California Indian Tribes Battle Over Legal Online Poker

Word recently got out that a group of Native American tribes and poker rooms in California have banded together to lobby for the right to start running online poker rooms (available strictly, of course, to state residents). The marks the Native Americans first foray into online gambling, though they’ve been at the forefront of gambling venues in the state for decades.

The Morongo Band of Indians and the group of card clubs have formed an LLC called the California Tribal Intrastate Internet Poker Consortium. The group notes (and hearing it, we find it hard to believe that this is the first we’ve read of anyone noting this) that there is a loophole in the restrictive 2006 UIGEA that, by omission, allows online gambling.

The Consortium looks to be facing strong opposition though: not necessarily from the state government, but from other California-based Native American tribes. The California Tribal Business Alliance (CTBA), for one – a group of the higher-class tribal casinos and card rooms – is afraid that the bill being offered to officially sanction Indian-run intrastate online poker rooms could jeopardize land-based Indian-run gambling establishments in the state.

Another opponent of the Consortium’s proposed bill is Stand Up For California, an Indian-based gaming watchdog organization, which says that the bill’s wording is so vague that it allows games of luck (like Pai Gow) to be legally sanctioned too, which runs completely counter to the online poker movement’s leading argument that poker is actually a game of skill.

As such, even the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) has expressed wariness about the Consortium’s efforts.