Should online poker be legal?

Annie Duke has argued to the House financial Services Committee that it is people’s right to gamble online and should not be illegal

Last Wednesday Annie Duke told the House Financial Services Committee that Congress should legalise and regulate the huge underground online gambling market.

Annie Duke is a World Series of Poker bracelet winner, mother of four children and the “Duchess of Poker”, now the latest entrance to her C.V. is the title of “congressional witness”.

In the House Duke testified that, "At its most basic level, the issue before this committee is personal freedom, the right of individual Americans to do what they want in the privacy of their homes without the intrusion of the government.”

Despite the fact that online poker is illegal in America, thousands of players still rush to the websites, most of which are operated offshore and therefore cannot be touched by the federal regulators. There is a bill which has been introduced by Representative Barney Frank, D-Mass who is Chairman of the Financial Services Committee, the idea of the bill is that online gambling websites would be legalised and then taxed.

Frank’s argument is that online gambling should be made legal otherwise users could be hurt. A few hours after President Barack Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation which he has spent the majority of the last year negating Frank said that “Unwise choices [are] part of freedom.”
Duke from Los Angeles agreed with Frank’s point. People in favour of the bill point out that it could bring in as much as $42 billion for the government in taxes over a period of just 10 years. However, this does assume that no state chooses to use the “opt-out” section of the bill which allows individual states to decide that they do not want to allow online gambling and for it to stay illegal in their borders.

The director of strategic planning at the Commerce Casino in Los Angeles, Tom Malkasian, said that the proposed bill is “fundamentally flawed and unsound.” He said that he is worried that the bill will not provide enough oversight. He went on to say that he is worried that his casino would suffer due to new competition brought from online gambling sites and claims that the new laws would favour “overseas Internet gaming operators over law-abiding, tax-paying domestic gaming interests.”