New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo delivered his State of the State address on Jan 4 to say, “We have long flirted and dallied with another potential economic engine — casino gaming — and when it comes to gaming, we’ve been in a state of denial.” Instead of flirting, Cuomo recommended a constitutional amendment that would finally consummate the state’s relationship with gaming.

Aside from making industry lobbyists flush, the governor claimed the Full Monty approach to gaming would generate $1 billion in economic activity. Of course estimated gaming-related revenues have to be taken with a grain of salt. In the fictitious town of Lake Wobegon, all the children were above average. When it comes to gaming revenue estimates, every state and municipality assumes an above-average piece of the pie, ignoring the expansion plans of its neighbors. Read More States Betting on Casino Gambling for Jobs, Revenue.

Not everyone stands to gain. NY currently has nine Indian casinos, five of which are run by the Seneca Nation. The Seneca have a 21-year agreement that gives them exclusive territorial gambling rights. After Cuomo’s speech, they wondered if their gambling treaty would end up being one more “broken promise.” Ouch.  You can read more about their anxiety: Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Gambling Push Opposed by Native American Tribes. 

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The US District Court in New Jersey has dismissed the constitutional challenge to the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) filed by iMEGA, State Senator Ray Lesniak, and others. The dismissal was based on a lack of standing. The court’s memorandum opinion is here.

Congress, as the court points out, enacted PASPA in 1992 to limit the expansion of sports gambling in the United States by making it unlawful for a government to license or a person to operate a betting, gambling, or wagering scheme based on professional or amateur sports. The grandfathering provision provided an out for those states that conducted a sports wagering scheme prior to PASPA’s passage, and certain sporting activities are beyond PASPA’s reach. The plaintiffs in the iMEGA case claimed that PASPA’s limitations violated myriad provisions of the US Constitution, including the Commerce Clause, the Tenth Amendment (limiting the powers of the federal government), and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

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Governor Christie prevented intrastate gambling in New Jersey from becoming law today with a his letter to the State Senate returning the bill without executive approval of the bill “in its present form.”  Christie did not comment on this bill in his press conference this morning, nor has made other public statement at this time.

The document can be found here-> <<image of Christie veto letter in PDF>>

It remains a bit unclear if this means the bill is going no further in the process to becoming law, or if it has been conditionally disapproved by Christie, and what precisely this means in terms of next steps for the effort to regulate gambling at the state level.

Checking the NJ Legislature of the website (searching for S490), the bill is currently listed with the last status update made today “3/3/2011  Conditional Veto, Received in the Senate.”

From the NJ Legislature online glossary:

CONDITIONAL VETO A veto in which the Governor objects to parts of a bill and proposes amendments that would make it acceptable. If the Legislature re-enacts the bill with the recommended amendments, it is presented again to the Governor for signature.

[Update per @GamingCounsel -> the NJ Legislature website has now changed the status of the bill in the past hour or two to the state of "Absolute Veto" from "Conditional Veto"]

In his veto letter to the Senate, Christie reveals what his objections are to this bill.  He cites his primary concern that this legislation as-it-stands does not prevent gambling transactions originating outside of the confines of Atlantic City in “commercial establishments”, as in intrastate cyber-cafes of sorts.  He states that if NJ residents wish to expand gambling beyond AC limits, they would need to reach this point by public “referendum” (a.k.a. vote).

Based on Christie’s statement alone, it sounds as if the governor is not asking for amendments, but rather stating his opinion that the issue of intrastate gambling in his state is one best left for public vote because of the “territorial limits” that exist.  If/what next steps the legislature in New Jersey chooses to take in response, as well as what Christie truly might be willing to sign into law in the future remains to be seen.

Seems to me that today’s veto, conditional or not, might alternately be thought of as a next step in the *pursuit* of intrastate iGambling legislation in New Jersey, just as many steps have also been taken in *pursuit* of federal online gambling legislation with HR2267 and the draft of #reidbill.

