Opinion: How the NFL Grinch Stole Poker’s Christmas

December 26, 2006 at 5:49 pm | In Legal Issues | Leave a Comment

by Amy Calistri

First published in PokerNews

Knife I’m always a little annoyed with the NFL this time of year. Like the fictitious town of Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average, decidedly average NFL teams are in the process of locking up “championship” and wild card berths. But this year I’m more peeved than normal, because, of course, this is the year that the NFL ruined online poker’s Christmas.

Even the most politically challenged online poker player knows enough to wish a lump of coal in Bill Frist’s stocking this year. But surprisingly few are aware at just how pivotal the NFL was in ramming the UIGEA into last minute “must pass” legislation. With the shock of the bill’s passage, followed by the many aftershocks as online poker sites withdrew from the US, many missed Geoff Earle’s scintillating New York Post article outlining the NFL’s role in the passage of the UIGEA entitled, “NFL Makes Fantasy Pass.”

Apparently the NFL hired big buck lobbyist Marty Gold, (not coincidently) former counsel to Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, to push through the UIGEA (again not coincidently) which exempted fantasy football. If the lobbyist wasn’t enough, both the current NFL Chairman Roger Goodell and past chairman Paul Tagliabue wrote Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.) in an attempt to sway him to tag the UIGEA onto “must pass” defense spending legislation. When Warner balked, they threw their weight behind Frist’s last ditch attempt at tacking it onto the Safe Port Bill.

It is not surprising that the NFL was backing anti-gaming legislation. The NFL has been almost rabid in its stance on gambling. In the past, the NFL has even gone so far as to forbid NBC from running promos for its “Las Vegas” television series on its Sunday night football broadcasts. The NFL knows that nothing destroys the integrity of a sport more than a cheating scandal. Their argument is that where there is gambling, there is a lot of money. Where there is a lot of money, there is incentive for cheating. Their fear is suffering a major backlash like those that followed the NCAA basketball’s point shaving scandals or the 1919 Baseball “Black Sox” World Series.

I agree with the NFL on at least one point; money can be corrupting. But to me, the NFL has proved that by their own curious actions. If this was only about principle and prevention, the NFL would have pushed the UIGEA without the fantasy football carve-out. But you see, the NFL makes a lot of money off of fantasy football. The NFL runs its own fantasy football site and receives royalties from other fantasy football sites. The second and third largest fantasy football websites are cbssportline.com and espn.com. Both sites are owned by networks that pay the NFL $1.7 billion in contracts to televise NFL games.

Nelson Rose recently said of the fantasy football exemption, “It doesn’t seem to be consistent. It doesn’t make sense to me given how antigambling the pro and college sports have always been.” Another attorney specializing in gaming and the internet, Anthony Cabot, also has consistency issues with the carve-out, “Why is sports gambling unlawful and fantasy sports legal? Is there a real difference between rooting for Tony Romo to throw a bunch of touchdown passes and rooting for the Dallas Cowboys to win?” Why of course there is; the NFL makes money on the former and not on the latter.

I wonder how the NFL would feel if online poker lobbied to support Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter’s (R-Pa.) current plans to introduce legislation taking away the NFL’s antitrust exemption. Beware NFL Grinch. We are not like the warm hearted Hoo’s of Hooville. If the mid-term elections proved anything, it proved we know a little something about revenge.

