Card Player – It still faces an incredibly low chance of passing, but one of the online gaming bills floating in California’s legislature was amended on Monday. It is now classified as an “urgency” measure. The 2013 legislative session ends next month.
The new language in Senate Bill 678 states:
“This act is an urgency statute necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, or safety within the meaning of Article IV of the Constitution and shall go into immediate effect. The facts constituting the necessity are:
In order to protect the interests of Californians who play Internet poker games and to ensure that people play fair games, that the state realizes the revenues, and that suitable persons operate intrastate Internet poker games, it is necessary that the act take effect immediately.”
This all means that if it passed both houses and was signed by the governor, it would take effect immediately in the hopes of getting online poker underway as soon as possible.
Another noteworthy amendment was that the bill’s provisions are now “severable”, which means that portions of the bill could be removed without killing the entire thing.
The measure was introduced in February by Sen. Lou Correa and has had little attention since, despite high hopes this year by some within the industry.
The other online gaming bill still alive is SB 51.
If neither measure is acted up before the September deadline, the online poker debate in the Golden State will be pushed into yet another year. The reason why web card playing has had such a hard time over the years there is because the tribal casinos can’t come to any sort of consensus on how to license and regulate the potential jackpot.
So far, Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware all have legalized web poker. Nevada has already kicked off its intrastate industry, while New Jersey and Delaware are getting close. New Jersey plans on launching its first real-money site by the end of November.
