Interview: Annie Duke Faces Congress Tomorrow

Annie Duke is one of the most well-known and respected poker players around, and she stands right on the front line in the fight for the legality of online poker. Her reputation as a poker player is well deserved thanks to a World Series of Poker bracelet-win in 2004, a victory at the 2005 WSOP Tournament of Champions invitational (worth $1 million), and for cashing more than 30 times in various WSOP events. She just also happens to be the kid sister of another poker superstar, Howard Lederer, who is also front and center in the fight for online poker.

Tomorrow, Duke will represent the Poker Players Alliance at a House Judiciary Committee hearing that will examine the United States policies as they relate to Internet gaming. Click here to read a story about that.

After shaking out the cobwebs from taking he red-eye flight from Los Angeles, the mother of four took an hour to talk about the issues facing online poker players. This is part one of a two-part series. Part two, as well as her written testimony, will be posted tomorrow.

Card Player: Why do you think poker has so many enemies in Congressional circles?

Annie Duke: I'm not sure that it does have so many enemies; I think it has some key and vocal enemies, and then there are certain Congressmen that don't want to be seen as pro-gambling. So I think that it's two issues; I think that there's a group of our representatives who are representing their constituents, but it's not like they're rogue. I mean, this is definitely an opinion of their constituents who believe that, because of the moral code that they follow, gambling is not a moral activity, and they certainly group poker in with gambling.

Now, I respect their opinion and I respect their moral code. What I don't respect is their belief that they're supposed to now legislate that moral code on me, that it's their job to legislate morality and to force everybody to follow their moral code. And then, what happens when they put these pieces of legislation forward? Even if someone is not in that extreme group of people that really thinks gambling is a sin, they still don't want to be seen as pro-gambling.

I think there still is very much a puritanical undercurrent that runs through the country, and it's so interesting, because there's such a strong dichotomy in terms of people or citizens' behavior and what their expressed views are. Because there's this puritanical undercurrent that says gambling, drinking, and sex are bad, and then there's the behavior of our citizens which is of gambling is all over the place. It's in like 48 states; I mean, everybody does it.

Then there's the issue of, putting that aside, that poker isn't gambling anyway, so it's misunderstood.

CP: Why should politicians listen closely to proponents of online poker?

AD: I think that there are a couple reasons. One is they should listen closely because 23 million Americans gamble online. So, we're talking about a very, very large group of voters. When you look at the people who feel like they're politically active enough to join a group like the Poker Players Alliance ... . We're talking about 800,000 members strong; that's very big for a political group. So, we're talking about a very, very, very strong voice. This is an issue that could swing the vote.

The other reason why they should stand up and pay attention, and this is actually one of the main reasons that I'm so passionate about this, is really just from the standpoint of what our founding fathers intended and whether this piece of legislation is in the realm of what our founding fathers intended. When you read John Stuart Mills' "On Liberty," he very clearly said that adults should be able to do what they want to do when it doesn't directly harm other people. I think gambling certainly falls in that category. This is adults choosing to spend their recreational dollars as they please. When it comes to online gambling, by the way, the average recreational dollar spent per week is $10, less than what it cost me to go to a movie in Los Angeles.

This is an activity that adults choose to engage in; it certainly doesn't harm anybody. [Tom] Jefferson and [James] Madison and Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, the framers of our Constitution, took that to heart, and we really were one of the first countries to embrace that idea, that in a free society adults should be free to do as they choose as long as they're not inflicting harm on other people. And it's really at the heart of our civil liberties, it's at the heart of our Constitution, and it's at the heart of our Bill of Rights.

If we start legislating things wherein people hurt themselves, as to opposed to other people, we're going to start banning things like fatty foods, for example. We're going to start banning online shopping. We're going to stop banning day trading. We're going to start banning real-life shopping, frankly.

The interesting thing is that when you look at the real harm to society of something like McDonald's or Doritos, the harm to society is so much greater for those to me, as an individual, than it is from gambling, because the fact that 60 percent of our nation is overweight. It costs me real dollars. It's one of the reasons that health-care costs are so incredibly crazy and out of control. So, when someone chooses not to live a healthy lifestyle, not to go to the gym, or to eat crap, it has an direct effect on me and my wallet. That said, because they live in this country, they have the right to eat McDonald's every day if they want. I may find it distasteful, but that doesn't mean that I have to force eating habits on you; you can choose to do whatever you want.

We're not looking to legislate those kinds of choices, and those kinds choices are much more disastrous. They have a much direct, harmful effect on the individual, and they have a harmful effect on society as a whole.

