19 months of no poker before it goes live.
pay horse racing industry 60mill.
no sharing liquidity with other states.

no. no. and no plz. i'll stick with WPN, Bovada, Chico etc.
no bill is better than this bill.

hope they get their heads outa their asses n get something that actually has a shot at longevity passed.


oh and ssn to play? so they dont care about that tourist money or guys relocating just to play and generate rake.

> 19 months not that outlandish, not sure what you're expecting. NJ took 10 months, and that was considered a super-expedited process.
> $60M, who cares? It's $ that would otherwise get lit on fire by dysfunctional CA gov, and otherwise tracks are going to stonewall any bill, so just take the compromise.
> No sharing liquidity: yeah, this is bad.

Non-SSN holders are a tiny fraction of would-be CA players. So yeah: no one should care too much about that, and it's going to be part of any bill so might as well get used to it.

Assemblyman Mike Gatto. Introduced AB 9 in December 2014

http://www.onlinepokerreport.com/148...-online-poker/

Here is what he said in February 2016

http://www.pokernews.com/news/2016/0...rnia-24056.htm

60 mirrions to horse racing yeehaw. Why play cards? Just buy a horse and a track and train there. Prize pools go up, rake to the bettors stays the same. Freeroll.

Are there other industries where you have to pay off your indirect competitors to be allowed to operate?

What percentage of those located in CA are there illegally, there on visas, or tourists? Is that group more or less likely to indulge in recreational gaming? I think it might amount to a bit more than a tiny fraction, more like a concerning fraction. But yeah the liquidity issue is the frosting topping off the sh*tcake here.

thanks for posting!

The SSN issue isn't going anywhere, so no one should lose too much sleep over it. Party currently requires players to have an SSN to play in NJ, and WSOP requires either that or a passport scan. Illegals aren't gonna be faxing in their passports either. Tourists: meh, ask NV -- a state where people travel to specifically to gamble -- how much success they're seeing enticing those tourists to play online. And fwiw many visa holders actually have an SSN. Regardless: this isn't a high-priority item that anyone here should be fighting for or care too much about, and has a 0% chance of coming out of the bill anyway.

No interstate pooling = v bad. Note that this doesn't mean that they can't reverse that decision later on, but actually baking that prohibition into the bill will make that climb much steeper, when it's torture getting the CA stakeholders to agree on anything.

Anyone saying that no bill > this bill hasn't been paying attention. CA is a political clusterf*k because of tribal gaming. Nothing in this bill is a show-stopper in the way that e.g. a super-high tax rate would be. The no-interstate thing is def bad, but if it comes down to a decision of whether to accept that or go back to square one, we should hope this bill gets snap-called.

I think you are missing his point here. "It's already happening therefore it's legal" is incredibly myopic. There will be challenges under Dormant Commerce Clause that the pacts are discriminatory (see: states requiring vendors to pair with hometown favorite land-based casinos to procure licensing). These bills do not even make an attempt to equivocate favoritism as they openly and brazenly pick winners and losers. Not even the tribes are exempt from unduly burdening interstate commerce (gasp!), and they are certain to realize that.

The original interchange was:

If it helps, you can change my statement from "The regulated US marketplaces already pool interstate. It's legal." to "The regulated US marketplaces already pool interstate, and hence don't seem all that perturbed about the near-term possibility of constitutional challenges." So irrespective of the viability of a constitutional challenge, it's far from "obvious" that interstate pacts fall afoul of the DCC. Or that it's "not something States can touch" when they're already doing so. But let's not get lost in the weeds here: the Q of why the bill would explicitly prohibit interstate compacts is a legitimate one. Maybe it's fear of a constitutional challenge (even while other States don't seem concerned). Maybe (theory I proposed) it's because of how zealously tribes guard their quasi-monopoly on CA gaming. "Interstate compacts", if not properly understood, may very well sound to their ears like something that might threaten their pole-position on CA gaming, leading them to demand bright-line language that walls CA off from any other States' players.

The status quo is certainly better for my pocketbook. 19 months of no online poker means 19 months of no side income. The average roundtrip commute + waiting for a game at an indian casino for me is the length of my average online session and would occur very infrequently.

The felony stuff is just damn offensive to me -- you're making thousands of Californians overnight felons with the law. A $10 SNG would now be a felony and it's unjust and not right. That's just insane. The CA online sites would have a major competitive advantage in terms of player balance security, quick cashouts/deposits, advertising, local promotions, etc. that they would easily outcompete unregulated sites - they don't need to make us felons to do so.

You've been smoking the libertarian way too hard if you think 60m is better off subsidizing horse tracks than going to an inefficient bureaucracy. At least with the latter, it has some chance of the betterment of society.

