From Poker News
Sheldon Adelson made himself abundantly clear. There is no longer reason to hope the Las Vegas Sands chairman and CEO has or ever will come around on online poker.
In an op-ed piece on forbes.com followed by an interview with Bloomberg Television, Adelson (pictured) went much further than to voice his old moral concerns.
He called Internet poker fool’s gold economically, a plague and cancer waiting to happen morally, and in an insult to poker players everywhere, not even a game of skill.
“It’s a complete slap in the face to every poker player,” said John Pappas,” executive director of the Poker Players Alliance. “It’s a slap in the face to our organization that spent a lot of time educating lawmakers as to why poker is different, not only because we want it to be so but because it is so. Poker is a game of skill. It’s not something we conjured up. It’s not an industry invention. It’s a position that is verifiable. That he seems to deny it calls into question if he really understands the game at all.”
Most U.S. casino executives have come around on Internet poker over the past decade, with Adelson being the main exception.
American Gaming Association president Frank Fahrenkopf said back in February that all AGA board members — including Las Vegas Sands — were now in favor of federal online poker legislation, leading to speculation that Adelson had changed his tune.
The Forbes piece showed this was far from the case. He’s not just going to keep his company away from online gaming. He’s encouraging Congress to rewrite the Wire Act or pass new legislation that would make Internet gambling illegal.
He makes claims that online gaming will hurt the brick-and-mortar casino business, but says that is not his reason for opposition. The soon-to-be 80-year-old, who has two teenage sons, expresses scare-tactic fears of college students gambling away all their money from dorm rooms while on drugs.
“It’s a threat to our society — a toxin which all good people ought to resist,” Adelson wrote.
