Pechanga-led coalition says California needs protection from PokerStars

A coalition of influential California Indian tribes has given state legislators a simple message: keep PokerStars out.

The six-tribe coalition – led by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians – issued a letter to Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer stating their opposition to his “fatally flawed” AB 167 online poker legislation. The coalition tribes were already understood to have thrown their support behind Assemblyman Mike Gatto’s AB 9 legislation.

The bulk of the coalition’s letter focuses on ‘bad actors’ aka companies that took wagers from Americans post-UIGEA. The letter goes into detail on the Black Friday indictments, in particular the three online poker companies’ mismanagement and occasional grifting. Such “unscrupulous entities and brands … defrauded poker players of over $300 million.”

The letter basically lumps in the financial shenanigans at Absolute Poker and Full Tilt Poker with the comparatively squeaky clean PokerStars, without whom Full Tilt’s defrauded players would never have been made whole. Without mentioning Stars by name, the letter describes Stars writing that $731m check solely to avoid “the looming possibility of criminal convictions – which certainly would have prevented those firms from obtaining gaming licenses in U.S. jurisdictions.”