Online Gambling Ban

In 2006, Congress outlawed Online gambling by trying to make it illegal for banks or credit card companies to process payments to online gambling operations. As a result some sneaky Congressmen who are no longer in office passed the UIGEA. Jim Leach and Bill Frist.

The law exempted Internet state lotteries and two and horse racing and some fantasy sports betting online.

Having turned gambling, which once was treated as a sin, into a social policy, The USA government looked very stupid trying to criminalize online forms of gambling. As a result they went after the ability to stop money transfers.

As a result, they passed a law that could not be totally enforced. Money transfers to online gambling sites has been nothing more than a Cat and Mouse game. The recent Funds Seizure was recently overturned and as the IMEGA and Poker Players Alliance keeps growing it seems no Politician wants to have their name noticed for upsetting more Americans that Play Online Poker.

The Poker Players Alliance is trying to make Poker look like it is as game of skill and not luck. Which is that by sweeping online poker into its proscription of online gambling, Congress committed a category mistake. Congress should revisit the work of John von Neumann (1903-57), the Hungarian-born mathematician who, after working for the Manhattan Project on implosion design for the atomic bomb, became a defense intellectual specializing in the relevance of game theory to strategic thinking. Chess involves logic; roulette involves probability theory. Poker involves logic, probability and something pertinent to military and diplomatic strategy - bluffing. Theory of Parlor Games (1928) and, with Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) established the field of game theory.

When you play chess, there is symmetry of information: Both players have all the information provided by the location of the pieces on the board, and both are equally ignorant of the opponent's intentions. A computer can be programmed to play a powerful game of chess, but not of poker, wherein your opponents' cards are concealed.

But what is his stake in decriminalizing online poker? This year, there were 6,494 competitors in the World Series of Poker Main Event, down about 1,000 from 2006, largely because more players used to win their $10,000 entry fee in online tournaments. It is a poker skill to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. Congress probably should fold its interference with Internet gambling, and certainly should get its 10 thumbs off Americans' freedom to exercise their poker skills online.