What are the main reasons poker should be regulated in the United States?

I think that regulation is always going to be the best way to go in terms of delivering a couple of things. One is delivering a safe product to the people using the product. I think the best example we could look at is the alcohol prohibition. What we see is that when you take something that adults are clearly going to use and you prohibit it, you don't actually change people's behavior, what you do instead is create a lot of illegal activities. People then will still create the product, it's just that now they're creating illegally without the watchful eye of governing bodies that make sure the product is safe. You get a who-knows-what delivered out of backyard stills.

I think gambling is the same thing. Clearly, banning it won't change people's behavior toward gambling; they're still going to gamble. Where there's a will there's a way, and all you're doing [by banning it] is creating an illegal activity.

CP: How important do you think it is to have people like you, your brother, and others showing up in D.C. and facing the politicos face to face?

AD: I think that it's important for my brother and I to do things like that, but I was more impressed by the guy from Alaska who flew in. So, not that we don't carry weight when we actually get our butts to Washington to lobby, but I think that when a Congressman meets his constituents who bothered to fly in from Alaska to discuss this issue, that's a big deal to that politician. One thing that we learned during that fly-in, if you write a letter to your representative, it's worth 10 votes to them. They figured if you actually bothered to write a letter, that there are nine other people thinking the same thing. When you fly-in, it's worth 100 votes.

I think those people are much more important to the cause than my brother and I.

CP: At the recent PPA fly-in, what are some of the things that the Congress members you met had to say about online gambling?

AD: It was interesting. The Congress members that I met with either were really pretty familiar with the issue and were very much sympathetic to the cause, or if they weren't, they got sympathetic really fast.

Whether you agree with the civil liberties issue or not, whether you think that gambling is distasteful or not, when you hear the stuff that's happening with the WTO [World Trade Organization], I don't think a reasonable member of Congress can't stand up.

When you get down to brass tacks and start talking about these issues, and start talking about the kind of trade sanctions that the U.S. is facing on this issue, they stand up and listen.

CP: What are some things you plan on telling the committee members at the hearing tomorrow?

AD: A lot of what we already discussed. I'm going to talk about the fact that I'm representing an organization that is 800,000 members strong, that this is what I do as my profession and I would like to be able to continue to do it whenever and wherever I want, that just because poker has moved from the kitchen table to the computer table doesn't change that people want to be able to do it. And my general understanding of the founding principals of this country, looking at what Madison and Jefferson were taking to heart from Mill, is that in this country, adults should be able to do what they want when they want.

I'm going to address the child issue. The opposition has pulled the "minors gambling online" issue quite a bit. The first thing I'm going to say about that is as a mother of four, I very passionately believe that that's a family issue and that the government shouldn't legislate what's happening in the home. If the child is stealing your credit card to gamble online, I imagine that there are quite a few problems that are much bigger than the online gaming issue. I certainly know what my children are doing online, and, honestly, of the kinds of problems that kids can have online these days, online gambling is pretty far down on my list.

Even if you don't believe that that's how gambling should be handled, and that the parents should generally know what their children are looking at on the Internet, the fact is that there's quite a bit of software out there in terms of age-verification that makes sure that someone is in the majority before they gamble online, and if a parent discovered that a child has run up a gambling debt, they could simply call up a bank and refuse the charge. The sites themselves are very motivated to keep minors off of their sites, because they would like to avoid those expensive chargebacks. The gambling sites actually do quite a bit of self-regulation.

Now, that being said, allowing the sites to self-regulate is not as effective as having real regulations in place, and if you are concerned about children gambling online, prohibition is not actually the best avenue in order to prevent it; regulation and legalization is actually the better answer.

I'm going to discuss that issue quite a bit, and I'm also going to discuss another card that the opposition pulls out quite often, which is gambling compulsion and gambling addiction. The interesting thing about gambling addiction and problem gambling is that the rate of them among people who gamble actually runs from about 0.4 to about 0.7 percent. The study that we've seen shows that online gaming doesn't actually increase those percentages.

We know that Internet gambling just gives people who already gamble another option, it doesn't actually increase the total number of gamblers in the country, nor does it increase problem gambling.

The fact is that gambling addiction runs at about one-tenth of what alcohol addiction runs, and yet we figured out that we should be regulating and legalizing alcohol and not prohibiting it. We should totally be behaving the same way toward gambling. The fact is that over 99 percent of the gambling population uses the product extremely responsibly. And, in the end, it's everybody's choice to gamble or not to gamble, and we should allow people to make those choices.