Overturning UIGE via Poker Play

There’s a NYTimes piece on the Poker Players Alliance, a 160,000 strong association of card afficionados, and their hiring of former Republican senator Alfonse D’Amato to lobby for the repeal of UIGE, the U.S. law that bans banks and credit-card companies from processing payments for Internet gambling. This is the tidbit that caught our eye:

Moreover, Mr. 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.

Mr. 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.”

Thus, D’Amato’s friendly poker games with cronies, where losses could reach several thousand dollars per session, will have to remain private affairs. With little prospect of the law being overturned in the next few years, the focus will remain on the Asian gaming market, and on the Philippines. We expect the U.S. to eventually come around and allow Internet gambling; the industry is too huge to ignore. In the meantime, there will be enough runway for the  nascent online gambling industry in the Philippines to take off.