -- and as many others have been explaining, too, especially over recent weeks -- the “fantasy sports” being exempted back in the late 1990s when legislators first began sharing early versions of online gambling-related legislation wasn’t at all like DFS.

There are references in the article from various folks (including legislators) characterizing those earlier fantasy leagues as being similar to friendly home games in poker -- that is, mostly between friends and for small stakes. There’s also a distinction made between longer (e.g., season-long) fantasy sports contests and shorter ones such as what has become the daily or weekly games. Only one brief exchange between former Arizona senator Jon Kyl (one of those often called an orginal “architect” of the UIGEA) and an attorney alludes to the possibility of shorter-interval fantasy sports contests, and that’s only in passing (and without any subsequent effect on how the law was ultimately worded).

Interestingly, the Department of Justice offered an opinion in 1999 that there should be no fantasy sports exemption in any federal legislation regarding online gambling. Then the topic wasn’t revisited at all over the next several years, making it seem as though the language relating to fantasy sports just kind of lingered there to be quietly included in the final version of the bill that was passed into law.

“There was no evidence in the Congressional Record that the final version of the UIGEA was openly debated in the lead-up to the Sept. 29, 2006 vote,” reports ESPN (a vote that technically didn’t finish until after midnight that night, thus 9/30/06). A lot of us well remember that part of the story. After it passed some legislators complained about the carve outs (including for fantasy sports), and of course there followed the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of Barney Frank and others to pass new legislation regarding online gambling. But the UIGEA remains the law of the land as far as federal legislation focused on online gambling goes, despite its abundant ambiguities.

The article concludes with some forward-looking thoughts about how things might proceed from here when it comes to this reconsideration of DFS’s legal standing. Included are quotes from current major sports leagues commissioners on the subject.

It’s obvious that DFS is almost entirely different from what “fantasy sports” was intended to signify in the UIGEA, which I suppose will be a central part of the debate among legislators going forward. In any event, today I’m lamenting we didn’t think to start calling online poker a “simulation sports game” at some point prior to October 2006.

On Jon Stewart and Online Poker; or, For Every Action There Is an Indignant and Opposite Overreaction

Seeing references the last couple of days from poker people responding to something Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show earlier this week regarding online gambling in New Jersey.

The Poker Players Alliance and others are mildly up in arms about what they’re saying was an unfair characterization of online poker by Stewart. However, looking back at the clip and statement, that itself sounds like an unfair characterization of what Stewart actually said.

It came up as a short postscript to a segment not about online gambling or online poker, but rather about the issue of legalizing marijuana (on the April 20 show, natch) -- one you can watch on the Comedy Central site here. Amid that discussion, reference was made to New Jersey Governor and potential presidential candidate Chris Christie saying he is opposed to pot being legal, noting also how states allowing its sale are in conflict with federal law.

“Marijuana is a gateway drug,” Christie says in a clip played on The Daily Show from a recent appearance by Christie on The Hugh Hewitt Show, a syndicated radio show. “We have an enormous addiction problem in this country.... Marijuana is an illegal drug in this country under federal law, and the states should not be permitted to sell it and profit from it.”

Stewart’s response to that position is to bring up Christie having signed into law the online gambling bill back in February 2013 that opened up poker and other casino games to online players in New Jersey. Actually Stewart doesn’t bring it up specifically, but rather plays another clip from another news show reporting that.

“There is a difference though, to be fair,” concludes Stewart via his usual deadpan. “If you smoke too much pot, no one comes to break your f*cking knees.”

It’s obvious that while Stewart did evoke a long legacy of gambling being associated with other criminal activity -- including violence -- to get a laugh, he hardly “attacked online poker” as Rich Muny of the PPA has tweeted out (and which others are also saying).

The point of the observation by Stewart is entirely muted by that response, actually. Rather than “attack” online gambling directly, Stewart is showing what appears to be an inconsistent position by Christie regarding the ability of states to pass laws that aren’t in accord with federal laws. Christie allowed legislation in New Jersey that goes against the feds’ legal stance on online gambling, Stewart and The Daily Show are pointing out, which seems to contradict what he is now saying about individual states legalizing the sale of pot despite federal laws making it illegal.

Those responding to this tangential reference to online gambling (and online poker) as though it were an “attack” are building it up into something it is not, thereby making it seem as though Stewart -- someone with a fair amount of influence -- is some kind of threat to the cause when he clearly isn’t.

