Poker Players Take Plea Deal After SWAT Team Raids Their Virginia Home GameVirginia Again Proves To Be Extremely Hostile To Card Players |
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Last week, lawyers for a group of poker players were gearing up to challenge the law in the state of Virginia after a militarized police force stormed the players’ home poker game with semi-automatic weapons drawn this past November, the Washington Post reported.
But the state decided to offer them a deal.
The Great Falls home game featuring a $20,000 buy-in with hired dealers and masseuses was raided and $150,000 in cash was seized from the game’s host. Players in the game were charged with crimes for engaging in illegal gambling, though the defense was prepared to fight the allegations due to poker irrefutably being a game based on skill, not chance. The state argued that since a small cut of the buy-ins was taken to pay for the game’s amenities it then constitutes illegal gambling.
The poker game in question, located not far from Washington, D.C., had been running for several years and several well-known poker pros had played in it in the past, the report said.
The criminal case will not go to trial, but it doesn’t mean the unnamed poker players won.
[T]he Fairfax prosecutors, with what the lawyers said was the police detectives’ blessing, cut them a deal: stay clean for six months and the gambling charge would be dismissed, and eligible to be expunged from their record. And for those who had cash seized from them—one player had more than $20,000, the regular player said—the police agreed to return 60 percent of the money, and keep 40 percent.
It is not hyperbolic to say that the poker players were lucky no one was killed in the November raid. A 2006 police raid of a similar home poker game in Virginia resulted in a police officer killing a player, in what was called an accident. Two million dollars was awarded to the victim’s family.
There have been other cases of police SWAT teams raiding private poker games in Virginia. In 2009, a college student at James Madison University in Harrisonburg was charged for playing in a $2-$5 no-limit hold’em game. Others in that game pleaded guilty and received fines.
“They came in with high firepower and stormed in like they were about to apprehend a serial murder or something. It’s ridiculous,” the lawyer for the student said in 2009.
“The fact that the government sees it fit to treat people who are participating in such innocent activities as if they’re common criminals is unconscionable."
Years later, this is still an ongoing problem in Virginia.
The state is highly hostile to poker players and apparently has no desire to change that. In 2013, the Virginia Supreme Court decided not to consider whether poker was a game of skill or not, after a 2010 shutdown of a charity poker game in the commonwealth.
Later in 2013, police busted a home poker game that had a minimum $100 buy-in.
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