With Internet gaming, a lot of legislative maneuverings seem to come down to the wire – to a fleeting few moments of activity before deadlines. That may be because of the subject- matter; gambling is a net vote loser and, accordingly, politicians want to deal with it at the end of a schedule if they want to deal with it at all. This was one such day in New Jersey.

Today was Governor Christie’s deadline for taking some action (or inaction) on the Internet gaming measure approved by the New Jersey legislature earlier this year. First came word that Governor Christie was holding a press conference this morning. Would Internet gaming be discussed? Maybe! That’s all the poker cognoscenti needed to hear! Then, as Scarlet Robinson ably reported (here), nothing seemed to come of that. More waiting.

Later came word that the Governor vetoed the measure, which is clear from his letter to the State Senate. One person that I know called this; most others I canvassed was expecting a conditional veto, with Christie sending the measure back to the legislature and specifically objecting to the horseracing subsidy. (Interestingly, earlier today the New Jersey legislative website recorded the send-back from the Governor as a conditional veto. Now, they’ve changed it to reflect that it’s an absolute veto.)

I’ll leave it to others to discuss the politics and machinations of the Governor’s interaction with legislators and lobbyists over this measure. I suspect it will be a good story when it comes out.

Now what? The legislature can override the veto if it has the votes or it can take the Governor’s letter to heart and seek to put together a referendum on the matter in New Jersey. Or it could treat this as a conditional veto in all but name and try again and address some (horseracing subsidies) but not all (a referendum) of the Governor’s concerns.

This may be a setback for Internet gaming in the United States, but it’s really too soon to tell. Will other states take their cue from a veto in New Jersey? Maybe. Perhaps other states will distinguish New Jersey’s measure, which legalized an Internet version of any game currently offered in Atlantic City casinos, from an intrastate poker-only bill. On one level, the kind of focus and wrangling that’s happened in New Jersey gives traction to the people who assert that this really should be restricted to poker and regulated by Congress at a national level.

One thing is certain: further delay in New Jersey (whether it’s short- or long-term) is a win for the offshore unregulated casino and poker industries currently servicing US customers. They’ll continue to function in a legal grey area that’s only extended by a failure by the federal and state governments to act.

Governor Christie is expected to announce today if he will sign/veto/ignore S490 which, if made law, “permits Internet wagering at Atlantic City casinos under certain circumstances.”

He is holding press conference shortly at 11am EDT, where he is expected to comment on his decision.

A live stream of Christie’s press conference can be watched-> here.

A man who did the hard labor and bucked the odds in a way that greatly affected all of our lives, either directly or indirectly, has passed. Joel Sterns, senior director of Sterns & Weinroth in New Jersey and named a “Super Lawyer” by his peers in 2005 and ’06 … died Monday from medical complications related to heart disease. He was 76 years old.

Though Sterns’ accomplishments were vast, and included many positions in state and federal governments, he was best known for helping give birth to Atlantic City as we know it (or at least knew it until very recently) by setting the regulatory path in the ’70s that allowed for the first licensed American casino outside of Nevada.

According to Roger Gros, publisher of Global Gaming Business and owner of
Casino Connection International:

Joel was a gentleman, but fought hard for his clients, which was very difficult to do in those formative days. Remember, only Nevada had any sort of gaming law, and NJ didn’t want to simply copy that state, so it was like writing an entire book of laws. But Joel was up to the task.

Fully legal online gambling is coming to the United States … like this year, if not pretty much right now … regardless of whatever happened with the Reid Bill whereby one of the most powerful men in the world was not able to deliver to his strongest backers a relatively inconsequential bill that came with money and jobs for his own state (on a piece of legislation that was two years in the making) despite his party’s having control of the Senate, the House, and the Executive Branch.

