Following on from my earlier article about the TDCAA seeking an opinion from the Texas Attorney General that free-entry poker tournaments which give out prizes are illegal, I had a very informative e-mail dialog with Markus Kypreos, the research attorney who wrote the article I quoted.
Mr. Kypreos is attempting to clarify the law as it is written, which his organization gets asked about a lot, so my characterization of him as a "radical anti-poker lobbyist" was a little harsh.
That said, I still disagree with his interpretation of how the laws should be applied to chips in a free-entry poker tournament. I'm very interested in seeing how the A.G. views the subject because interpreting the law as banning the risking of anything of value in public could have some wider implications for activities beyond poker.
The whole issue is going to come down to whether a chip in a free-entry poker tournament has value, or does not have value. I would fervently argue that those chips do not have value. Success in a poker tournament is not measured by how many chips you amass, but how long you stay alive with at least one chip. Your end payout in a poker tournament is correlated to the number of people you have outlasted, not the number of chips you have amassed. The number of chips you amass is irrelevant because outside of first place, everyone ends the tournament with zero chips.
At no point in a poker tournament are chips exchanged for prizes, nor is there any "exchange rate" between chips and prizes. Players receive prizes/points/rewards purely based on the order in which they busted out of the tournament.
If the A.G. does opine that chips in a poker tournament have value and therefore free-entry tournaments with prizes are illegal, that would seem to suggest that any game which involves risking points, or tokens, or anything which has a bearing on the end result and is partially determined by chance, is illegal if prizes are given out. That would include: bridge, backgammon, television game shows, etc.
I'll be following this and posting updates here as they occur. If the A.G. does rule against free poker tournaments, I'll do whatever I can to mobilize some lobbying of state reps to get the Texas penal code changed as that will be pretty much the only solution. Please send me your contact information if you'd like to help or be informed of actions to take to help protect legal poker in Texas! Lawyers especially welcome :)
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