Harvard Minds Wrestle With Poker Regulation | Howard Lederer

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Harvard Minds Wrestle With Poker Regulation
by No Luck Needed member ttwna2k for NoLuckNeeded.com

A group of Harvard University law students and academics met last night with a pair of professional poker legends, Crandell Addington and Howard Lederer , to explore what it will take to convince judges and lawmakers across the United States to legalize the game.
Some of the best university minds in the US are taking up a seemingly unlikely cause – how to raise the stature of high-stakes poker and extricate the increasingly popular game from a web of state and federal prohibitions.

A newly-formed Harvard student group, the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society, organized the unusual session, held in a classroom at Harvard Law School. The outspoken and brilliant law professor Charles Nesson, who founded the Harvard group, led the discussion – even breaking out the chips afterwards for a round of poker with Addington and Lederer.

During a free-wheeling discussion in which Nesson and the two poker greats fielded questions from a hall packed with dozens of Harvard students, a consensus of sorts emerged. While there is a strong case to be made that poker is a game of skill, it has been unfairly lumped in with various forms of gambling, from lottery tickets to slot machines, participants in last night’s session said. Overall, poker enthusiasts have done a poor job making clear this crucial distinction, with widespread misunderstanding of what the game is really about.

“Ignorance is the largest factor,’’ noted Andrew Woods, a third year law student and director of Harvard’s Poker Strategic Thinking Society, who argued the public too often “associates poker with gambling.’’

Meanwhile, Nesson, the Harvard law professor, drew the debate back several times to what he described as the crucial legal question, whether poker is a game in which “skill predominates chance.’’

It was a query that drew an unlikely response from Addington, a Texan and a co-founder of the World Series of Poker, who retired from the game 25 years ago. Addington, who now runs a biotech company, offered a challenge of his own to the dozens of Harvard students to find what he called an obvious argument against poker as a game of skill. “I want to know if anyone has discovered the evidence in plain site (that) it’s a game of chance,’’ Addington said.

After several answers that missed the mark, the Texas poker great laid out his case, arguing the form of poker played on TV tournaments – and in particular one risky and overused hand on which the player typically bets all - could be used as an argument against poker as a game of skill. He lamented the loss of the more subtle game he recalled playing in the old Las Vegas. “The point is you go broke on one hand playing like that.’’

Still, neither Addington or Lederer, a more recent poker professional who has made millions playing in tournaments, traveled to Harvard to condemn the game that earned a fortune for both.

Addington, famed for helping bring the game Texas hold’em poker to the Las Vegas strip, noted that he could not have achieved the success he enjoyed on pure luck.

Nearing 70, Addington recalled playing feasting on “rich seals’’ at a time when players came to the poker table fully armed. “I can’t recall any players shooting at each other,’’ he chuckled. And the play was for keeps, with no limit to the amount that could be bet.

Sometimes large fortunes changed hands, as when a major Las Vegas business casino owner lost an 87.5 percent stake in a hotel. The high stakes helped fuel an intense and even vicious style of play, one that Addington called “crystallized aggression.’’ For gambling novices, he recommended reading up on military strategy.

Lederer, by contrast, came of age as a poker player in the 1980s and 1990s. A more civilized time for the game, Lederer, who has started poker related businesses, noted it has also been a time of explosive growth, with the Internet combining with television to turn the game from a niche pursuit in into a national obsession.

The wealth of poker literature, in turn, gives novices a chance to become adept much faster than in the past. “You can cut years and years off that journey,’’ he said. But Lederer also argued that, in his view, it is simply a “fact’’ that poker is mainly a game of skill.

What is needed, he argues, is a careful analysis, one that separates out the elements of skill from those involving pure luck. “Poker is a game that should be treated differently on the Internet,’’ he said. “I can’t think of a game that is played against other players that is not a game of skill. People don’t get together to flip coins against each other.’’

However, the two poker legends offered different solutions on how to wrestle poker from the grasp of regulators and law enforcement officials. Addington argued that it will ultimately fall on state legislatures to make new laws. But, from his experience in Texas, that can be a difficult route.

The “Baptists’’ opposed a bill that would have legalized Texas hold’em, with intimidated lawmakers leaving the legislation to die quietly without a vote. “They trotted out the same old tired argument about public mortality,’’ he said. But Lederer argued poker’s best hope is to be found in the courts, not in state legislatures. Lederer argued there is a strong enough case that poker is a skill-based game to convince the courts to legalize it.

Woods, director of the new Poker Strategic Thinking Society, argued poker’s main foe may not be lawmakers or judges, but rather a general ignorance about the game. The group, at this point, is looking to educate the general public about the crucial business and life skills playing poker can develop. So far, there have been several inquiries from teachers at all levels interested in incorporating poker into their lesson plans, Woods noted.

Moreover, the Harvard group is just one part of mushrooming student poker movement at universities across the country, with other schools, including UCLA, also forming poker chapters. “From a public policy perspective, it makes sense to have people develop the ability to assess risk,’’ Woods said.

For his part, Nesson, the Harvard law professor, made no secret of his sympathies. He decried the "legal persecution" that poker is facing and noted the new Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society, has, as part of its objective, “legitimizing the game of poker.’’ It is a cause that he is clearly taking personally as well. Nesson lamented the removal of poker from the Internet in the US in the recent ban on Internet gaming. “I was just affronted by it. I enjoyed playing on-line poker. Suddenly it’s gone.’’