Jeff Haney on how passage of bill will put a damper on Vegas poker tournaments

Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006 | 7:50 a.m.

Poker pro Erik Friberg navigated a field of more than 8,700 players to make the final table of this year's World Series of Poker.

He later marveled at the skills of the opponents he encountered who had honed their game online.

"Playing on the Internet, you can get so many hands in such a short time, you learn quickly to play really well," said Friberg, who makes his living primarily by playing online poker in Stockholm, Sweden.

In coming years, more and more Internet specialists would advance to the late rounds of the World Series and other big tournaments, Friberg predicted.

With the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, his prediction could be in jeopardy. The bill, awaiting President Bush's signature, prohibits banks and other financial institutions from processing payments related to online gambling, including sports betting and poker.

As Internet cardrooms have driven the phenomenal growth of poker in the past several years, the bill could spell the end of the poker craze that has generated huge tournament fields in Las Vegas and other gambling-friendly cities.

Poker insider Nolan Dalla of Las Vegas likened it to a pinprick that could burst the balloon of the poker boom in the United States.

"I think it could be extremely damaging to poker," Dalla said. "It's a question of just how much damage it's going to do."

Rather than approaching a plateau in its popularity, online poker was still growing "astonishingly fast" before the bill was pushed through Congress by Republican leaders, according to Whittier Law School professor I. Nelson Rose.

For example, Party Poker was the eighth-fastest growing site on the Internet from July 2005 to July 2006, said Rose, who published his six-page opinion of the bill at gamblingandthelaw.com. Party Poker, which operates from Gibraltar and is traded publicly in Britain, announced it would suspend service to U.S. customers as a result of the legislation.

If other major Internet poker sites are forced to stop accepting business from U.S. customers, it would be devastating to the industry, as up to 80 percent of online players come from the U.S.

One question raised by the bill's passage, Rose said, is how far federal regulators are willing to proceed into the realm of Internet commerce. It will be relatively easy to prevent U.S.-based financial companies from dealing with gambling operations, Rose said. But what about services such as online money-mover Neteller, based on the Isle of Man?

"Neteller might say, we're going to blow them off, we're not regulated by the U.S.," Rose said in a phone interview from his California office. "Can (federal regulators) say banks can no longer send money to Neteller, which also has nongambling uses? That opens a door that U.S. regulators might not want to enter, as far as regulating various aspects of the Internet."

(Neteller issued a statement saying the company was "considering the potential impact of the act at this time" and would continue to monitor the situation, but its shares, also traded in Britain, dropped more than 60 percent.)

Sure, there will always be a way for a determined American gambler to get his money offshore by using foreign bank accounts and similar methods.

Amateurs who play poker purely for recreation, however, will not be eager to deal with such complications and will almost certainly opt to sit out.

That would create an online poker-playing population made up almost exclusively of top-level pros such as Friberg and other sophisticated gamblers. It would be missing an influx of what used to be called "live ones" but have come to be known as "fish" - novice or unskilled players who lose money, the driving force of any poker economy.

Certainly any online poker enthusiast who had been aligned with the GOP can now relate to former NBA star and aspiring politician Charles Barkley, quoted this past summer as saying, "I was a Republican - until they lost their minds."