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.

Railbirding RAWA

A few months after I started this blog -- more than eight-and-a-half years ago, if you can believe that -- the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 was passed into law. Suddenly I found myself writing about a host of other topics besides simply playing poker, among them legal matters affecting my ability to play the game online.

As we’ve been reminding each other over and over again since the UIGEA was passed -- kind of like repeatedly relieving a bad beat -- that bill was snuck onto another one in the dead of night just before that Congress adjourned for the final push of campaigning prior to the ’06 elections. Thus did it become law without going through what many would rate a legitimate process of thoughtful debate and decision-making -- that is to say, via a process other than one in which our elected representatives would appear unequivocally to be representing the wishes of those who voted them into office (not that such an ideal is so often realized).

From there followed several years of mixing in posts in which I’d write about various legal developments that followed the UIGEA, including the long, drawn-out process of the regulations getting finalized by late 2008, as well as the many rival federal bills introduced by Barney Frank and others hoping to legalize and regulate online gambling in the U.S.

Then came Black Friday, which I might call a game-changer but in truth more or less stopped the game altogether, at least for most online poker players in the U.S. Before then, though, I remember somewhere along the way finding an analogy between poker and legal machinations surrounding the online game, the parallel having to do with both involving a combination of luck and skill.

That’s a generalization, but the point was that when it came to legislation regarding online poker, the process was in some respects controlled by the “players” (i.e., legislators, judges, lobbying groups, plaintiffs and defendants and those representing them, and so on) and also -- seemingly -- by what often appeared “chance” elements insofar as the combination of individuals and circumstances would result in lots of unpredictable outcomes.

Some “players” in the legislative game -- like in poker -- have a lot more influence than others, with money often making the difference in both contexts. Such is what we’ve been seeing happening over the last couple of years with Sheldon Adelson’s ongoing efforts to curb online gambling of all kinds. The CEO of Las Vegas Sands (parent company of the Venetian Macao Limited) is purportedly the 10th richest person in the world (as of this past summer), thus it hasn’t been difficult at all for him to toss chips various legislators’ way in order to lean on them to play his way.

The most recent orbit of this game has involved Adelson backing this new Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA) first introduced in both houses back in March of this year. This federal law would rewrite the Federal Wire Act of 1961 (which the DOJ opined in late 2011 only applied to sports betting) to prohibit most forms of online gambling in the U.S., including making current state-regulated online gambling (in Nevada, New Jersey, and Delaware) illegal. (Horse racing and fantasy sports would still get a pass.)

RAWA has gotten some co-sponsors but not huge traction this year, but during this “lame duck” session some surmised it could be tossed into this huge $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill, with a lot of talk about how the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (NV) was being goaded by Adelson (and his money) into sneaking it in there in UIGEA-like fashion. You’ll recall how during an earlier lame duck session (in 2010), Reid was introducing a federal bill to license and regulate online poker while curbing other forms of online gambling. Well, now he apparently is sitting behind someone else’s stack.

During the day yesterday I noticed Rich Muny, Vice President of Player Relations for the Poker Players Alliance, noting how on his most recent webcast a former member of the House, Jon Porter, said it was “50-50” the RAWA would get added to the spending bill. The bill finally dropped last night without RAWA, and as one commentator in a Two Plus Two thread about the situation noted, “we went from about a 50% chance of being safe, to about... 85%.”

Again, just following the story makes it hard not to think of poker analogies. In this latest hand, those not wanting to see a federal bill outlawing online gambling across the U.S. were all in preflop with Q-Q versus an opponent’s A-K-suited, and now have faded both the flop and turn to have a big edge with one card to come.

The problem with those analogies, though, is that most who oppose RAWA aren’t even sitting at the table, never mind making decisions about pushing their stack in behind a premium hand. They’re on the rail, watching others with big stacks keep buying back in and playing the game on their own.

Details, Details

The day is nearly over and I’ve barely got time to post, so I’ll just share the most curious thing I saw while passing up and down the poker aisles today.

Apparently Ben Mezrich, he of the highly-blinkered book Straight Flush that weirdly whitewashes the Absolute Poker scandal-ridden saga, is making television appearances and writing op-eds in support of online poker, perhaps not coincidentally in concert with the publication of his book in paperback. “I’m out there in the trenches trying to get online poker legal again,” he tweeted, adding an obligatory happy-face emoticon.

A piece in the Boston Globe by Mezrich yesterday argued in favor of Massachusetts considering legislation to legalize online poker in the state. Regarding Mezrich’s op-ed, Steve Ruddock wrote an interesting response over on the Online Poker Report titled “Misinformation in Massachusetts Gives False Hope to Online Poker Expansion.” Ruddock explains how Mezrich’s op-ed appears to have been largely based on outdated information, referring in particular to a Massachusetts budget amendment that was already voted upon and rejected a year before.

Read Ruddock’s piece for the full skinny. It looks like the Boston Globe piece was subsequently edited to remove the archaic element of the argument, and in between appearing on MSNBC and other running around Mezrich defended his editorial and its argument as still current (although now I’m having trouble finding that tweet in his timeline).

Like I say, I’ve run out of time today to explore this further and so don’t really want to comment too much on it. After all, details are important.

(Photo: “Goed Zoekveld” by Bart van de Biezen, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0.)