Anyone remember way back in 2006 -- before even the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed into law -- when Stewart joked about members of Congress arguing about legislating against online poker (and other forms of gambling) while permitting wagering over the internet on lotteries and horse racing? Again, there was an inconsistency worth highlighting and a source of some ready grins. (Here’s that clip on the Comedy Central site.)

In order to reflect on the absurdity of allowing some forms of online gambling and not others, Stewart evoked Alaska senator Ted Stevens’ much-derided characterization of the internet as “a series of tubes.” Aided by some hilarious animation, Stewart explained how poker chips clog up the tubes whereas horses can run through them easily and lottery balls blow through them without a problem.

When making that point about the inconsistency present in the bill being proposed (that would eventually become the UIGEA), was Stewart attacking gambling over the internet on horse racing and lotteries? Well, he wasn’t promoting those things, but he was hardly attacking them, either. In truth the observation implied support for online poker, although there, too, that would be reading something definite into the segment that was only implied at best.

Stewart didn’t “attack” online poker this week. I don’t think it makes sense to attack him as though he did.

NJ Sports Betting: Leagues Throw Out the Challenge Flag

Was curious this afternoon to see what might happen up in New Jersey regarding its efforts to legalize sports betting.

You might have heard the legislature in the Garden State rushed a bill through both houses last week and a day later Governor Chris Christie signed it, and all was in place at Monmouth Park to start taking bets on the NFL games this Sunday.

Earlier this week came the complaints from the NCAA and the four major professional leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL) who took the position that the New Jersey law which would allow casinos and horse tracks to take sports bet was “in clear and flagrant violation of federal law” (the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992).

The leagues sought an injunction to keep New Jersey from going forward with sports betting, New Jersey filed a response to the complaint, then all waited to see what U.S. District Court Judge Michael A. Shipp might do. Without any sort of ruling, bets could be taken, but Shipp could step in to issue a temporary restraining order so more time could be taken to decide on the case.

And that’s what Shipp did just before the end of the business day today, although it sounds like the order only prevents bets involving the NCAA or the four major leagues, meaning they actually could take sports bets at Monmouth on golf, tennis, NASCAR, and other sports, or so points out an advisor to Monmouth. (Not sure that’s actually the case, though.)

Here’s an article in The Press of Atlantic City detailing Shipp’s late afternoon decision. For a good and quick overview of what’s happening regarding these efforts to get sports betting in New Jersey and Shipp’s decision, check out this radio interview with John Brennan of the Bergan Record. (Thanks to Grange95 for tweeting that one out, and check his blog for more good commentary on this topic.) [EDIT (added 10/25/14]: And for another interesting read, here’s Brennan delivering a blow-by-blow account the scene in Shipp’s courtroom when he gave the decision.]

In the interview, Brennan spells out how it was a little extraordinary for such a restraining order to be granted, but Shipp had a history of ruling in that direction on this issue and so his decision wasn’t a surprise. So they’re on hold a little longer in New Jersey on the sports betting front. Meanwhile they’re still playing online poker and gambling in other ways there, and of course fantasy sports continues to be enjoyed all over the nation.

Allowing sports betting in the ailing Atlantic City casinos (those that remain, anyhow) and at the horse tracks doesn’t seem terribly out of place from afar, and the leagues’ complaints against it seem disingenuous when sports betting already happens legally in Nevada (and illegally everywhere) and the leagues have continued to survive. Will remain curious to see if it ever comes about.

Christie’s Nixonian Moment

Was diverted a short while today by that press conference in which Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey who was re-elected back in November by a wide margin, addressed the ongoing controversy surrounding the Fort Lee lane closure back in early September.

The affair is being packaged by some under the catch-all heading of “Bridgegate,” alluding, of course, to the first “gate” -- Watergate. And indeed Christie’s statements today about staff members acting on his behalf yet without his authority -- or knowledge, as he repeated many times -- certainly echoed some of Richard Nixon’s memorable statements regarding others’ actions and his own culpability from about four decades ago.

I was most reminded of Nixon’s still-amazing-to-watch November 17, 1973 presser -- well after many of the firings that preceded Nixon’s own resignation -- in which he met with the nation’s newspaper editors (and not the White House corps) and with almost manic energy responded to questions about the scandal. That was the one in which Nixon infamously circled around to the “I’m not a crook” line, actually delivered with reference to questions surrounding his tax returns, not Watergate.

