Filed under: poker by Ryan on June 26, 2011

Congressman Joe Barton from Texas has just introduced HR 2366 The Online Poker Act of 2011 to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. This bill has been in the works for a while, and the poker community is very excited that it has finally been released.

There is a lot of work to be done, as support and momentum for this bill must be built. Direct from Joe Barton’s mouth, he says that people who support online poker need to contact their congressmen and senators, ask them to co-sponsor this bill, and ask them to vote for it when the time comes.

I’m happy to say that there is currently a growing grass-roots movement on facebook to support online poker legislation. Here is a list of congresspeople sitting on the Energy and Commerce committee… take a quick look at a few of their facebook walls and you will see what I mean.

In contrast to phone calls, letter writing, and emails (which are all still very important), the facebook posting is exciting because it’s easy to see how many people are participating and how much the momentum has increased over the last couple of weeks.

I have added a popvox link to the sidebar for HR 2366. If you haven’t yet, please click that link (or go here) and express your support for the bill. At the time of this post, 35 people for, zero against.

Finally, here is a list of important lists:

• Energy and Commerce members’ facebook pages
• facebook pages of Congressional Representatives and House Committees
• facebook pages of Congressional Senators and Senate Committees
• The 100 largest newspapers in the U.S.

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Filed under: poker, politics by Ryan on June 6, 2011

Cliffs: If you want help take action, go here, here and here to send prewritten emails to key politicians.

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As you probably already heard, the U.S. Department of Justice has blocked access to the three major online sites that served U.S. customers: Pokerstars, Full Tilt, and Absolute Poker, charging them with money laundering and bank fraud. Let it be clear: online poker players (there are an estimated 10 million Americans who play online each year) are not breaking any laws by playing poker online. In addition, there are around 50,000 Americans poker pros who have now had their primary income stream cut off because of these actions. -_-

There is a very strong push in the poker playing community, along with many key politicians, to license and regulate online poker companies in the U.S. There are currently two bills (well, one to be introduced any day now) in committee, and the more we lobby politicians from all angles, the better chance we have of pushing this legislation through. One of the key efforts is sending emails to the attorney general, congress, the president, and state lawmakers. If you want to help by quickly sending off some prewritten emails, please follow these links:

Send an Email to Attorney General Holder
Send an Email to Pres. Obama and Congress
Send an Email to Your State Lawmakers

Another rallying point has been hitting up key Facebook pages with comments. Check out the following pages to see the flood of support for online poker, and if you want to help, please ‘like’ these Facebook pages and post supportive comments:

House Committee on Financial Services
House Committee on Energy and Commerce

Please post a quick comment here if you send the emails and/or comment on the Facebook pages so that I can thank you for your support!

Thanks in advance!

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P.S. Here are some articles following the aftermath of the April 15th shutdown of online poker by the DOJ.

Families Face Dire Straits After Online Poker Shutdown
Shutting down online poker invades privacy, destroys jobs – Baltimore Sun
DU professor says poker is about skill, not luck
Phil Ivey Boycotts WSOP & Files Lawsuit

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Filed under: poker, politics by Ryan on May 9, 2011

An interesting article on this topic was recently published by Steven D. Levitt, well known economist and author of the following book:

Emphasis is mine:

Abstract:

In determining the legality of online poker – a multibillion dollar industry – courts have relied heavily on the issue of whether or not poker is a game of skill. Using newly available data, we analyze that question by examining the performance in the 2010 World Series of Poker of a group of poker players identified as being highly skilled prior to the start of the events. Those players identified a priori as being highly skilled achieved an average return on investment of over 30 percent, compared to a -15 percent for all other players. This large gap in returns is strong evidence in support of the idea that poker is a game of skill.

Conclusion:

This paper attempts to shed light on the extent to which pre-existing metrics of poker skill are useful in predicting tournament outcomes. Our results suggest that players who are a priori identified as “high skill” do indeed substantially outperform other competitors. This predictability in returns is evidence for a substantial role of skill in poker.

It is not immediately obvious how one measures the importance of skill versus luck in poker relative to other activities. One approach that problem is to estimate the probability that a randomly drawn high skill poker player will outperform a randomly drawn low-skilled poker player over the course of a tournament. An important limitation of our data in this regard is that we do not observe the complete order of finish, but rather, only the order of finish for those who make the money. Because of this limitation, we can make pairwise comparisons between two players in a tournament only when at least one makes the money. Subject to that constraint, an exhaustive pairwise comparison of high skilled and low skilled players entered in each tournament in the WSOP finds that the high skilled player wins 54.9 percent of the match ups. For purposes of comparison, we calculated the regular season win rates for professional sports teams that made the playoffs in the previous season – making the playoffs last year is akin to being a highly skilled player entering the WSOP. Since the year 2007, teams that made the playoffs the previous season win 55.7 percent of their games in Major League Baseball against teams that failed to make the playoffs in the previous year. Thus, in some crude sense, the predictability of outcomes for pairs of players in a poker tournament is similar to that between teams in Major League Baseball. To the extent that baseball would unquestionably be judged a game of skill, the same conclusion might reasonably be applied to poker in light of the data.

Asset management is another domain where skill is generally believed to be important, as evidenced by consumers paying billions of dollars annually in fees to money managers. Academic analysis, however, has generally found little evidence for skill in this domain as demonstrated by low rates of persistence in mutual fund returns (Carhart 1997, Bollen and Busse 2004) and evidence of inferior or superior performance only in the extreme tails of the mutual fund distribution (Fama and French 2010).

Link to full text.

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