PPA Feels California Online Poker Regulation Will Happen

Posted on February 22, 2010 
Filed Under General

Last week, the California state director for the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) attended a informational hearing in the California Senate Governmental Organization Committee, and left the meeting confident that the state’s legislature will quickly move towards legalizing intrastate poker in the near future.

"I think it's clear after the hearing that, if not for the financial mess the state is in, these hearings wouldn't even be held," Steve Miller said. "It's such a mess, and they are trying so hard to close the budget gap, that it seems like something is going to happen for certain."

California’s financial woes have been well publicized over the last year, with state officials looking into every possible resource as a potential way of driving in revenue, with online poker being one of the more lucrative options. The meeting lasted more than eight hours, with Miller and PPA executive director John Pappas on hand to testified on the behalf of the poker rights for the 127,255 PPA members that hail from California.

"The PPA respects the due diligence of the committee to investigate 'if' online poker can be regulated, and we stand here to tell you that it unquestionably can be regulated and, in fact, already is being regulated, very effectively, across the globe in well-respected jurisdictions," Pappas said in his testimony.

One of the biggest roadblocks towards the regulation for California comes from the California Tribal Business Alliance, which overseas Indian-related gaming in the state. One of the alliance’s members, Leslie Lohse, says that regulating online poker in California would violate tribal gaming compacts and result in the stopping of payments from the tribes to the state’s general fund, amounts which total in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

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