Senate Bills 535 and 628 are all but a distant memory in South Carolina, at least for the foreseeable future. The bills were not addressed before the conclusion of the legislative session in the coastal state and will now be put on hold until 2010.
An article that appeared in the Augusta Chronicle noted that the bills, which would legalize social games of poker, “won’t be readdressed until next legislative session, set to start in January.” For fans of the game, that means at least seven more months until legalization may occur. Senators McConnell, Mulvaney, Ford, Land, Knotts, and Davis introduced Senate Bill 535, which legalizes “private” games where the House does not take a rake. At the same time, the Poker Players Alliance (PPA), the industry’s main lobbying group, successfully added a “predominance test” clause to both bills in an attempt to clarify South Carolina gambling laws.
The Chronicle noted that Aiken County Sheriff Troy Elwell’s office “mainly gets calls concerning video poker machines, but even those cases have declined in recent years.” In Georgia’s Columbia County, the Sheriff’s office added that fewer than six complaints about illegal gambling are logged each year. Both law enforcement agents indicated that “commercial gambling” was the main focus of their efforts, not small-scale home games.
The gambling law on the books is over 200 years old and was brought into the spotlight after the arrests of poker players allegedly competing in a friendly home game in Mount Pleasant. The group, which included Bob Chimento, challenged the antiquated law in court rather than pay a nominal fine. World Poker Tour (WPT) Host Mike Sexton came to the aid of Chimento, who is one of 10,000 PPA members in South Carolina. The voice of the tournament series ever since its debut in 2003, Sexton came armed with video of players in WPT events exercising skill to take down pots.
In addition, the PPA fronted the cost for University of Denver Professor Robert Hannum’s appearance. The statistics guru presented the results of a study of 103 million hands on PokerStars revealing that three-quarters of them did not go to showdown. Instead, the process of betting and bluffing took down each hand prior to players turning up their cards. The study was conducted in December on the world’s largest online poker site in conjunction with Cigital.
Despite Judge Larry Duffy admitting that “overwhelming” evidence pointed to poker as a game of skill, no clear direction existed from the South Carolina courts or legislature to indicate whether the game was therefore legal. The five poker players have since appealed. The bills, meanwhile, were approved on May 13th, but the legislative session quickly expired.
The two pieces of legislation addressed a wide variety of gambling-related topics, including charity events, poker home games, and raffles. The Palmetto Family Council, which is based in Columbia, has been one of the organizations leading the charge against both measures. Its President and CEO, Oran Smith, told Poker News Daily, “When you take the bills together, it’s a lot of pages that would be added to the code. South Carolina has a tradition of being conservative in gambling issues. Whatever we do, we should be really careful. To have the summer and fall to talk about it is a good thing.”
Smith indicated that the Palmetto Family Council would support several components of Senate Bills 535 and 628. He explained, “There are parts that we’d clearly support. It’s a matter of separating out things that we don’t think belong like poker.” In total, Smith encourages South Carolina residents that to desire to gamble to head to nearby states like North Carolina or Mississippi. Smith told Poker News Daily, “We have a tradition of being conservative about gambling. Our position is to keep South Carolina the way it is.”
