Good For The Game: Jason Somerville – Online Poker Lobbyist

For the media, it’s always easy to focus on negativity and controversy. Writing about these things draws traffic, increases hits and can help a writer build a following. But the truth is, controversy and negativity are low hanging fruit for a columnist and I think it’s time I personally reach for something higher.

In an effort to highlight positivity in the poker community, PokerNews now presents Good For The Game, a column that will look at the people, places and things in poker that are exactly that.

With all due respect to Chris Moneymaker, the poker boom was about more than just his 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event win. The World Poker Tour had kicked off a year earlier, using hole-card cams to present the game to a whole new audience in a brand new way. Plus, what really made the whole thing go was the fact that the millions of TV viewers who were exposed to the game through coverage of both Moneymaker’s historic win and the fledgling WPT didn’t have to fly to Las Vegas or visit their local casino to start playing. If they had Internet access, they were in.

If poker boomed anywhere, it was online first. In fact, while the gray market and offshore status of much of the early players in the industry makes it tough to quantify, according to Christiansen Capital Advisors, online poker revenues grew from $82.7 million in 2001 to $2.4 billion in 2005. That’s a boom.

Of course, things started to go downhill in the United States with the passage of The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA) and online poker was all but obliterated on April 15, 2011 when the U.S. Department of Justice shut down the biggest operators left in the U.S. market. A billion dollar segment of the poker industry was shattered overnight, but somehow the game survived. The online market in Europe continued to flourish. A new online market in Asia began to emerge. And while a crop of gray market operators willing to test the resolve of the U.S. government continued to attract some U.S. players, most kept the game afloat playing more live poker than ever before.

The fight for online poker went to the state level, and now more than five years later, online poker is regulated in Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey. Plus, the possibility of legal and regulated online poker is at least being talked about in heavily populated states like New York and California.

It almost goes without saying that legal and regulated online poker across the United States would be good for the game. Any portion of the billions in annual revenue being returned to the industry would be a windfall, and since the availability of online poker in millions of American homes has been a conduit for the growth and health of the game in the past, it certainly could be again.

That’s why the campaign for legal and regulated online poker across the United States is so important and why I think it’s important to recognize the efforts of at least one of its leaders.

Poker is such an individual game that the community itself is a little dysfunctional. Lobbying efforts made by the Poker Players Alliance often seem stale and ineffectual. But one of the game’s …

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