[MicroBob]

I reiterate that I still don't know if any of this makes it potentially legit or not and also that I really don't know what I'm talking about AT ALL regarding non-profits and stuff like that...but fwiw:

Seems like there is some flexibility with non-profits from state-to-state and with the right lawyers and re-working of 'your mission' etc I think you can take a profitable enterprise and try to pull off calling it a non-profit.

I worked for a minor-league hockey team in Memphis that was owned by a non-profit organization partly claiming the charitable stuff they did for the community and stuff like that.
I believe it was revealed that this organization moved from Tennessee to Mississippi because of more flexible and lenient laws about non-profits or something like that.

I know diddly about how it worked. The team president had a really good lawyer to figure out all that stuff and how they could pull it off.
They also got in some trouble for suspiciously looking more like a for-profit venture than a non-profit and I don't know what came of that. Buying your own hockey team and then claiming that now it's part of your non-profit organization struck some people as kind of weird.

Cliff-notes version: You might be setting yourself to get in trouble. But I believe there are creative ways to re-define "non-profit" if you have the right legal-counsel to help you do it.

One way I could immediately think of might be to take an extremely small rake or membership-fee, use some of it for operations and to maintain the site, and use the rest of it to donate to charities.

This would effectively be similar to some charity poker or charity casino night where people pay an entry-fee or whatever and compete for some prizes in there and part of the money goes to renting the space and perhaps even paying the host or MC of the event.

For the non-profit poker-room, get various poker celebrities and companies to donate chip-sets, autographed posters or hockey-jerseys or whatever, have the members of the site bid for the items, and then donate the extra profits to more charities.
My extremely uninformed and amateur impression is that donating to charity in such a way could conceiveably allow you to take advantage of not-for-profit status.