America Poker Players

It only took a few hours after Congress passed the Safe Port Act, which included anti-online gambling legislation, for Jim Perkins to set up an online petition.

Now, 10 days later, he’s hoping more people stop by and sign it. So far, 5,800 people stopped by and signed the petition he created at petitiononline.com. But that’s without any help that he was hoping to get from poker sites or anyone else. The signatures have been generated by word of mouth. A thread about it has even been started on CardPlayer.com’s forum.

Perkins thought the online sites would give him a hand generating traffic to his petition, but he was wrong. Every site he contacted told him it wouldn’t be able to help him. He asked what he called the most popular sites to send out a mass e-mail to its American customer base informing them about the petition, but all the sites said they couldn’t do it.

This is Perkins’ first petition and he imagined if he got help from the online sites, he would have upwards of 100,000 signatures by now. As it is, a few hundred people a day have stopped by to fill out the form.

The Santa Monica-based finance lawyer has been playing online since 1998 and considers himself a poker hobbyist. He came to poker — both live-action and online — via bridge.

After the signaturs slow to fewer than a hundred a day, Perkins will write all his local representatives and send them the petition. He’ll also send it to the handful of online gambling supporters in government.

With the thousands and thousands of players already members of the Poker Players Alliance, and the thousands and thousands of players who play online, he still expects the number of signatures to grow.

How much depends on the public. The petition reads:

To All Members of the Congress and Senate

We would like to register our strong disagreement with and disapproval of the recently enacted bill regarding the prohibition and/or regulation of Internet gambling. The bill was originally introduced in the House of Representatives by Representative Goodlatte and was attached to “must-pass” legislation in the Senate by Senator Frist.

We strongly believe that the government should not attempt to prohibit online gambling by adults. We favor legalization, regulation, and taxation of online gambling by the government of the United States.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Poker News Article courtesy of Card Player