Society are organizations that are involved with gambling! Gamblers are viewed as a group of people with a set amount of money budgeted for gambling. Therefore, any widening of the gambling horizons is viewed by those groups who are already approved for legalized gambling as competition for the gambler’s dollar that must continue to be shut out of the marketplace. And guess who is a member of that monopolistic-minded group? The state itself! Nearly every state is making money from gambling these days. They worry those items like lottery revenue might decline and put an additional crimp into already tight state budgets. If the state thinks gambling money is going to be siphoned off by poker, they may well fight against it. That is why there is probably a better shot by going directly to the people, in my opinion. In the November election, “Proposition 1” passed by a wide margin. This is a law requiring any expansion of gambling to be approved by both a statewide vote allowing a specific of gambling and a vote of the people of a city or township approving it in a specific location. This anti-gambling statute was proposed and backed by an alliance of the three legal Detroit casinos and the Indian tribes (which were exempt from the statute’s requirements).

Opposition to the statute came mainly from the state, which was concerned that the state lottery would have a crimp put in its expansion to new areas and the revenue-gathering idea of allowing slot machines at racetracks would be torpedoed.

Here is my suggestion for a legal definition of poker: “Poker is a card game for two or more persons in which the players bet in turn among themselves on hands whose full content is unknown to the other participants; the bets are gathered together to be won by the best hand or an unmatched wager, and the hands are ranked according to a scale based on the frequency of their occurrence.” Feedback on this definition is welcome.

Editor’s note: Bob Cia ffone has authored four poker books, Middle Limit Holdem Poker, Pot-limit and No-limit Poker, improve Your Poker, and Omaha Holdem Poker. All can be ordered from Card Player. Ciaffone is available for poker lessons: E-mail thecoach@chartermi.net. His website is www.pokercoach. us, where you can get his rulebook, Robert’s Rules of Poker, for free. Cia ffone is the card room director for the ChecknRaisePoker. corn webs ite.



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