$500 million, 38 million residents and 2 influential California Indian tribes. Those are some of the numbers which are involved with an important piece of legislation that is allegedly going to be delivered to California lawmakers the first week of June. With a very long history of supporting physical poker rooms, the Golden State would become the fourth state in the US to legally offer some type of state-sanctioned legal online poker. Delaware, New Jersey and Nevada all currently deliver Internet wagering legally to their residents and visitors, and a band of Pechanga Indians agree with some of their San Manuel counterparts that California needs to be online as well. State regulated California online poker would represent the largest stateside player base for virtual gambling thus far.
While cyber gambling has not produced massive financial numbers in the three states which currently offer it, those jurisdictions boast only a total population of 13 million. California by itself lays claim to more than 38 million residents. With nearly 3 times the population of the entire US Internet gambling industry, California would enter the marketplace as the predominant player. Recent revenue numbers in New Jersey and Delaware, coupled with the populous presence of potential poker players in California, have led industry analysts to believe that an estimate of 500 million first-year tax and revenue dollars for the state would not be an overly aggressive guess.
In a state that has battled bankruptcy, those types of numbers are almost too big to ignore. The leaders from the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians and the San Manuel Band of Serrano Mission Indians recently had their final meeting concerning a proposal which they say would deliver legal online gambling in the form of Internet poker to California. Those are two of the largest and most influential Indian tribes in that state. And if they can appease the Morongo tribe which recently announced a partnership with PokerStars and three of the largest California poker rooms, legislators viewing the proposal next week may meet with statewide Indian support to help push the bill through.
You may recall that PokerStars was indicted on money-laundering and other charges by the US DOJ in 2011. Though they have since reached a “white knight” status in the poker community by making good on frozen player pools and appeasing the DOJ, they do have that black mark against them. In some cases, a “bad actor” clause is included in contracts. The idea is to exclude any previously indicted firms from benefiting if Internet poker is legalized in California. It is not known at this point whether the Pechanga/San Manuel Internet gaming proposal will appear favorable to Morongo and PokerStars, but we do know that the proposal is rumored to be delivered to California lawmakers sometime from June 2 through June 6.
Jerome Encinas is a tribal lobbyist close to the proposal, and he recently mentioned in an interview that the last meeting between the two powerful tribes “went well.” He also pointed out that discussions are 99.9% finished on the proposed wording of the online poker bill. This would mean merely getting it in front of the right legislative parties before the 2014 legal session in California closes this August. With such a rich card room and poker playing history, California Internet poker legalized and run by state certified parties is more a matter of when than if. Let’s hope that the proposed legislation makes for a 2014 legal Internet poker presence in California.