Poker Players Alliance

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Poker chips get advertised as Father’s Day gifts in sporting goods stores. TV shows with play-by-play tournaments are beamed into living rooms. Nationally, the poker craze is everywhere.

But in South Carolina, hosting a kitchen-table card game might still bring the police knocking on your front door with a warrant.

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MOUNT PLEASANT — Five “Texas Hold ‘em” poker players fighting gambling tickets from an April 2006 police raid finally get to argue that their case should be tossed out.

South Carolina’s anti-gambling laws are unconstitutional and unenforceable, they contend, and will ask a municipal court judge Friday to dismiss the case outright.

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An archaic statute

In the fall of 2005, there was a police raid made on a group of people who were playing poker in an apartment-complex recreation room near Greenville, South Carolina. After several discussions with some of the busted players and their lawyer, I decided to do some legal research, based on the way the state law there governing poker is worded. Based on that research, I wrote a series of three columns in Card Player, stating that the law under which the players were charged was unconstitutional.

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Legislators have folded on a bill that would legalize kitchen table poker.

A measure legalizing recreational poker games in homes was sent back to a House panel on Wednesday without debate.
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An assistant prosecutor for Calhoun, Dorchester and Orangeburg counties was among 27 people arrested in a raid on a Hanahan house where people were playing poker, police say.

Don Sorenson was charged with unlawful games and betting. He submitted his resignation to chief prosecutor David Pascoe. But Pascoe told The (Charleston) Post and Courier that he is suspending Sorenson without pay until he decides what the 13-year veteran’s future will be with the office.

A home telephone listing for Sorenson could not be found Sunday.

“This is a magistrate level offense,” Charleston County sheriff’s Maj. John Clark told The Times and Democrat of Orangeburg. “I do not have a court date and time yet.”

The arrests Friday night were the result of a 10-month investigation. Officers executed a search warrant and seized more than $40,000, Clark said.

Investigators said the Hanahan house was hosting a well-organized poker and gambling operation with paid pit bosses and dealers. Poker is illegal under a 200-year-old state law that prohibits dice and card games.

“This isn’t boys’ poker night out,” Clark said. “This isn’t just friends getting together and playing poker for a quarter or a dollar. This was an organized poker operation in which they had people in positions who were acting as employees. They were being paid to do their jobs.”

The raid was at the home of Martin and Dawn Reyes, who told The Post and Courier that her husband began hosting the games about eight months ago. Reyes said the players were friends and her husband wasn’t paid.

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Government has all sorts of creative ways to strike a balance between enhancing your life and regulating it to death, and this two-year legislative session is no different.

“There are more inane laws introduced than you could shake a stick at,” House Majority Leader Jim Merrill, R-Daniel Island, said. “Somebody at the grocery store says they’re having trouble with this or that, and they (some legislators) feel they need to introduce a law about it.”

Among the several thousand bills filed this session were proposals to stop parents from smoking in cars if a child younger than 10 is riding along, suspend driver’s licenses for high school students who are absent too often and require restaurants to post notices if they serve food with trans fats.

There’s also a proposal that would prevent people from suing restaurants if they get fat.

Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, hosted Sens. Robert Ford, D-Charleston, and Larry Martin, R-Pickens, on a recent edition of his weekly news conference sponsored by ETV, a half-hour show where legislators discuss what’s going on around the Statehouse.

On the show, the panel talked about “laws that go too far,” with a focus on South Carolina’s gambling legislation.

McConnell and Ford co-sponsored a bill that would update what some consider to be the state’s outdated anti-gambling laws, which by extension stop people from playing Monopoly at their kitchen table and holding cake raffles at church.

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Almost two years after a poker game was broken up by Mount Pleasant police, some of the more vocal members of the group still haven’t resolved their cases.

One of the players contends the delay is because town officials don’t want the spectacle of a jury trial, in which he plans to defend the game of poker against what he calls South Carolina’s outdated anti-gambling laws.

“Mount Pleasant, they don’t want to be the stepping stone into changing this,” said Bob Chimento, the unofficial spokesman for the group.

Town Attorney Ira Grossman, however, contends the delay is not out of the ordinary. About two-thirds of those ticketed that night have been dealt with in municipal court pleas, he said, adding that prosecutions take time, especially when many of the defendants don’t have lawyers.

Of the cases that have cleared the court docket, some paid gambling ticket fines of as little as $100.

In April 2006, police busted a Texas Hold ‘Em tournament at a Glencoe Street home they’d been watching for some time. Fifteen to 20 vehicles were visiting several days a week before the raid, authorities said.

The game had been advertised via an Internet meet-up site set up specifically to attract poker enthusiasts from around the Lowcountry. Players paid a $20 “buy-in” to join the game, with a percentage of the proceeds going to the house.

Only about eight of the approximately 24 people involved lived in Mount Pleasant. The others hailed from Charleston, James Island, Summerville, Hanahan and North Charleston, police said.

Authorities seized nearly $6,000 and a small quantity of drugs.

Chimento said the five remaining members of his players’ group “are bound and determined to go to trial on this,” no matter how long it takes. They are getting help and advice from lawyers from other parts of the country who are pro-poker advocates, he said.

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