[TheEngineer]

Last month you agreed with the rest of us in that we should worry about get IGREA through the House (or at least through a House committee) and then hope to get on must-pass legislation to get it through the Senate if we wish to pass legislation this year, and many (including me) agreed. Why now the drive to abandon this in favor of a backroom deal or nothing?

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I don't want to sound overly pessimistic, and indeed in the past I have been a "glass half-full" guy as to the current situation, which I think will be mostly unchanged post-regs as I believe the regs aren't likely to be enforced effectively enough to stop US players from playing online. However we will have to be willing to jump through more hoops and bear with more delays.

Regarding the future of online poker, I think we need to distinguish between the short term of like the next 5 years, and the longer term after that. In the longer term I am very optimisitic that either options 2a or 2b that Engineer listed above will come to pass. But in the near term, with the political reality that even *if* some favorable legislation passes the house it won't even get a committee hearing in the senate once Kyl and others place a hold on it, then we are unlikely to succeed. Which is why I and others have previously said that our only realistic chance *this year* is getting such legislation passed in the same way as the IUGEA did, by being attached to must pass legislation.

If we don't want to be let down big, we must accept this political reality, while maintaining the determination to keep working to achieve our goals. We need to look at what we are doing now as plowing the political ground and planting the seeds for the future when we hope to reap the fruits of such present and future efforts.

So for now of course we keep working hard on getting something favorable passed this year, but concentrating on acceptable language being fashioned in the house, and then getting same attached in conference committee to must pass legislation, which is something highly difficult. Which is why we must also get some committments from important senators who chair committees, and who have influence with the senate leader, Sen. Reid.

Also for the near term we need to concentrate on neutering the regs as much as possible, as the situation where they aren't effective mostly, just like with alcohol during prohibition, will be a *huge* factor in helping to persuade other politicians to our cause in the future.

As far as neutering those regs, which Engineer has already been urging all of us on with letters to the Treasury etc., we need to work on our allies in Congress to do the following:

1) Use the option Mr. K mentioned in deleting funding for enforcement in the funding bills. Since all funding legislation has to originate in the house, we are in better shape trying something like this as that is where most of our support is.

2) I don't remember the specifics now, but I believe it was Nate in a thread late last year who dug out another option, which is that Congress can refuse to accept the regs, let alone fund them. Obviously we need to encourage this avenue as well.

3) Back the efforts of the banks to water down the regs by writing our politicians to back such measures as being a giant unfunded mandate that will hurt banking in our states. Though we shouldn't lie, we can buy a nominal number of shares in some bank corps so that we can say we are stockholders concerned about the effects the regs will have on the corporations' profits.

4) Keep playing and supporting the sites in the US market even when as likely, they occasionally experience hiccups in cashout times and vehicles, as a result of being forced to constantly adapt. *And* spread the word to casual players that you can still get your money online and off again, albeit with delays that weren't happening before. Again this is to keep the regs from being effective which further aids our efforts to get legislation passed sometime in the future, even if not this year.


As far as things like the WTO, the lawsuit against the IUGEA and such, those are more longshots that we can't as easily influence. However they are freerolls, and added to other longshots we are working on, up our EV and make it a little more likely that *some* longshot or other will come in sometime.

If we don't have both this long term focus, and a short term focus that puts equal weight on neutering the regs as much as possible, then I am afraid that many here will be in for a big letdown by the end of the year. We just need to work on plowing the ground, planting the seeds and realize it takes a while to reap the fruits of current efforts.

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