Club owners to bring poker issue to court

By John Stevenson : The Herald-Sun
jstevenson@heraldsun.com

DURHAM -- A would-be poker club is attempting to stack the deck in its favor as it mounts a major legal challenge on North Carolina's gambling statute.

When The Joker Club appears in Durham County Superior Court this week to argue that poker should be declared legal, it will have some human aces up its sleeve.

They include a casino operator from the Bahamas, a poker writer from Las Vegas and an attorney and professional poker player who also publishes an international card-gaming journal.

All will attempt to convince Judge Orlando F. Hudson that poker is a game of skill rather than chance. As a result, it should not be prohibited by a state law that makes it a misdemeanor crime to bet on games of chance, the witnesses will contend.

"I agree that gambling should be illegal," Durham lawyer Marcus Hill, representing The Joker Club, said Friday.

"But poker isn't gambling," he told The Herald-Sun. "It's a game of skill. That should be abundantly clear to people of rational minds."

The Joker Club leased a building on Ferrell Road in November, hoping to open "a business that allows adult persons to play poker against one another and whereby [the club] will retain a portion of funds which are wagered by the players," court documents say.

In its effort to make that happen, the club named District Attorney Jim Hardin Jr. as a defendant in a lawsuit.

Hardin, however, maintains that state law doesn't distinguish between betting on games of skill as opposed to games of chance. Either is illegal, Hardin says.

And the Attorney General's Office, representing Hardin in the case, has said it is well settled in the state Supreme Court that "poker is a game of chance, hence illegal."

Assistant Attorney General David J. Adinolfi II will argue this week that The Joker Club's lawsuit should be thrown out.

On the opposing side, the club will ask to introduce testimony from Allyn Jaffrey Shulman, an attorney and professional poker player who, with her husband, publishes Card Player Magazine in the United States and Card Player Europe overseas.

In her mind, it is crystal-clear that poker is a game of skill.

"To be adept at poker, you must have the ability to engage in purposeful decision-making," she told The Herald-Sun on Friday. "That requires specific skills. You have to know odds and you have to know probabilities. You have to know statistical analysis. You can't control the cards that come to you, but you can control how you play them. That takes skill.

"It is true there is a slight element of luck or chance in the game," Shulman added. "But that's true in business as well. It's true in the stock market. ... The reason the same poker players keep winning is that they have the necessary skills. If all you did was put your money in a pot and then dealt the cards out, poker would be a game of chance. But that's not all that happens. Some very heavy analysis is involved."

According to Shulman, even bluffing is a skill, as is the ability to read body language and know when someone else is bluffing.

In addition to testifying in Durham this week, Shulman is scheduled to appear before the North Dakota Senate as part of an effort to have poker declared legal there.