I found myself on a roll during the Focus Roundtable on online poker I participated in a while back, and decided to flesh out one of my ideas into a piece for the Las Vegas Business Press:
Surely it’s not just patriotism that tells me Americans would take more chips from their overseas counterparts than they lost. After all, we invented the game on the bayous of Louisiana, nursed it to maturity in small-town back rooms and wide-open saloons throughout the 19th century. America may not be the world’s leading manufacturer. We may not even be the world’s dominant economy for very long. But if there’s one thing we’re still good at, collectively, it is playing poker.
With so much concern over manufacturing and service jobs leaving America, wouldn’t turning loose the nation’s expert card players on the world be one way of restoring a positive balance of trade, so to speak?
via Las Vegas Business Press :: David G. Schwartz : Legalize Net poker if not for logic, for patriotism.
I’d love to get some feedback from poker players about this–I don’t think I’m mistaken about the income-earning potential for American poker players. I’ll concede that there are a lot of very talented international players out there, but come on–if Americans aren’t confident in their ability to win at poker, we’ve really lost our swagger.
As you’ll see, it’s a half-joking addendum to many of the very sensible arguments for legal online poker that have, thus far, fallen on deaf ears.