Citizen Poker

Good story in today\’s DMN about the VFW poker bust, the Texas Poker Act, and police frustration with the issue of illegal Texas Hold\’em games in North Texas. No mention of the armed robberies that police don\’t/can\’t handle … and the person who accuses poker players of throwing bottles in her yard doesn\’t give her name, which is too bad. I wasn\’t aware of any poker players who have ever left poker rooms carrying beer bottles … in fact, I am so confident that these sorts of nuisance crimes from poker players are so infrequent that I would like to volunteer Pokerati\’s services to clean up whatever mess poker players do leave in any particular residential neighborhood. I\’m being serious. But we can\’t help you or any accuser who isn\’t willing to give their names/meet eye-to-eye.

That\’s the thing with the anti-poker forces, whatever and wherever they may be … they don\’t know what they are talking about.

This became clear in Austin when the Baptist lobbyist guy got his ass handed back to him by the legislative committee of elected representatives charged with hearing his point of view. If so many people have been calling in complaints as police claim, why is there not one of them speaking on the record with actual information, research, and knowledge? Think about how Dallas is when residents have had real problems — like the \”Barking Dogs\” folks who put up pictures of drunken Greenville Ave. revelers pissing on their fences. They had a real beef, and even though their solutions weren\’t to my personal liking — hate dealing with parking now — they were fair, understandable, and enforceable. I don\’t see anything like this when it comes to dealing with underground poker.

OK, that\’s my rant. Sorry, just got a little hyped up. Jason Trahan did a nice job with the story. And the DPD are doing the best they can with the bad cards they have to play. And so many people in Austin are working their asses off trying to make things better for those of us who would like to pursue our hobby in legal peace.

And, of course, the people in Oklahoma are also hard at work — and are clearly banking on the notion that Texas will not be doing what is right makes so much obvious sense. I\’m still holding out hope that our present issue will fall on the side of what is right … but every decent poker player knows that hope is seldom the best strategy.