A Case for Legalized Internet Poker
I was playing cards today at the Venetian when I was introduced to an interesting regular. This guy would just verbally announce his chip bets and then the dealer would push them in.
My first reaction was that I was pretty annoyed by this, since a fairly decent part of my game is determined on chip tells, and asked the dealer why she was allowed to do this.
“He has MS,” she whispered to me. Boy did I feel like a jackass. I noticed later that this gentleman was sitting in a motorized wheelchair and his hands shook whenever he was in a pot. He couldn’t really stack his chips and it took almost a minute for him to push out a bet on his own. Apparently, the Venetian set up a system for him where the dealers would stack and count out chips for him because when he was acting on his own, players were only seeing like 15 hands/hr.
This guy turned out to be a really nice and polite man who was obviously very passionate about poker. I remember Annie Duke mentioning during her testimony for defending the right to play online poker its effects on the handicapped. At the time, I thought Annie was kind of reaching, but after meeting this man I see that she really does bring up a legitimate point. While this guy’s condition was not bad enough that he couldn’t play, he was clearly having some trouble and I would imagine it would be much easier for him to play online, especially with the travel to/through the casino to play. It took him quite a few seconds to pick up his cards and when he did so, he raised them pretty high - it would be easy for an angleshooter to see them, among other things.
One of the dealers also mentioned to me that he admitted he felt embarrassed when he asked the dealers for help, such as putting in chip amounts. Luckily, the Venetian staff is excellent (with the exception of one crazy ***** that I hate) and the floor gave the dealers a heads-up on helping him.
While this guy certainly could play live, I think that having the option of playing online in an atmosphere where it wasn’t ridiculously hard to deposit/withdraw money would be a welcome thing.
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I know quite a few 2+2 posters that are severely handicapped and are thriving due to internet poker. Even if it just for microstakes in the long run they are making about 5-10k/year and somehow feel valuable to the family living around them.