But we’ll have to save that discussion for a later date … Last night the New Jersey Assembly (the Garden State’s version of the House) approved a package of five bills to recharge their battered Atlantic City-based gaming industry, one of which allows their casinos to offer online gambling (not just poker, but casino games, too) within NJ borders. Their Senate had already given the measures an official “like”, so now all that remains is needing a signature from Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who has given no indications of wanting to veto.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Those bills’ final passage marks the first real change in more than three decades to how business is conducted in the nation’s second-largest gaming market, which is reeling from the weak economy and regional competition. The resulting structure mirrors that of Nevada.

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Here are my thoughts on the most interesting stories in the gaming sector over the past week or so:

1. New Jersey Moves Forward on Intra-State Gaming - Yesterday, Monday, November 22^nd, the New Jersey State Senate passed S490, the succinctly-named “An Act permitting Internet wagering at Atlantic City casinos under certain circumstances and amending and supplementing the Casino Control Act.”The vote was 29-5 in favour. This bill authorizes Internet wagering at AC casinos; it would allow New Jersey residents and persons located outside of the US to place wagers on casino games by means of the Internet. All games that are permissible in a bricks and mortar AC casino could be offered over the Internet under this bill. S490 also provides for the imposition of a tax on such intra-state Internet wagering, monitoring and regulating the Internet offerings, and licensing fees. Now the bill will be taken up by the State Assembly’s Regulatory Oversight and Gaming Committee. New Jersey has elections in November of each odd-numbered year, so there is still considerable time to see this bill through to passage by the Assembly. It is looking more and more like the legislative i-gaming action in the US for the next little while will be at the state level and perhaps not in Congress. [NJLeg.state.nj.us]

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2. Quebec Launches Government Gaming Site - Loto-Quebec’s new Internet gaming site, www.espacejeux.com, went online last week. (It looks terrible, which is to be expected of a government-run casino site.) as of next week, Quebecers will be able to wager up to Cdn$9,999 per week on sundry interactive games. The poker offering will eventually share liquidity between Quebec and British Columbia, but only Quebecers are supposed to be permitted on Loto-Quebec’s site. [Montreal Gazette]

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3. New Zynga Game - Zynga, the popular social gaming developer, released CityVille. I haven’t played yet, but apparently it’s SimCity meets FarmVille. It will go live globally in the next few weeks. More proof that Zynga (and the social gaming sector, more generally) are key things to watch in the gaming industry as we go forward. [TechCrunch]

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4. The Status of Congress – Congress is currently in the lame-duck session between election day and the start of the 112^th Congress in January. Frank Fahrenkopf, President of the American Gaming Association and as keen an observer of the gaming industry in the US as anyone, said during G2E in Las Vegas last week that he doesn’t see online gaming legislation passing during the lame-duck session, but he left open the possibility that Internet gaming legislation could pass. No surprise, but Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV) thinks that, if anything passes during the lame-duck, it may be limited to legalizing Internet poker only: [Las Vegas Sun; Las Vegas Review-Journal]

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5. Las Vegas Cut-and-Paste Lawsuits - Righthaven LLC is a firm in Nevada that has sued dozens of parties over posting content on the Internet from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Some have alleged that Righthaven’s actions have been abusive. Comes now Righthaven with an indication that it will narrow its litigation campaign after a Nevada judge ruled that a realtor’s use of part of an LVRJ article constituted fair use. (The realtor reproduced 8 sentences of a 30 sentence news article on his blog.) See: http://www.scribd.com/doc/39767798/Righthaven-v-Realty-One-Order This is fascinating enough by itself, but the Nevada attorney who is a principal of Righthaven (Steven Gibson) is the same lawyer that is a member of the law firm Dicknson Wright PLLC, an international law firm with a respected gaming practice and now with a Las Vegas office. [Wired]

Attorney Stuart Hoegner regularly follows international gaming law; you can follow him @GamingCounsel on Twitter.

