More on Poker Legality in New York
Most (if not all) of the NYC poker rooms were closed this weekend, biding their time and evaluating the fallout from last week's raid. One club is having a staff meeting today to discuss the issues surrounding recent events; I imagine others will do the same.
While everyone waits to see how things shake out, I wanted to address two of the comments I received to my previous post about the legality of poker in Gotham.
1. Not Being Cashed Out. Two people suggested that losing the chips you have on the table should be deterrent enough not to go to a New York poker club, out of fear that you might be there the night of a raid. I admit that it is a certainty; if you're there when a raid goes down, you won't be cashed out. How is that different from a losing night though? If it happened to me, I'd just go home, note in the spreadsheet that my net for the night was a loss for however much I was in for, and move on. If you're afraid of losing chips, what in god's name are you doing at a poker table?
If the raids are stepped up in frequency, this may become a more legitimate concern. But as it stands now, there have been three raids in the last year: Acepoint in August, Brooklyn Players Club in February (and that was more targetted at bookmaking than poker-playing; the sweep-up of the poker club was an unfortunate side effect of some poor choices by club management) and Thursday's raid of New York Players Club and Playstation. If you drop BPC, that's two raids in nine months. I'll take those odds.
2. Games of Skill v. Games of Chance. One commenter suggested that New York courts have "specifically determined that Backgammon and Bridge are not games of chance, and thus are not gambling and therefore can be wagered upon." I have been unable to find any such New York court decision. As far as I know, New York has never issued such a decision. If anyone has a link to a New York case with the above holding, please post it in the comment section.
There are similar decisions in Oregon and a handful of other states where backgammon players challenged gambling statutes, but those cases addressed the statutes of those particular states. Without reading the text of the statutes at issue in those cases, it's impossible to know how successful applying similar logic in New York would be.
Until then, the fact that the New York statute makes a distinction for "a future contingent event not under his control or influence" is what will convince me that poker is "gambling". Similar logic would, in theory, apply for backgammon, although the thrust of the case in Oregon seemed to be that the roll of the dice is largely irrelevant, due to the skill demands of the game. How can you say that about poker? You can get all your money in with the best hand with one card to come, but if the cards come out the wrong way, you lose - and you have absolutely no control over how they come out unless you're a mechanic.
Beyond that, however, gambling on games is not the issue - the issue is profiting from gambling. The New York statutes are all designed to go after the facilitators of gambling. There's nothing that says you can't gamble on poker, or backgammon, or bridge -- as long as no third-party is profiting from it.