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Robert Williamson wobbled wearily into the conference room thirty minutes late for a 9am meeting and sat down without making an excuse. He didn’t need one. He’s a professional poker player.
For someone in his line of work to be out of bed that early in the morning usually means an all-nighter at a juicy table full of tourists with money to spare. Detesting or even having a phobia of the 9-to-5 routine and confi nes of an offi ce is what drives many pros to take up playing cards for a living. Williamson’s motivation to wrestle himself awake and rush out of the house on this day never would have happened before the events of Sept. 30, 2006.
He had an appointment with his congressman.
Rep. Pete Sessions, a Republican who serves the 32nd district of Texas, had voted for the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act on that day that shook the poker world.
He could hardly be blamed. Only 2 of 501 members in the House and none of 100 senators opposed when the UIGEA was attached to the completely unrelated SAFE Port Act and snuck through Congress by then-Senate majority leader Bill Frist in the dead of the night just before Congress adjourned for the 2006 elections. The UIGEA didn’t bar people from playing online poker but tried to choke the industry at its throat by prohibiting banks from performing transactions with online gaming sites.
Eleven months later, Williamson sat at a conference table in Sessions’ Dallas offi ce next to fellow poker pro Clonie Gowen, Poker Players Alliance executive director John Pappas, and a variety of poker enthusiasts from in or around Sessions’ district. There was a psychiatrist and addiction specialist there to discuss the concerns of online poker being dangerous, a man who ran a small business making poker tables, poker blogger Dan Michalski, and one of his home game participants.
“We wanted to show him that these were regular folks — his voters — and not just degenerate wackos pushing for more gambling,” said Michalski, who runs the website pokerati.com. “We had to realize that, though this was the biggest outrage to us, it was something that wasn’t even on his radar before. It was kind of baf- fl ing to him that this little provision of a relatively small spending bill affected so many people.”
Williamson and Gowan tried to convince Sessions of the skill component of poker. “The bottom line is if poker isn’t a game of skill then I’ve been getting lucky for 36 years,” Williamson told Sessions. “This one issue is so important that I changed all my travel plans to be here today.” A month after the meeting, Sessions signed on as a co-sponsor of the Skill Game Protection Act, which would exempt poker from the UIGEA. He has championed the right of US citizens to participate in online poker ever since.
“I don’t think guys who spend forty weeks a year in Washington passing legislation have a real handle of everything going on in this world,” Sessions said. “It takes a while for us to understand. By these players coming in and speaking with me, I realized that this is also a freedom issue. I wholeheartedly encourage your readers to fi nd their member of Congress, get to know their staff, come by and meet them, and show interest in this.”
The Sessions meeting is the most successful example to date of poker players — a group previously known for their individualistic nature — coming together to make an impact on the political landscape. People who make poker their profession have a reputation of being in their own little world. And that applies double to those who make a living online. They work from a desk in their home, sleep much of the day, and have no co-workers. The people with whom they do business don’t have faces. They have avatars. What goes on in the outside world is of little interest because it doesn’t affect their routine.
That changed with the passage of the UIGEA. When the bill fi rst surfaced, the PPA formed to fi ght for poker. The organization has grown from 120,000 members in September of 2006 to nearly 900,000 members today. PPA chairman Al D’Amato, a former Senator, estimates that forty percent of the organization’s members are under the age of thirty. If the government was looking to fi nd a way to get the youth of America more involved, it succeeded by attacking online poker.
“I think a lot of younger poker players realize that the threat this legislation presents is one that is totally unfair and does not take into consideration their own rights,” D’Amato said. “This is something that absolutely infuriated a great number of young adults who heretofore had never really been involved in the political process.”
With the Sessions victory as inspiration, nearly one hundred PPA members conducted a fl y-in to Washington, D.C., in October. There they individually met with about fi fty members of Congress. Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson, Barry Greenstein, Chris Moneymaker, Annie Duke, Andy Bloch, and Vanessa Rousso were among the top professionals to make the trip.
Lederer remembers his fi rst meeting on Capitol Hill, with Senator John Sununu from his home state of New Hampshire. A lobbyist introduced him as a representative of the PPA there to talk about online poker. Lederer recalls that Sununu turned around, pointed at a stack of ten bills sitting on his desk and said, “I have only so much political capital or time. Why should your issue eat into any of that?” Half an hour later, Lederer thought he had someone who understood his stance on poker.
“There’s certainly a feeling you get as a citizen to actively play a role in the political process,” Lederer said. “To potentially convince one of a hundred Senators that this is an issue worth taking note of is a unique feeling I had never experienced in my life.’’
Lederer, now on the board of directors for the PPA, has since made two more trips to Washington on behalf of the organization. His sister, Annie Duke, spoke at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in November. Rousso personally met with seven congressmen during the fl y-in.