Without delving too deeply into the specifics of either Watergate or the Fort Lee story, both appear to demonstrate in different ways political leaders failing to control those whom they appoint to work for them. Watergate, of course, developed into a complex cover-up that ultimately unearthed much, much more regarding Nixon’s leadership methods. Meanwhile it appears more is to come regarding the extent of the malfeasance perpetrated by Christie’s senior staff, and perhaps even about the governor himself as far as this particular story is concerned.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I have been reading and thinking about Nixon quite a bit, studying his entire life and political career and not just Watergate. Looking at his life through the lens of his poker playing, I’ve begun to develop an idea of the man as one who was intensely competitive and who unfailingly believed in the value of hard work and individual effort as a means to accomplish anything, including political goals.

I’ve also come to recognize him as someone driven to control as much as he possibly could no matter what the endeavor. Thus in his early campaigns -- indeed, in every one of them until the last one in 1972 -- he was involved in seemingly every detail when it came to planning and executing those plans on the campaign trail.

So, too, did Nixon study poker with a similar intensity when first becoming serious about the game as a Naval officer. (I’ve found that Nixon was introduced to poker well before his days in the Navy, although I don’t think he took the game seriously until he found himself playing for significant money with fellow officers in the Pacific.)

Something changed for Nixon prior to the 1972 campaign, however, or at least his preoccupations with the responsibilities of his office made it impossible for him to exert the same degree of control over his final campaign that he demonstrated with each of those that had come before. This lack of focus (to carry forward the poker analogy) led to some reckless play, then by the time Nixon finally retook his seat and began playing his chips for himself he was already too far behind to mount any comeback.

Like Nixon, Christie apparently harbors hopes for a run at the country’s highest office. Losing the “Bridgegate” hand definitely reduced the New Jersey governor’s stack going forward, but it seems he’ll be remaining in the game, perhaps even to recover today’s losses.

New Jersey! (Is It True?)

I’ll admit it. Until early yesterday, I continued to imagine the possibility that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie could execute some sort of massive slowroll. That's right... to imagine (crazily) that somehow Christie might not go along with the newly-submitted online gambling bill incorporating the recommended changes he’d made when conditionally vetoing an earlier version a few weeks back.

Was an absurd prospect to ponder, really. Most legislators in the state had already made clear that they were comfortable with the changes suggested by Christie. And in fact when it came to voting on the revised bill yesterday, both houses passed it by wide margins (68-5 in the Assembly and 35-1 in the Senate). Then Christie signed it immediately, unlike the previous two times he’d had a similar bill before him to sign and took a full 45 days before deciding how to play his hand.

So New Jersey follows Nevada and Delaware into the new, exciting but uncertain world of online gambling. Regulators in NJ will soon start to work sorting out the details of licensing and ultimately paving the way for sites to get up and running, a process that likely is going to take at least a year, perhaps even a couple.

Right now only the dozen casinos in Atlantic City will be able to go for licenses. Those who do will be able to offer all of the same games online that they have in their casinos. Thus like Delaware, New Jersey’s law covers a variety of online gambling games, while Nevada’s law is sticking with poker only.

New Jersey is also giving itself that option of entering into interstate compacts with other legally willing states, which obviously will mean a lot when it comes to poker and building big enough player pools to achieve liquidity.

Also of interest is the Rational Group’s bid to acquire the Atlantic Club casino which will be decided upon by NJ’s Casino Control Commission sometime this spring. The Rational Group, of course, is a collection of companies that includes PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, and thus should their application to purchase the Atlantic Club be approved, that’ll be a step toward PokerStars and Full Tilt essentially finding a way back into the U.S. via New Jersey.

(Have to say, I like the idea of an entity called the “Rational Group” coming in and helping remove all of these irrational thoughts I seem to have about online poker and its future in this country.)

There’s a lot that will need to fall in place, obviously, before anyone is playing online poker in New Jersey. Before that day we’ll probably see some games going live within the next few months in Nevada. And we’ll continue to hear more about other states considering their options for joining in as well.

Now I find myself experiencing a different sort of absurd, worst-case-type imagining. Again, I have no basis for it -- other than six-and-a-half years or so of upset expectations and disappointment, I suppose -- but I find myself dreading some unforeseen, federal-level swooping in to stop everything from going forward.

Unfounded applesauce, I know. Like a weak-tight player crazily fearing that his opponent is holding some huge hand, sitting there slow playing while holding the nuts. But I feel like I’ve been conditioned somehow to think this way. Gotta unlearn.

At least it will be a while before any online poker games will happen. Maybe by the time they do I’ll have gotten over such instinctive feelings of dread when it comes to legislation and the online poker in the U.S.

Maybe by then I’ll be thinking more about what it means actually to play poker.

