For years, Alfonse M. D’Amato, the former Republican senator from New York, was the host at a Thursday evening poker game at his Capitol Hill office, playing with other lawmakers, staff members and lobbyists late into the night over pots that ranged from a few dollars to a few hundred.
Once New Yorkers collectively informed D’Amato that it was time to find a new line of work, he graduated to a higher-stakes game, playing with Howard Stern, among others. He is now a stalwart of a weekly game on Long Island where a bad night might mean that a player drops $5,000 or more.
As D’Amato tells it, and as his card-playing cronies confirm, he rarely leaves a game a loser. Yet it is a safe bet that his love of poker never proved so lucrative as it did last week, when he signed a lobbying deal with the Poker Players Alliance, a nascent group that hopes that D’Amato will help them become players in Washington politics, too.
Most immediately, the group is hoping that D’Amato, long known for his connections to Washington insiders and his ability to deliver perks to his constituents and interest groups, can help them overturn a new federal ban on Internet gambling–or at least exempt poker from its provisions.
“John Smith, maybe he doesn’t have the financial means or the ability” to travel to a casino, D’Amato said, gesturing with his hands and speaking volubly in his trademark accent. “The poor guy at home can’t bet $50 because we pass this law.”
The first big assault on poker players came in October when President Bush signed a bill aimed at online gambling by making it a crime to use credit cards or online payment systems for poker and other online casino games and sports betting conducted over the Internet. The law did not make it impossible or illegal for Americans to bet online, but it did make it trickier for players to get their cash to the offshore casinos that run the Internet sites.
“I think it’s fair to say that most poker players see themselves as nonpolitical,” said Walt Thiessen, 49, an entrepreneur from Warrenton, Va., who recently joined the alliance. “But the more that the government does to impede poker players, the more angry and frustrated they’re going to become.”
The booming popularity of poker has spawned any number of cable television shows and made media figures of professionals like Chris Moneymaker and Daniel Negreanu. Tens of millions of Americans play, primarily in home games but also at casinos, legal and illegal card rooms, and at scores of Web sites.
So perhaps it was inevitable that poker enthusiasts would assert themselves as another special interest demanding to be heard in Washington. The Poker Players Alliance, which says it has more than 160,000 members, most paying at least $20 to join the group, will open an office in Washington in the next two months “to oversee our political efforts there,” the group’s president, Michael Bolcerek, said. It hopes to build a grassroots organization whose political presence is felt in all 50 states, he said.
Moreover, D’Amato, for all his ability to attract attention and parlay his reputation into big money, may not have much sway in a Democratic-controlled Congress preoccupied with war, budget deficits and presidential politics. There is little interest there at the moment in turning back to a subject decided a year ago, when Republicans ruled.
D’Amato and his backers, said I. Nelson Rose, law professor at Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa, Calif., and an expert on gambling law, “think they have a pair of queens. But what have they really got? They don’t even have a pair.”
Still, former Representative Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican and one of the authors of the Internet gambling ban, said that D’Amato certainly added heft to the effort.
“Don’t ever underestimate Al,” he said on hearing of D’Amato’s role.
Certainly, D’Amato’s poker buddies have learned that lesson. “He’s tenacious, he’s fearless and he’s aggressive,” said Gary Melius, the host of the Monday game where D’Amato is now a regular. “He’s also really good at reading people.”
A waste of resources?
Subtlety has never been D’Amato’s long suit, and he has already embraced his new role with characteristic fervor. During an interview in his offices in a high-rise on Park Avenue in Manhattan, D’Amato did not answer questions about online poker as much as filibuster on the issue.
To him the implications of prohibiting online poker are profound, touching on matters as wide ranging as the war on terrorism, national security, the rights of the elderly and the handicapped and equal protection under the law. At times, he pounded his desk to make his point.
The money being spent to outlaw poker and enforce the ban, D’Amato said, could be better spent “in the battle against money laundering, trafficking in drugs, or trafficking in terrorism.”
He takes issue with Congress’s decision to lump in poker, a game of skill as well as luck, with games of pure chance like roulette and craps. “It’s really a great sport,” D’Amato said, perhaps the country’s favorite sport. “You don’t have 70 million people participating in baseball.”
It is not clear that poker has 70 million players, either. (D’Amato’s source is a study commissioned by the poker association.)
But one of his trademark tactics is throwing around numbers that might or might not be considered, well, a bluff. He talks of the million players who have already joined the poker association–a misstatement that prompted his handler, presidential style, to clarify that what the former senator meant is that the group hoped one day soon to have that many names on its rolls.
After New York voters replaced D’Amato with Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat, in 1998, the former senator opened Park Strategies, a lobbying and corporate strategy firm whose client list includes banks, telecommunications companies and a few racetrack owners.
“I play as much now as I did before the ban.”
–Ethan Ruby, member, Poker Players Alliance He acknowledged that he did not understand the impulse that prompted a person to place a wager on a horse. But he spoke rhapsodically about the sense of community that poker has fostered in his life, and the banter, camaraderie and friendly competition that can make the game so engaging.
The intimacy of the game, in fact, produced some political headaches for D’Amato while he was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee after an article in The New York Times disclosed that he had invited lobbyists to play in his office. That gave extraordinary access, some charged, to those representing banks, securities firms and other financial institutions.
D’Amato has a different view, defending his activity as an innocent pastime that followed in the footsteps of President Harry S. Truman’s poker games with cronies. “It was a great way to while the time away–to have fun and talk politics,” he said.
Plenty of Americans are still playing poker online, if no longer at sites run by publicly traded companies, which fear reprisals from Washington despite being based overseas.
Instead, online players have shifted to smaller, privately owned sites. They are forced to find other means for transferring money in and out of their accounts, given that the new law more closely monitors financial institutions processing wagers.
“I play as much now as I did before the ban,” said Ethan Ruby, a member of the poker alliance who lives and works in Manhattan. Ruby said he simply took the money he had on account at PartyPoker, his old site, and transferred it to Full Tilt. He then linked his poker account to his checking account instead of a credit card.
“It’s a much more tedious process now,” Ruby said.
Still, it only took a few days. “You can’t cork this,” D’Amato said. “You can’t stop this through some silly bill.”
Online poker will only go further underground, he continued, providing an opening for unscrupulous foreign operators seeking to take advantage of the hunger of Americans to play poker.
“When you have regulation, where you have openness, you can ensure you have a game that won’t be unfairly cut or disadvantaged or manipulated,” D’Amato said. You can also tax the winnings of players whose ups and downs are tracked online, a figure the poker alliance puts potentially in the billions.
Rose, the law professor, while doubtful of the chances for the lobbying effort in the short run, said D’Amato and his backers would be well served in keeping the issue alive until there is more interest in the matter. “If they stay active the next two years,” he said, “then there could be a serious bill” to carve out an exception for poker.
Certainly, D’Amato has staying power.
“The later the game goes, the more Al is going to win,” said Larry Elovich, a Long Island lawyer who said he has been playing poker on and off with D’Amato for 50 years. “He has the ability to stay awake when the rest of the players are all tired.
Source: CNET