Gov. Steve Beshear (D-KY) is almost single-handedly making sure horse racing interests gets their cut of online poker spoils.

I’m paraphrasing, of course, but I dunno man … it’s starting to seem inevitable that Antonin Scalia may eventually have to reveal his screen name and/or recuse himself to avoid violating any PokerStars T&C’s. But until then, the state of Kentucky is doing its part to make sure the Black Friday cases don’t go away.

The governor’s office put out a kinda strange press release last week, just to let people know, hey, don’t be confused by recent reports of certain online gambling cases achieving final settlement. The great Commonwealth of KY, you may recall, made the bold assertion in ’08 that it had a right to take over foreign web domains that failed to block access by Kentuckians. And now they would like you to know with extra certainty that Kentucky only let go of their claims against Absolute and UB (after a $6 million score) but have not otherwise released claims against poker sites that still have any money left, which they plan go after in full force.

Click here to read the whole press release.

Below is a quick Cliff’s noting some peculiars:

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We are all looking for the Big Casinos to benefit from online gamining legislation. But the parimutuel race tracks are also setting themselves up to be players.

Kentucky-based Churchill Downs, now owner of Bluff Magazine, operates TwinSpires, one of the country’s only legal online gambling sites (thanks to the UIGEA carve out for horse racing).

UK-based Betfair, owner of  TVG, another legal online horse wagering site operating in the US, just completed a five-year naming rights deal with California’s Hollywood Park.  

And now Las Vegas-based casino operator Pinnacle Entertainment bought a 75.5% stake in Retama Park in Texas for $22.8 million. Since Texas is one of the few states that hasn’t legalized gambling, Retama is an unlikely racino conversion. Pinnacle could, however, augment its revenues with an online wagering site.   

In the not too distant past, parimutuel racing was a stagnant enterprise. But the industry’s UIGEA exemption has made it a gateway to online gaming revenues, initially from horse racing, and perhaps ultimately from poker.

Former WSOP Commissioner Jeffrey Pollack, who oversaw the WSOP through the boomtime poker era, plans to make professional poker something more akin to the PGA.

He’s founded a new California company — Federated Sports+Gaming — with Annie Duke on the executive team and serving as commissioner of the poker league, which promises to be a professionals-only set-up. Duke resigned from the WSOP’s event-steering Players Advisory Committee two months ago and last month renounced her relationship with UB, the most notoriously beleaguered online poker site in history.

According to @OskarGarcia from the Associated Press:

The yet-to-be-named league is planning four televised regular-season events plus a $1 million championship freeroll at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas this year, league executives said.

“This is incredibly pro-centric,” Duke told The Associated Press. “This is the one piece that’s kind of missing from the poker landscape right now, which is something for the best players in the world to compete against the best players in the world.”

Should be interesting to see who, by Federated’ new definition, qualify as pros … with one obvious litmus test being will @donkeybomber be able to secure his card?

Corporately, Duke is an executive vice president of Federated Sports+Gaming’s, though not a member of its board of directors. The others on Pollack’s team come from YouBet.com, the biggest legal online gaming company based in the US, which was recently acquired by Churchill Downs, the publicly traded online gaming outpost for Kentucky’s horse-race industry. Others on Pollack’s executive team share varying degrees from Northwestern University, to which I say, um … Go Cats!

Pollack, serving as chairman of Federated, maintains his position as executive chairman of PBR, which real cowboys will tell you is very different from traditional “rodeo”. Read below for his full statement announcing his reburstage onto the poker scene:

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