Poker's popularity worries Utah officials

A lot of people say the whole thing — the poker tables for sale in supermarkets, the proliferation of Texas Hold'em tournaments, the way poker supplies flew off the shelves this Christmas season even in Salt Lake City — started with a man whose improbable name is Chris Moneymaker.

Moneymaker is the Ken Jennings of poker, an ordinary guy who won big in front of millions of TV viewers, in Moneymaker's case $2.5 million on the World Series of Poker on ESPN in 2003. A year and a half later it's now possible to watch poker on TV sometimes eight hours a day: Celebrity Poker, World Poker Tour Ladies' Night, even reruns of 11-year-old poker games, with NBC planning to air the two-hour finale of Poker Superstars right before the start of the Super Bowl in February.

The TV coverage has turned poker into the pet rock of 2004, as mainstream as Uno. "Poker paraphernalia is about the hottest item that we're carrying this Christmas," said Smith's Marketplace spokesperson Marsha Gilford. "It's flying out of the store as fast as we get it in." At least one local Albertson's featured poker supplies at the front of the store this Christmas, along with Tonka trucks and inflatable snowmen.

On the one hand, poker is just a card game. On the other hand, its history and structure are all about betting, so all this newfound popularity has some addiction experts worried. It's also causing heartburn among government officials in Utah, one of two states in the country where gambling is still illegal but where poker games and poker tournaments are flourishing nonetheless.

Take the case of Diamond Poker Tour, run by Shawn Moore, Josh Colledge and Doug Baker of Ogden. On Tuesday, Dec. 14, after getting a Salt Lake City permit for a "card room," and buying 12 ads in the Salt Lake Tribune, the partners opened a Texas Hold'em poker tournament at the Salt Palace Convention Center.

No sooner had players started settling in at the oblong poker tables, however, Salt Palace officials showed up asking everybody to pack up and leave. The tournament is illegal, the Ogden men were told, even though the Salt Palace had signed a contract with them two weeks before. According to Salt Palace general manager Allyson Jackson, the convention center made its move after the Utah Attorney General's office called county and city prosecutors, who in turn called Salt Palace lawyers.

So Diamond moved the tournament one block south, to the Shilo Inn. "We crossed 200 South, which is the new state line," they explained wryly a few days later in a small meeting room at the Shilo, where they had set up some of their tables.

If the tournament was OK at the hotel — if no police showed up to arrest them — what does that mean, the men wanted to know. Is poker illegal in the county-owned Salt Palace but legal everywhere else? Or, conversely, if poker is really illegal everywhere, what about church raffles and bingo and charity casino nights? If everything is illegal, predicts Colledge, "they'll have to triple their police force."

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