Former Senator D'Amato Offically Joins PPA

Filed in archive Internet Poker on March 7, 2007

A nod to the guys at Wicked Chops for reporting a third times a charm as the Poker Player Alliance finally named former Senator Al D'Amato their spokesperson. With the Senator's background of poker games while in office and still enjoying the feel of taking his friend's for a little cash during his home game, he is the first step towards lobbying the cause of giving online poker and its payment processors the same status currently enjoyed by horse racing and lotteries.

A steep hill to climb for D'Amato, as sights are currently (as they should be) with the war on Iraq for many politicans. But, the current status of online poker players having to dance around with different payment processors that charge fees in what used to be a very smooth (and fee free) process of funding your poker account, make gaining newer players more difficult.

Here's a snippet of the NY Times Article:

For years, Alfonse M. D'Amato, the former Republican senator from New York, was the host at a Thursday evening poker game at his Capitol Hill office, playing with other lawmakers, staff members and lobbyists late into the night over pots that ranged from a few dollars to a few hundred.

Al D'Amato's Poker Politics Once New Yorkers collectively informed Mr. D'Amato that it was time to find a new line of work, he graduated to a higher-stakes game, playing with Howard Stern, among others. He is now a stalwart of a weekly game on Long Island where a bad night might mean that a player drops $5,000 or more.

As Mr. D'Amato tells it, and as his card-playing cronies confirm, he rarely leaves a game a loser. Yet it is a safe bet that his love of poker never proved so lucrative as it did last week, when he signed a lobbying deal with the Poker Players Alliance, a nascent group that hopes that Mr. D'Amato will help them become players in Washington politics, too.

Most immediately, the group is hoping that Mr. D'Amato, long known for his connections to Washington insiders and his ability to deliver perks to his constituents and interest groups, can help them overturn a new federal ban on Internet gambling - or at least exempt poker from its provisions.

"John Smith, maybe he doesn't have the financial means or the ability" to travel to a casino, Mr. D'Amato said, gesturing with his hands and speaking volubly in his trademark accent. "The poor guy at home can't bet $50 because we pass this law."

The first big assault on poker players came in October when President Bush signed a bill aimed at online gambling by making it a crime to use credit cards or online payment systems for poker and other online casino games and sports betting conducted over the Internet. The law did not make it impossible or illegal for Americans to bet online, but it did make it trickier for players to get their cash to the offshore casinos that run the Internet sites.