Playing Poker

One Friday evening each month, a group of eight of us gather at someone’s house for an evening playing poker. We’ve been doing this for longer than I can remember, at least 20 years or so. We’re all all about the same age and we play poor man’s poker where the most you can lose is $5.00.

We take turns hosting the monthly game and everyone else brings snacks to share. It’s a good opportunity for us to socialize during breaks and share experiences, both good and bad. My guess is that there are thousands of similar poker groups across the country.

The poker group has been a dramatic device in movies, TV shows and even commercials.

It has a long-running presence in the stage, movie and TV versions of “The Odd Couple.” And Kenny Rogers singing his hit “You’ve Got to Know When to Hold ‘Em” is the basis of a GEiCO insurance commercial. Rogers’s poker mates react with disgust and anger when he sings the song for the umpteenth time during their game.

The poker game was a staple of the movie and TV Westerns that my Baby Boom generation grew up watching. There was drama in the high stakes of these games usually at the town saloon and there was usually violence if one of the players was caught cheating.

An American Game

Poker appears to be a uniquely American game originating early in the 19^th century. In 1829 English actor Joseph Crowell wrote about a card game played in New Orleans involving four players and 20 cards with the highest hand winning a pot each round. At this time, riverboats were taking passengers up and down the Mississippi River and gambling, including poker, was a popular pastime among the passengers.

Sometime before the Civil War, the so-called French deck of 52 cards was introduced to poker. At this time different forms of poker, straight, stud and community card poker games were introduced and gained popularity. During the Civil War, there were press accounts and drawings of soldiers playing poker in camps. A couple of my poker group friends often talk of playing the game while they were in the military during the Vietnam War.

Poker went mainstream during the 1970s when the World Series of Poker and other tournaments were held all across the country. This popularity lead to a number of poker books being published in the 1980s and the beginnings of online poker as the Internet began to take hold. In the 1990s TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” there were poker-game scenes in 10 of the episodes.

Poker Goes Cyber

Advancements in video technology led to a series of poker-based TV shows as we entered the new Millennium. The use of smaller cameras allowed the audience to see the cards and expressions of players more clearly.

At the 2003 WSOP, an accountant with no poker experience named Chris Moneymaker (no joke!), paid $40 and entered the novice round of the tournament. Apparently he picked up the game pretty quickly and advanced to the championship round where he won the first prize of $2.5 million!

The International Federation of Poker was established in 2009, in Lausanne, Switzerland, to govern the game as its international popularity exploded.

Online Poker and the Feds

Back in the U.S., the increasing popularity of online poker led FBI to investigate online gambling and question its legality. “You can go to Vegas. You can go to Atlantic City. You can go to the racetrack. You can go to any of these places and gamble legally, “ said Leslie Bryant, head of the FBI’s Cyber Crime Unit. “But, don’t do it online. It’s against the law.”

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice obtained indictments against three of the largest online gambling sites and charged them with wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering and a variety of other charges. The defendants maintained their innocence saying they were based offshore and violated no US laws.

On Christmas Eve 2011, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Virginia Seitz ruled that the Wire Act of 1961, used by the DOJ for the indictments, only prohibited betting on sports or sporting events. Earlier, courts had ruled the Wire Act of 1961 governed the Internet.

Seitz responded to a request by the states of New York and Illinois to permit online betting for their state lotteries. “We conclude that the Cyber Crime Unit’s premise is incorrect and that the Wire Act prohibits only transmission of communication related to bets or wagers on sporting events or contests.”

So, today, you can watch poker on Cable and Satellite networks where players bet hundreds of thousands on a regular basis. You also can play online 24/7 and wager as much as the game permits.

I still prefer to play in person, where you can try to guess who’s bluffing and who isn’t. And I enjoy the comraderie of playing with friends I have known for a long time—even though they win more than I do most of the time.