Default Positioning: Folding, Calling, and Raising

December 13, 2006 at 4:37 am | In Bet Patterns | 2 Comments

by Lou Kreiger

First published in Poker Player Newspaper

In poker, as in life, we have default positions that help us put a lot of our decision making on autopilot so that we con concentrate on the really tough choices. We’re not unlike our computers. Every time I open Microsoft Internet Explorer, Hotsheet comes up. It’s my homepage and I don’t have to make any decisions or go through any gyrations to put it right up there on the screen in front of me. It’s my default choice, and I like it that way. Poker players have default positions too. Most of us — when confronted with folding, calling, or raising — choose to call. It’s our default position and represents what we do almost instinctively. We don’t think too much about calling, but we ponder long and hard about either folding or raising. When we default to calling — rather than saving our money for another hand and a better opportunity by folding, or trying to seize control of the situation by raising with a good hand —we’re wrong more often than not. Calling runs on the wrong side of one of poker’s prime strategic tracks: Be aggressive, but be selective. A call is not aggressive, and when you call too often, it’s not selective either. Aggressive play builds pots when you have a big hand, and more importantly, it provides two ways to win. An aggressive player can win by causing his opponent to fold a hand that might have beaten his, and he can win by showing down the best hand. The passive player can only win in a showdown. The need to be selective is obvious. If you’ve ever had a maniac at your table who raises almost every pot, you’ll see him experience huge swings but almost always lose money in the process. There are times to call. But a decision to call should be made only after analyzing the cards you hold, the community cards on the board, and other players’ playing styles. Here are four situations when calling pays. 1. You have a drawing hand that you’re trying to complete as inexpensively as possible. 2. To sucker your opponent into betting with what he mistakenly believes is a bigger hand; then you can checkraise him. 3. To disguise the strength of your hand or take a free or inexpensive card when you’re in the small or big blind. 4. A guy to your right bets when you have a huge hand. Calling will probably attract additional calls from players acting behind you. It may also help you get in a checkraise on a subsequent betting round. Most of the time, however, raising or folding is preferable to calling. Too many poker players call when they should fold. It’s the single biggest mistake you’ll see at the poker table. Here’s why. Players come to a casino to play, not to throw away hands. Like traffic entering the freeway, they merge with the rhythm of the table. Soon they are playing just like their opponents — and calling too much as a result. If you need a default program to guide you at the poker table, try this: Fold more than you raise and raise more than you call. While this aphorism is true for cash games, it is even more important in tournaments, where you seldom want to call. Many top tournament pros almost never call. If they can’t raise before the flop, they fold. This allows aggressive players to pressure their opponents. Because bluffing is generally more effective in tournaments than it is in cash games, a selectively aggressive player can drive his good hands and his bluffs too. When a player has a good number of chips to work with and can afford to lose a hand without becoming so short stacked that he has no latitude left for creative play, taking command of the table by raising the hands he plays is the fast lane to the final table.

Pro poker tougher than it looks

December 11, 2006 at 10:38 pm | In Legal Issues, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

by JESSICA HOPP
First published in the Tennessean

TUNICA, Miss. — Nashville’s Sonny Perry stoodin the Gold Strike Casino and took a drag from his cigarette.

As he talked of his young poker career, he fisheda big gold ring out of his denim overalls. He won it, and $110,000, playing poker in New Orleans.

Not a bad way to make a living, huh?

“There’s nothing better than this,” Perry said. “You can make money and you don’t have to do no sweating.”

The hundreds of players at the World Poker Tour Open that January afternoon probably would have agreed.

Perry was one of 326 entrants, each hoping a $500 buy-in would win them the $969,421 first-place prize.

The four-day tournament was just a piece of the big picture. Poker remains hotter than a royal flush.

TV popularizes poker

With the introduction of the World Poker Tour and World Series of Poker to national television, the game has shed its backroom image.

In its fourth season, from May 2005 through April 2006, the World Poker Tour made 17 stops and awarded $85.12 million in prize money. Millions watched broadcasts in 147 countries and territories. Everybody had dreams of making millions playing cards.

A little more than two years ago, Perry saw Nashville’s Chris Moneymaker win $2.5 million in the World Series of Poker championship.

Here was Perry, a 60-something Nashville man with a limousine service. There was Moneymaker, a 20-something Music City accountant with a huge chunk of wealth via gambling.

If Moneymaker could do it, why not Perry?

“When he won that championship, that is when everyone in Nashville got interested in it,” said Perry, who by Septemberthis year had cashed in on eight tournaments for $325,888. “Somebody who is used to no money can win $3 million or $4 million at a time. That’s what made me want to do it.”

Josh Tieman started playing poker in his dorm room at Illinois Wesleyan. After seeing the 2003 World Series of Poker on ESPN, he joined several online games and kept winning.

Then he lost $500 on one game, which was a lot on his college budget.

“I was pretty mad at the game,” he said. “But after a few days I wanted to play again. It is something I love to do.”

The young Lake Zurich, Ill., native finished 14th in Tunica and won $31,464. In August he topped that with a third-place finish — highest of his pro career — in a World Series of Poker event and won $52,525.

Pro says it’s stressful life

Despite its monetary draw, playing big-time professional poker can be tougher than it looks.

Now in her early 30s, Liz Lieu started playing when she was 18, helping an ex-boyfriend set up a home game. She learned how to play, she dealt, she ran the game. Then she turned pro and eventually moved to Las Vegas.

Now she is a professional poker fixture. Her petite frame, supermodel-skinny body and blond-streaked raven hair make her impossible to miss on the tournament floor. She shuffles poker chips between French manicured fingernails and listens to her iPod as she tries to outwit her opponents, most of whom are male.

“A lot of people think it is easy money, an easy life, and an easy way out, but actually it isn’t. It’s not at all. It’s very stressful,” Lieu said. “I feel like I have aged 10 years in the last year. I have lost weight. I am not eating right. When you win it’s all good, but when you lose you can’t sleep.

“Now it’s televised, so a lot of people want to start and become famous. It’s not worth it. The majority of the players will go broke. In these tournaments if you play the whole year or you follow the circuit, if you add it up it’s probably about half a million dollars. That’s a lot of money if you don’t win.”

 

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