I'm also concerned regarding rake and liquidity of the games for CA online poker, with all the mouths that need to be fed before site profitability and the fixed rake laws.

I don't know if I'd ask NV because the hotel running the in-room poker service likely prefers the rubes to buy into the pit or the slots. NJ, from what I understand, turned blue face down in the crib shortly after being abortively ejected from the corrupted womb that conceived it. Not a model to query much less emulate.

The thing I was wondering about is, I am quite sure but without data, that CA is probably the largest scholastic alien sanctuary of any state by a large multiple. Also you have all of your Silicon stateside outsourcees but as you say they probably have TIN's, maybe some of the Coolie Cardinals have them too, idk. Cuz that's precisely your market. Maybe Carlos the jardinero isn't making the target demo short list but I can't imagine any business would willingly forfeit 7% of its potential market share for the sake of a couple ill-chosen words.

The whole charade is an ongoing self-indictment of american government doin its thang.

Actually, I'd say that assuming anyone who prefers no bill to this one hasn't been paying attention simply shows an inability on your part to see things from other people's point of view. Whether you agree with them or not, I think that preferring the status quo to online poker being a felony for over a year and a half is a perfectly valid and understandable stance.

"Social Security Number" should at least be changed to "U.S. Taxpayer Identification Number". The underlying reason it's in there at all is to enforce collection of state income tax on winnings. If they were smart, they'd include a mechanism to collect income tax on players who don't have a TIN (visiting foreigners), such as tax withholding on net withdrawals by those without a TIN.

I don't disagree with the idea that the above is a reasonable and logically-sound position for a CA player to take: the devil you know, and all that...
I happen to believe that in the aggregate, however, legal & regulated online poker in California would represent a massive step forward towards a better and more sustainable environment/ecosystem, and dramatically outweighs any short-term drawbacks. There probably won't be much common ground to be found between me and those that disagree with that underlying premise.

Can you please elaborate what you mean by this?

its a step forward but the cost is too great (for me personally 19 months of no poker is huge). online poker has a hard enough time surviving with this state by state approach but now they wana pay the 1st 60 mill to the horse racing industry? Geo location isnt cheap either. All these added costs will reduce their bottom line and lord knows cali cardrooms aren't scared to have substantially higher rake than other states.

again, no bill > this bill (for me)

Whether the first $60M goes to the horse tracks or doesn't has no bearing on the costs to the site. It's just how the state will allocate their gaming tax revenues.

First $60M going to racing tracks means the state will get $0 out of this. Assuming tax of 15% on gross gaming revenue, the state would start to get something once GGR is > $400 mil. Meanwhile market estimates for CA are in the $200-300 mil range, and in the case of NJ and Nevada, estimates pre-launch have proven to be rather ambitious and much higher than actual numbers. Seems like a bad look if CA gets nothing out of this, as it could lead to other states being much less prone towards legalizing iPoker in the future.

The state wouldn't be getting nothing out of it. The state would simply be choosing to allocate the tax revenues they get to boosting the racing industry. Considering the fact that the yearly state budget for CA is close to $250 Billion dollars a year, it's a relatively small amount of revenues.

+1

Can someone describe to me how the tracks have so much power to begin with? This site shows roughly 10 tracks in the whole state; there's probably more small ones but I'm guessing these are the only politically relevant ones.

California's 69 casinos pulled in $7 billion in 2013.

Looks like the horse tracks pulled in $3 billion in 2013 according to this report. Well, that's a good chunk for a small amount of tracks I guess. Just don't get how ~10 legislators in horse track districts control the fate of every casino and card room.

Good question - I don't know the politics of it. But thought I would mention that the $3B brought in by the race tracks was the total handle, not the net wagering revenue. 80% of the $3B was returned to bettors in payouts.

Sure, by all appearances, and maybe I'm measuring with the wrong stick so correct me if I am, when the 11th most populous state gets fully regulated online poker with wide open advertising and its entire daily traffic volume is routinely coming in at less than 1% of PokerStars, a good word for that might be stillborn.

When you had, judging from Neteller documents, what amounted to probably close to 80% of the worlds online gaming revenues coming from one country and that industry was nuked overnight with a last minute backroom amendment to a must pass security bill without any possibility of debate or even public disclosure, an amendment which was probably written by businessmen who didn't want the competition, a good word for that might be corrupt.

Do you think that's due to the type of regulation in NJ though? I understand the lack of interstate linkage dampening the enthusiasm of the competent players, but how much do the fish/recs really care? (Full disclosure: I'm a fish--love playing, but not enough to learn it seriously, and I suck at the game). Or is it due to the fact that online poker was a big deal during the last decade and that many other forms of online gambling have captured the attention of the masses since?