“I found through those conversations that the majority of Congress people are actually misinformed on what poker is,” said the 25-year-old Rousso. “They see the old image of smoky backroom gambling. We may not have seen an immediate, offi cial result, but I know we set the seed in their minds. We walked into these offi ces and people were like, ‘What? Poker? Yeah, Okay.’ And by the end of the meeting they had done a 180-degree change. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with poker. We really have a common-sense persuasive argument.”
Poker players don’t need to head to Washington to make a difference. They don’t even need to leave their home. Most online players who have become involved do their part through campaign donations and letters to Congressmen, which they can work on while check-raising on a table open in the background. Poker legislation forums began popping up on the Internet a few months before the UIGEA passed and have grown substantially. On these message boards at pokerplayersalliance. com, pocketfi ves.com and twoplustwo.com, online players discuss where politicians stand on the game, what presidential candidates are best for poker and proposed legislation that could affect them.
Justin Bonomo awoke on Sept. 30, 2006, ready to enjoy his 21st birthday. For him, this day of independence meant more than being able to drink alcohol legally at a bar. He would get to take his online tournament success out on the live poker tour. But the celebration stopped when Bonomo got up to fi nd the UIGEA had passed through Congress while he slept.
“I hadn’t realized how big an effect it would have on online poker,” Bonomo said. “I think the games are a lot tougher now and the UIGEA is the reason for it.”
During the congressional election two months later, the previously apolitical Bonomo was glued to his television all day long. “I don’t even remember the previous election, when I had just turned 18,” Bonomo said. “Poker is the reason I gained a minor interest in politics. Especially for online players, it’s the No. 1 concern when voting.”
Paul Wasicka was about to cash in on another big payday when the UIGEA struck. Two months removed from his second-place fi nish to Jamie Gold at the 2006 World Series of Poker Main Event, Wasicka was in the middle of negotiations for a lucrative sponsorship deal with a poker site. The legislation stopped that discussion. It was nearly six months before Wasicka was able to sign with Full Tilt for a lesser amount.
“For me personally, it couldn’t have come at a worse possible time,” Wasicka said. “It was uncertain what the future would hold. I had family and friends asking how I could play anymore when it was illegal. They didn’t understand.”
The government’s assault on poker unsettled Wasicka’s conservative beliefs. The 27-year-old grew up in a Republican household and had voted within the party up until the UIGEA was pushed through by the conservative Frist. Now Wasicka considers himself an independent.
“I was raised Christian and always had very conservative beliefs, so I can understand a lot of the concerns people have for online poker,” Wasicka said. “Obviously, we don’t want addictive people going broke or kids playing. But it seems whenever the government tries to tell people what they can and can’t do, like with prohibition, it just makes the situation worse.”
Online poker’s opponents might point to Josh Delzell as part of the problem. He admits to having played online before he turned 18 last October.
While most of Delzell’s friends are planning ditch days and enjoying their fi nal months of high school in Lincoln, Neb., the small-stakes player spends his time perusing the poker legislation forum at pocketfi ves.com and writing emails to his congressmen.
I probably shouldn’t have played under age,” Delzell said. “I only ever made one deposit. But now this issue is really important to me, and that’s why I’ve gotten more involved. I don’t like the government telling me what to do in my own house.” Participating in his fi rst election this year, Delzell said he probably would have voted for whomever his parents wanted for President before the UIGEA. Now he will make his own decision with poker in mind.
After Republican Ron Paul spoke out in favor of online poker and was the only presidential candidate to meet with PPA members during the October fl y-in, Delzell made a $100 contribution to his campaign. Paul didn’t turn out to be a viable candidate, so Delzell checks the PPA website weekly for the latest information on where candidates stand on poker.
“My parents think I’m a one-issue voter, and I guess I kind of am,” Delzell said. “If the government is taking away my freedom to play poker, it’s going to take away other freedoms.”
Poker players who have become politically active came away with the impression that they can make a difference. If they had made their voice heard sooner, perhaps poker would have received an exemption in the UIGEA similar to less skill-based games like wagering on horses, picking lottery numbers, or playing fantasy football. But D’Amato can’t recall another time in his nearly forty years in politics that a group of predominantly young people, without a history of involvement in their government, united so quickly for a cause.
There are four proposed bills currently fl oating through Congress that could help legitimize online poker in the United States. Lederer believes poker players will get some positive, tangible results by the end of next year.
“When politicians see a losing proposition, they will abandon it,” Lederer said. “Once we accomplish some sort of national regulatory framework for online poker, I don’t think the PPA is going anywhere. You look at the National Rifl e Association or Christian rights groups, and once they have success they don’t just disengage. I would imagine poker players will be active for a long time to come.”
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