The midterm elections and the November Nine are over, but interesting things keep happening in the gaming world. For starters, the lame-duck session of Congress is underway; time will tell if anything that affects Internet gaming will pass before the start of the next congressional session. In addition, here are the legal tidbits that I thought were the most interesting and/or relevant coming out over the past week:

1. FullTilt Turns Off Washington - In big news from last Friday, FullTilt Poker has elected to follow PokerStars’s lead and discontinue providing real money games to players located in Washington State. This impacts players residing in Washington and non-residents of Washington visiting Washington. Tilt’s FAQ on the matter is here. This is being done to preserve Tilt’s Internet-poker-only-is-legal argument. A related fact is that they’re able to protect their poker-only and transparent processing solutions by turning off Washington. This leaves fewer offerings out there willing to service Washington State poker players. [Poker News Daily]

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2. New Jersey Moves Forward on I-Gaming - Irrespective of what’s happening in Congress, New Jersey continues to move forward in its review of an intra-state Internet gaming offering. This week, the NJ Senate’s Budget and Appropriations Committee reported out S490 (Permits Internet wagering at Atlantic City casinos under certain circumstances); the bill now goes to the full State Senate for consideration. This bill has State Senator Ray Lesniak as the primary sponsor. It seeks to authorize Internet wagering in Atlantic City casinos, thereby allowing New Jersey residents to place wagers on casino games by means of the Internet. All games, including poker, which may be played at a casino in New Jersey, may be offered through Internet wagering under this bill. Several commentators have been saying for some time that New Jersey is one of the more promising states for intra-state gaming; if this bill becomes law - and there’s a ways to go yet - those predictions may turn out to have been prescient. [NJLeg.state.nj.us]

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3. Kentucky v. PartyGaming - In other US state news, PartyGaming is not (initially, at least) rolling over in the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s attempt to extract damages from Party. Recall that Party was added to the state’s suit against Pocket Kings (Tilt) earlier this year; Microgaming was added last month. Party has now brought a motion to dismiss the complaint on several grounds. This will be interesting litigation as it rolls forward alongside the Kentucky domain name litigation. Watch for one or more of the identified defendants in Pocket Kings et al to settle. [EGR Magazine]

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4. GTECH Worldwide Expansion - GTECH, a Lottomatica subsidiary, continues to generate interesting news and business. Recently it has struck a number of deals with various operators, including with provincial operators in Canada. Last week two more deals were made public. The first was a 10-year agreement with the Shenzhen Welfare Lottery Center to upgrade existing Keno systems, selling online lottery games, and increasing the operator’s terminal base. [iGaming Business] Then came word that GTECH has received a two-year extension to continue providing support to Pronosticos para la Asistencia Publica in Mexico. [Gaming Intelligence] Even though the parent posted a net loss in Q3, keep watching GTECH, folks.

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5. gTLD Expansions - This is the most important ongoing story in Internet gaming (and, indeed, in intellectual property) that you’re hearing nothing about. Basically, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is opening up the general top-level domain registry well beyond what’s currently available. Instead of .com, .biz, etc., people will be able to create their own extensions and registries. Some of the new registries could include cities (.london, .nyc), Internet auction providers (.ebay), and people with strong trade-marks and domain names in a host of industries (think of .pfizer or .coke). The implications for Internet gaming are huge. Not only could operators register trade-marked names (e.g., .pokerstars), but they could add security to their offerings by owning, domiciling, and managing their own registries. Some think that a more generic name could be registered by one or more parties: .bet or .poker, perhaps. A summary of changes in the proposed final new gTLD applicant guidebook are here - worth a view. [via CircleID]

The WPT-Borgata Poker Open is underway … big action of the season for East Coast grinders and top pros willing to travel to New Jersey. New Jersey happens to be one of the most fascinating states on the online gambling legal fronts for many reasons — sports gambling, poker, and casino games all included — as their state lawmakers attack severe budget deficits at a time when Atlantic City took some of the biggest recessionary gambling hits.