More from New Jersey

I remain in blog-on-the-go mode this morning as Vera and I are planning a quick day trip over to New York City. By the way, that to the left is a little house-of-cards art piece found in one of the buildings we visited yesterday at Princeton.

As I was talking about yesterday, this week we’ve been visiting New Jersey, the place where some in the poker world -- at least here in the U.S. -- have been directing their attention of late in anticipation of Governor Chris Christie’s decision regarding that online gambling bill.

Wrote some last week about the bill (A2578) and how it had been passed by both the NJ State Assembly and Senate and for a while now has been sitting on the governor’s desk awaiting either a signature to make it law, a veto, or no action at all (which would make it law by default). The deadline for Christie is a week from today, so soon we’ll know whether or not New Jersey will be following Nevada and Delaware into the world of intrastate online gambling.

Then again, we might not. Was reading around on a couple of local sites up here to see what the latest scuttlebutt might be, and saw some talk regarding the possibility that Christie could actually respond with a “conditional veto” of the bill. That suggestion comes primarily from Richard Gros who publishes Global Gambling Business magazine and who has some behind-the-scenes sources in Atlantic City feeding him info.

Gros tweeted about the “conditional veto” possibility yesterday, and John Brennan elaborated further on the idea for his “Meadowlands Matters” column. There Brennan explains how a conditional veto is just what it sounds like -- a veto of a bill that isn’t quite final, but rather objects to part of a bill and might also propose amendments, then gives it back to the legislators to perhaps pass it again and give the governor another opportunity to sign the bill into law.

In other words, a conditional veto wouldn’t quite mean starting over from scratch for the bill, but it would still probably add at least a few more months here to the process (maybe more) before any sort of bill might become law.

Brennan’s speculation goes on to consider the possibility that Christie might in fact want to pare the sucker down to just online poker. Taking those reservations about problem gambling he expressed during that “Ask the Governor” program last week, Brennan thinks maybe Christie might “prefer to tip just one toe in the water at first” with online gambling and allow an online poker-only bill before committing to anything more significant.

Then again, the delay could also just allow Christie to “tank” a little longer on this one -- or perhaps to continue pretending to tank -- which might also be in his interest as he’s up for re-election this fall.

In any case, I wonder how much the bill’s proponents would be excited by a poker-only bill, given how the revenue created by such would necessarily amount to only a small percentage of what a broader law permitting other casino games to go online would draw. A2578’s proponents -- including State Senator Raymond Lesniak -- are all about job creation and the economic benefits of the bill (as Lesniak talked about with PokerNews last week). Having online poker in the state might amount to something, but like the poker rooms in the casinos it ain’t gonna be that much of a cash creator on it’s own.

Will continue to stay tuned on this one. Meanwhile like I say Vera and I will probably end up in a museum or two today over in NYC, looking at paintings and sculptures and thinking about the past. Not the recent past in which online poker was part of the picture, that is, but earlier.

Tankers Always Fold; or, Gov. Christie and the NJ Bill

One sorta-truism a person comes to recognize after years of observing poker tournaments is how players who tank for a long time very often will fold their hands. I’m pretty sure F-Train was the one who long ago first articulated the maxim to me as we both were watching a player take several minutes to decide on his action...

“Tankers always fold.”

I’ve been to Atlantic City on a couple of occasions over the last two years to cover poker tournaments. The first was in March 2011 when I helped report on a WSOP Circuit event at Caesars. Then I went back last month to Harrah’s Resort AC for another WSOP-C event. Both times there was a lot of buzz going around concerning possible online gambling legislation in New Jersey and its prospects for being signed into law.

Actually, the first time I was there the conversations were all centered on the fact that Governor Chris Christie had just a few days before vetoed an online gambling bill, having waited until the last possible moment to do so before it would have become law by default. Both the NJ State Assembly and Senate had passed the bill by wide margins, with more than 85% of legislators voting in favor in both cases. But Christie was not ready to make New Jersey the first state to pass its own online gambling bill, and so all the talk was of the what-might-have-been variety.

At the time the governor -- a former U.S. attorney -- cited several reasons for his reticence regarding the bill, including questions about its constitutionality within his state. Many commentators additionally believed Christie was unwilling to sign the bill without some assurance that doing so would not conflict with federal laws concerning online gambling, including the Wire Act.

Months passed, and in December 2011 that memo emanating from the offices of the U.S. Department of Justice surfaced, a memo that revised an opinion regarding the Wire Act. The memo indicated that it was the DOJ’s position that the half-century old law only applied to sports betting, and thus when 2012 began efforts were redoubled by legislators in many states to try to forward online gambling legislation, including in New Jersey.

