Let’s say you’re playing poker and you need one more diamond for a flush. The dealer turns a card, reveals a diamond and you win the hand. Was it skill or luck? The answer is affecting the fates of people across the country accused of breaking anti-poker laws, people like Kevin Raley, 44, of Colorado.

As an engineer, Raley finds the mathematics of poker come easily, and he’s pretty good at keeping a blank face. Reading other people, though, is something he’s always working on. “It’s something I’m better at today than I was five years ago,” Raley said.

This goes to the point Raley is trying to make: The better he gets, the more he wins. Arrested a year ago for running a $20 buy-in Texas Hold ‘em tournament at a bar in Greeley, but acquitted by a jury, Raley hopes to convince the Colorado Supreme Court that poker hinges more on skill than chance. Most states generally tolerate poker as legal as long as it’s confined to games among friends in which no one outside the players makes a profit. In Colorado, it’s illegal to participate in a game in which rake – a commission fee charged by the poker operator – is taken.

It’s also one of 37 states where a game of skill doesn’t constitute gambling, said Chuck Humphrey, a Colorado-based lawyer and expert in gambling laws.

At his January trial in Colorado, Raley argued that poker is a game of skill and that the tournament had been a game among friends. Prosecutors maintained that it was neither.

In a review of Raley’s case this month, a judge said poker relies heavily on chance. “A poker player may give himself a statistical advantage through skill or experience, but that player is always subject to defeat when the next card is turned,” Weld County District Judge James Hartmann wrote.

Tim Ouellette, of Greeley, disagrees. Ouellette, 46, was arrested along with Raley, but charges against him were dismissed following Raley’s acquittal. “It’s not like roulette or craps where you throw the dice and you have no control over it,” Ouellette said. Raley is now petitioning the Colorado Supreme Court to weigh in on the question of skill versus luck.

Other recent skirmishes include a South Carolina case in which five men were arrested in a 2006 raid on a game of Texas Hold ‘em. They were convicted this year by a municipal court judge who said he agreed that poker hinged on skill but felt it wasn’t clear whether that was relevant under state law. The men are appealing.

Share This

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•