But arguably the biggest and most immediate threats they’re facing are from neighboring states that have expanded gambling — with new tables, poker and otherwise, rapidly opening. Though it’s just a single anecdote and hardly statistical evidence of anything, I got this text message from a Pokerati player about new games in his home state of Delaware:

I’m back in DE. Playing @ DE Park right now. Casinos 15 mins from my house. 20 tables, separate tourney room, pretty nice. haven’t gone to AC since I’ve been here.

Yikes, if not indicative of likely continued economic woes for New Jersey, it seems to at least suggest something about the redistribution of gambling wealth currently going on in the Northeast corner of the United States.

In so many ways, I can’t believe the WSOP is now almost two weeks complete. In some ways it seem like we just got started … in others, it seems like holy crap, we’re full in the heat.

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We head off the strip and record an episode at our local breakfast joint on the west side of town. Change100 and Michalski discuss an alarming trend on display at the WSOP — the invasion of Jersey Shore douchebaggery in what is traditionally Vegas Dbag territory.

Episode 14: WSOP Fetishes (w Benjo)

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Benjo makes an astute observation — that WSOP tournaments are like different types of porn, particularly the specialty events, like the similarities between 10K Stud and CFNM bondage.

Episode 15: Stalking the Devil (w Benjo)

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After getting a tip from the Poker Grump about a chest-heavy woman in the poker room, Pauly and Benjo spring into action. Along the way they get distracted by the poker kitchen and then debate the merits of stalking the one we refer to as … The Devil.

Even though I’ve gotten hooked on two-minute video interviews and have kinda taken a personal change-of-interest-pace and started paying attention to actual tournaments … big names are starting to win at the LAPC, WSOP-Circuit Tunica is kicking it old school, everyone wants to know how the Venetian Deep Stacks is gonna shape up with PokerStars heading to town, and I really gotta make it over to the M Resort to check out this whole PartyPoker Premier League thing … I still tune in almost-weekly to APCW Perspectives Weekly for a little catch-up on the international poker and online-gambling-related political scene for 10 minutes at a pop:

This week J Todd keeps us abreast of California and New Jersey’ desires to get in on the online gambling game from a state-size perspective, updates us on the online gambling fund-transfer cat-and-mouse game with MasterCard and Visa getting more serious (just three months before they are legally required to do exactly what they are trying to do), fingers the Eldorado Casino as a potentially shady site to avoid, and tease me with some affiliate business stuff that I don’t really care about but am interested to watch because of the hidden-camera + foreign-accent nature of the upcoming interview.

Here are a few other semi-related newsy links about how things are going elsewhere in the poker world:

The Mayor of Baltimore is pushing for poker+table games despite the governor of Maryland having less of an interest in making expanded gambling a priority.

Michael Barnier, the newly appointed EU Internal Markets Commissioner, promises to straighten out inconsistencies in European online gambling laws.

Police in suburban Alabama are cracking down on / raiding the real-money tournament scene there.

In yet another clear sign that America is ready for fully legal online poker … and perhaps another example of why it will take so long to get there … New Jersey is looking to jump ahead of the federal curve (and California) with a bill to allow its citizens play online poker freely … and, of course, for the state to profit from the action.

“There are probably 500,000 online poker players in New Jersey alone. And we’re missing out on around $100 million in revenue,” said state Sen. Raymond Lesniak, D-Union, the bill’s sponsor.

Meanwhile, the opposition is upping its rhetoric:

Arnold Wexler, former executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey, said legalizing Internet gaming would make it easier for people to “lose their life.”

Lose their LIFE?!? Wow … He goes on to make it about the kids. Mild opponents of any online poker bill have continue to make it clear that if anything is going to move forward, they need some assurances that 13-year-olds aren’t playing on their brother’s account and developing mad skillz that will allow them to win more than $2 million in the PCA before completing their first semester of college.

And while we’re on the topic of New Jersey … CORRECTION: Despite what I may have twittered with heavy disclaimers on Tuesday, The Situation is not a poster on 2+2.