Nevada had already by then become the first state to get a bill signed into law (in mid-2011), and so when the DOJ memo arrived that state was already in position to begin fielding applications to grant licenses. Delaware followed suit in June 2012, and a few other states have been considering various kinds of online gambling legislation as well.

Meanwhile, at the end of the year New Jersey was again considering another online gambling bill during my visit early last month. Soon afterwards legislators again passed a bill, the vote being nearly unanimous this time, and as 2012 concluded most of the reports regarding the bill were suggesting that without the Wire Act obstacle, Christie was “likely” to sign the bill into law in short order.

But three weeks into January that likelihood has begun to dim, and now Christie has but a couple of weeks left in the 45-day period within which he is to act on the bill (i.e., sign or veto it) or not act and see it become law by default. He gave a state of the state speech a little over a week ago without mentioning the issue, prompting consternation by NJ state senator Ray Lesniak, the bill’s leading sponsor. Lesniak then told Card Player a couple of days ago that while he doesn’t know what Christie will do with regard to the bill -- other than likely wait until the last minute again -- he isn’t terribly hopeful.

Last night Christie did finally opine publicly about the bill and online gambling, and his comments added further reason not to be optimistic about the governor’s signing A2578 into law.

Each month, Christie appears on a Trenton FM station to field questions for an hour on a show called “Ask the Governor.” Not too surprisingly, a lot of the questions during last night’s show concerned rebuilding efforts in the state following Hurricane Sandy. But toward the end of the hour, a caller named Joseph did manage to get through to ask about Christie’s intentions regarding the bill.

Christie said he was still tanking on that one, adding that when it came to online gambling, there are “two things I’m concerned about.”

The governor’s first concern is that legalizing online gambling “may drive traffic away from Atlantic City” brick-and-mortar casinos. “If people can gamble in their own homes on their laptops, why are they going to Atlantic City?” That’s an idea we’ve heard brought up before (and roundly refuted by the bill’s proponents).

His second concern had to do with “setting up a whole new generation of addicted gamblers.” Echoing a sentiment voiced by the ultra-conservative wing of his party with whom he’s been more than willing to butt heads in recent weeks, Christie suggested that “if you can sit on the edge of your bed on your laptop and gamble away the paycheck, that’s a lot different than making the decision to go down to Atlantic City to gamble in a casino.” We’ve heard that one many times before, too. (I’m remembering Jay Leno follow a similar line of argument on his show back in the fall of 2010 when Barney Frank was his guest.)

Christie noted that these two concerns were “in part the reasons that I vetoed the bill before, in addition to some ways that it was constructed that made no sense, either.” He then concluded his response by saying that he’ll probably be making a decision regarding A2578 “in the next couple of days.”

Christie didn’t say whether or not he had problems with the bill’s construction this time around, nor did he mention anything about its constitutionality or any potential conflicts with the feds. Rather Christie’s concerns have more to do with less specific, hard-to-prove notions about the bill’s possible effects on the New Jersey economy as well as what would happen to a certain percentage of its citizens whose problem gambling may lead them to self-inflicted ruin.

Christie is up for re-election this coming November. He also has become a national figure and potential Republican candidate for president in 2016. He’s a popular figure both locally and nationwide. Whereas the two concerns he raised last night regarding online gambling were somewhat vague, the potential political consequences of his supporting an online gambling bill perhaps seem more clear. Signing A2578 would become something he’d have to answer for on the campaign trail. In other words, the former lawyer would not only have to change his apparent position on the issue, but he’d have to become much more convincing when arguing against the very objections he’s currently raising regarding it.

All of which is to say, I’d be more than surprised if a veto weren’t coming, perhaps even sooner than just before the Feb. 7 deadline. Thus New Jersey will not be challenging Nevada’s leading status when it comes to online gambling in the near future, or perhaps for many years to come, either.

I suppose we might step back from this story and remark on how the idea of gambling online has perhaps reached a stage of cultural acceptance, just like doing other things online (communicating, banking, shopping, receiving news/entertainment, etc.) has become customary and even second nature to many. Thus might high numbers of legislators be willing to vote in favor of bills that would allow for the activity (within the highly circumscribed parameters of government-imposed licensing and regulation, of course).

But are we at a point where a would-be presidential candidate -- one who is legitimately positioned within one of the two major parties to be forwarded as their representative on a national scale -- might gamble his future on online gambling? I don’t think so.

No, if Christie was going to do something other than fold this hand again, he would’ve acted already.