The no summary judgement remark is just the court stating the procedural rules for criminal law, in a civil case a defendant can ask the judge to skip the trial and give a ruling based on the evidence, but under criminal rules a case can't be dismissed for lack of evidence before trial.

thanks for the editorial, us judge

Sorry, hopefully by tomorrow. Things just happening faster than expected tbh, and everything is still under construction.

ty

If a trial goes down in NY- the defendants may need to stock up on Vaseline. Those guys almost never lose.

This. Also thanks for continuing to follow the case for us D_F.

In the first campos/Elie brief the DOJ took the line that w.r.t to UIGEA:

Bold emphasis added.As an aside I have previously written here the report mentions for the vast majority video poker FWIW.

w.r.t to IGBA:
Bold emphasis added again. I think it's useful to quote Skall's response(hope he doesn't mind) to a question by myself re: State laws and IGBA in an older PL thread:

So w.r.t UIGEA the Plaintiff claims that if Congress had so desired it would have specifically explicitly exempted online poker whilst simultaneously arguing that in IGBA that the Plaintiff knows what Congress meant and implicitly construed, i.e it's covered despite no explicit reference to poker in IGBA.

Is that position not somewhat logically inconsistent or have I made a logic faux pas?

IMHO the uncertainty w.r.t interpretation of gambling legislation or "muddled waters" needs to be cleared up or ideally new legislation enacted else it will hamper the industry. Let's see if it is a bit clearer tomorrow... in teh other thread LDO

I haven't found a link yet.

I've found Nathan Vardi (Forbes author) to be well-informed and very even handed in his reporting.

He even took a jab at the government in a previous article:

Still, the government lawyers will have to hope that their understanding of the law is better than their knowledge of country music.

^^ I don't spam my own sites, but I think this is the link you are looking for: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&p...0ZDcz&hl=en_US

This judge basically punted all the issues until after the trial.

That is what I was looking for. Thanks.

The actual Order is a bit more interesting than the Forbes article, especially wioth respect to the analysis of the exemption.

All in all, the Order decided almost nothing, except that the case is going to trial because the legality of the underlying poker business will be examined under NY laws.

.... Lawdude wins, so far.

Quite apart from the applicability of UIGEA and IGBA, my reading of the bank fraud caselaw is that they're hosed on that.

Obviously, though, it would be a major victory for poker players in the US if the UIGEA and IGBA claims were thrown out.

It's true that poker bets are different from some other types of bets. The problem is, the statutes don't really draw any distinction based on that. The triggering event is a bet or wager, not any particular form of bet or wager.

I'll say this about Skalla's attempts with respect to skills and chance-- the role of chance actually is an element of most state gambling statutes (as well as the UIGEA), so he's trying to make an argument based on something that's actually relevant under the applicable statutes. You can't simply say "poker is different"-- you have to show that it's different in a way that MATTERS under statutory text and caselaw.

I suspect you can go to any state or federal judge in America and you will find that counter-intuitive arguments are harder to win. That's simply a fact of life.

Perhaps. I clearly don't understand the logic, or utter lack thereof, of the legal process. I am curious as to how much the terminology of poker is relevant.

If we were playing a game of chess, and I held the while pieces, I would open 1. e4; and if you responded 1. e5, my move would be 2. f4, the King's Gambit. I am willing to risk the loss of a pawn in order to gain control of the center as well as open lines that will result in what I hope to be a devastating attack on your king.

• If we called this opening the King's Bet, would chess be gambling?
• If poker had treated a "bet" of x dollars as being a raise from 0 dollars to x dollars (which is actually how it was recorded in Tribeca Table hand histories), and avoided use of the word "bet" altogether, would poker not be gambling?

On a more pragmatic line, NY's treatment of poker clubs is largely based on the affiliation of these clubs to "guys in silk suits", who were often into bookmaking, loan sharking, and other types of clearly illegal activities. To what extent do court rulings in these cases reflect the character of the defendants as opposed to the text of the statutes?

^^ Continuing from the nice chess example

Growing grapes from UK Telegraph newspaper
So when I risk my money on a vineyard by wagering that I will reap a good harvest and is that not gambling too?

As a matter of fact some of the 'larger' ones are subdivided into investor plots 'vignettes' that combine under co-op agreement to share and outsource all the big costs of maintenance.

The fact is the word "gambling" is in common parlance and often has different meanings between different persons. Buying home insurance I consider gambling by the insurers that it won't happen which means I'm gambling too as I take the other side. many others don't consider that gambling.

All that matters is that under these statutes is the playing of Internet poker covered by them? If one's sole argument is that it uses the same terminology then you better start charging chess players and vineyard owners for "gambling" too.

Good points and well-said. I understand that the legal standards do force themselves to, necessarily, look at the duration of a game until it reaches its payoff. I agree that it would be nice if some consideration were given to typical duration; just because people can choose to play only a single hand in a cash game, that doesn't mean that most players aren't playing enough hands to equal out to the tournament variance in any way. But yeah, legally the option to end a game early is probably tough to overcome... even though this hypothetical judge who approved tournaments but not cash games would probably not have any issue with players somehow "cashing out" or selling their seats in the middle of a tournament for their chip equity, assuming such a market existed. Or maybe they would. Who knows! Maybe an enterprising poker site could create cash game poker where "score" is kept until you've played X,000 hands, upon which your results are taken from or added to your deposit.

Also I love where TheDarkElf is going here.