With online lottery sales successful, Illinois may consider expanding to online poker. This while polls in New Jersey gives conflicting information about internet gambling. Also, our interview with the Lotos Affiliate Program.

Episode 23
The Rabbit Hunt is here, with special guest Corwin [vital]myth Cole and they’re talking about the latest WSOP-C and WPT news, Poker Hall of Fame inductees, the latest poker court cases in South Carolina and Illinois, and Ladbrokes Poker’s new anonymous tables.

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Here’s @GamingCounsel‘s look at the important legal developments in gaming over the past ten days or so:

1. Crespo v. Online Poker - Interesting complaint filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division filed on October 12^th. In a nutshell: A resident of Florida named Scott Crespo, who may or may not play poker online (there’s no indication from the complaint that he does or not), is suing residents of Illinois under an Illinois statute for money they purportedly won from other online poker players who may or may not be residents of Illinois. Oh, and Crespo apparently didn’t lose any money. He wants triple the amount of the unclaimed “losses” of others accruing to the defendants. Illinois was chosen because it’s one of a handful of states that have third party recovery statutes. As a gaming attorney I know in the US put it: We have way too many lawyers with nothing productive to do. [US District Court]

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2. Betfair IPO Numbers – The Betfair IPO seemed to hit the top end of what analysts were predicting as the company’s market capitalization. Betfair was valued at £1.4 billion on flotation. Fully £200 million was raised on the IPO. [Herald Scotland]

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3. Harrah’s IPO Imminent - More news from the public markets: Harrah’s is heading back to the public marketplace with an estimated $575 million offering. The money is likely to be used for new casino projects in Las Vegas and Ohio, not to pay down debt. We’ll have to wait and see how this offering fares, but there are definitely challenges ahead. [Wall Street Journal]

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4. Canadian I-Gaming Split - While certain provinces are keen to enter the interactive gaming market, others are throwing cold water on the idea. Ontario and Quebec have announced that they’re coming out with online offerings; British Columbia already offers an online experience at www.playnow.com. However, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island recently announced that they’re not comfortable with participating in Internet gambling at this point. These latter three provinces are small - PEI is the smallest province in Canada, both geographically and in terms of population - but, interestingly, they’re part of the Atlantic Lotteries Corporation, which is working with BC and Quebec on sharing liquidity on a common Internet poker platform. [Globe and Mail; CBC]

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5. IMGL Conference in Madrid - The International Masters of Gaming Law is the pre-eminent organization for gaming attorneys and other gaming experts. Their Fall conference is on from October 24^th-26^th in Madrid and, as usual, it’s an interesting lineup and series of sessions. I’ll be tweeting on different panels and speakers throughout the conference; check out my tweet stream if you’re interested. [Gaming Law Masters]

Huff, Dan, Jess, BJ, and even Stapleton (with the return of the Tight Laydown?):

The Poker Beat: October 24, 2010

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• Poker Hall of Fame inductees Harrington and Seidel, age-minimum debates, and comparisons to Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
• Anonymous tables at Ladbrokes
• Crespo’s Illinois online poker lawsuit — significant or frivolous?
• More on WSOP-C’s new power and purpose?
• WPT-Festa al Lago FT, Randall Flowers, and the Jess & BJ Show
• Phil Ivey is gay? Craps + multi-phallus fellatio promises at the Wynn

Barney Frank has finally debuted his bill to Repeal the UIGEA and set-up a regulatory frame work for the online gambling industry in the United States! Also, industry news from Minnesota, Illinois, and the biggest jackass in the industry!

photo: Alex Garcia/Chicago Tribune

The Empress Casino in Joliet, IL, and its poker room of course, had to be evacuated yesterday as a big fire threatened to turn the first casino I ever gambled in to ashes.

At age 19, a couple of my Northwestern classmates and I would skip a few classes sessions of Super Mario and make the trek to Chicago’s outer suburbs … (I can’t remember if you only had to be 18 to gamble or if we used fake IDs) … and we all know where things have gone from there. When the Empress opened in 1992, you used to have to pay $12 to go on a “cruise” … i.e. the boats would leave the dock for about 10 feet. We were so excited to learn, after a few trips, that we could be playing enough $5 blackjack to get the pit boss to “comp” us another cruise ticket, and eventually we didn’t even have to stop playing or get off the boat! Ahh, our first taste of the high-roller life.

This is also where I was introduced to the concept of “a chip and a chair” when I once took my last $10 and put it on the 5-to-1 on the Wheel of Fortune and eventually left the casino that day up about $200, which was an absolute mint back then. It is also where I was exposed to (but didn’t quite get) the concept of bankroll management when my girlfriend at the time kept coming over to a blackjack table where I was winning and grabbing $30 or $40 every so often. I was pretty pissed at her by the time I ultimately went bust, thinking she blew my wad on slots little by little … but much to my pleasant surprise she was just pocketing the money, and when I later moaned to her about the bad beat I took with an 11 against the dealer’s 6, she was totally nonplussed and pulled out $265 that she had stashed away, telling me, here, this is yours … to which I responded “I love you”.

ItsOverJonny wondered in comment below whether or not the new ShuffleTech noise machines auto-shufflers actually kept a count of the cards being riffled … I wasn’t sure (kinda assumed they did), so, because apparently this is what I like to do at 6:30 am on Saturday night/Sunday morn, I wrote to the folks at ShuffleTech (which happens to be based in the small village outside of Chicago where I was born) and they responded:

Dear Dan,

I’m happy to answer this or any other question, particularly for anybody from Shuffle Tech’s home town!

The ST-1000 does not count cards. Most of the machines that do in the casinos are also scanning the faces of each card, which enables those machines to not only count but also identify any missing card. You can understand how that could be abused in a private, unregulated environment: a clever programmer could reprogram the machine to identify the location of any particular card in a deck, and in the case of the casino machines (which function differently than Shuffle Tech) place certain cards in a certain position in the deck.

I hope this answer the question, and our reason for avoiding any mechanism or feature that could potentially be abused.

Best regards,
Rick Schultz

Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL) is speaking right now just spoke a little while ago … he’s a friend of poker!

Jackson is one of four cosponsor’s to Rep. Pete Sessions’ (R-TX) HR 6663. That bill, of course, is the most straightforward fix to the UIGEA — simply limiting its reach to online sports gambling — yet one of the more controversial because of, um, politics.

Perhaps shockingly, he didn’t mention anything about the critical importance of being able to easily compete in online WSOP satellites in his five minutes he had to address the world … but hey, that’s where we stand: We have a young, pre-introductory Day 1 speaker to the Democratic party (his debut performance on such a stage) aware of our issues and philosophically on our side, though not exactly the way the PPA would like him to be.

Speech transcript / Video

It’s kinda funny sometimes the way news spreads … all the way to Chicago. Should be interesting to see how the non-poker masses respond (if at all) to the Dallas poker plight.

In a sign of how hard it is to convince non-poker people how different types of poker work … the Illinois liquor police are shutting down the amateur bar tournaments that so many of us (nationwide) know and love:

Rather than trying to sort out those playing poker for fun from those playing poker for money, they say it makes more sense to simply prohibit poker tournaments in liquor establishments.

“Usually when you’re playing poker, you’re gambling,” says Ted Penesis, a spokesman for the liquor commission.

Yeow, nice enforcement standards. Apparently there’s no need to send in an undercover agent when you’re not gonna find what you’re looking for.