Connecting the Dots

"My Vacation Ends Monday, June, SUN Permitting."



That nonsensical sentence, or variations thereof, for many years has been taught to schoolchildren as a mnemonic device to help them memorize in order the nine planets, which were Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. That all has changed now that astronomers recently kicked poor little Pluto off the list by downgrading it to a dwarf planet, or something equally degrading. Why are names and designations of things always changing?



Sometimes names of objects are changed to make them seem more dignified, or at least less disgusting. That's why we have "restroom" instead of "toilet room," even though very few people ever go there to rest. And "toilet" itself is a euphemism to replace the original and perfectly serviceable designation of "crapper." Remember, the "silent water waste preventer" (flush toilet) is widely believed to have been invented by a plumber named Thomas Crapper.



And look what happened to the good old strip joints. Now they're all "gentlemen's clubs." Right. The last place you can expect to find a gentleman is in one of those sleaze hangouts.



Similar examples are evident in all walks of life. On airplanes, barf bags are "motion sickness bags." In the military, deaths in combat are simply "casualties," and the unintentional death of civilians during such combat operations is dismissed as "collateral damage." We have "custodians" instead of "janitors," "heck" and "darn" for "hell" and "damn," "groin" for you know what, and on and on.



And the world of poker is no exception. It seems to get more complicated, convoluted, and confounding by the day, with the latest example being the dot-com/dot-net furor at the World Series of Poker.



About half the entrants into the $10,000 main event got there via online satellites, and these participants arrived proudly wearing T-shirts sporting logos from the sites that sent them there. But partway through the tournament, Harrah's mandated that these players, as well as all journalists in the tournament area, partially tape over these logos to cover the dot-com part.



So, the identification for an Internet gaming site such as PikerPoker.com was shortened to simply PikerPoker. Sometime later, the casino began distributing dot-net stickers, so that the PikerPoker logos became lengthened and transformed into PikerPoker.net.



Confused? Does this sound like meaningless nitpicking? (Or, should I say, "netpicking"?) Well, it's not. It all started with the Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) anti-Internet gambling bill passed by the House of Representatives. While the bill has not reached the U.S. Senate, it nonetheless had everyone in poker on edge, and Harrah's was understandably concerned about the advertising of Internet gaming sites. (See the editor's note at the end of this column for an update.)



The security alert level then jumped from yellow to red with the arrest of a British citizen who is the CEO of a publicly traded online sports-betting site, while he was in the U.S. on a flight layover. He was indicted on racketeering charges, his site was temporarily shut down, and shock waves rippled through the online gaming community. I was told that pressure then came from the Nevada Gaming Commission to have Harrah's build a Chinese wall between them and any dot-com gaming sites.



OK, but what's with this dot and net business? Well, dot-com gaming sites are where you find cash games. But a dot-net site is where you get schooling and "gamble" for just play money. So, not only apparel logos, but all the signage for Internet gaming exhibitors had to be similarly changed. I suppose you could call this com to net a "safety net" for Harrah's.



Well, as Shakespeare wrote, "A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet," and online sites altering their logos seems like a technicality and an unrealistic artifice. Everyone knows that an online gaming site called dot-net is merely a portal to a full-scale dot-com gambling site.



And what will all this dot-net business lead to, anyway? For one thing, a poker-playing Silicon Valley tycoon like Paul Phillips, who heretofore has been known as a dot-com millionaire, now may be compelled to identify himself as a dot-net millionaire. What is the world coming to, anyway? Or, should the word now be "netting" rather than "comming"?



Under current rules, tournament players around the country automatically get a 10-minute penalty for uttering the F-word.



What's next? A 20-minute penalty for saying the dot-com word?



Am I being sillier than usual? Not at all. Let's take the U.S. stock market. If that isn't a gambling business, what is? A lot more people jumped out of windows after the 1929 stock market crash than for all the poker bad-beat fatalities combined. So, I would not be surprised to learn that the Justice Department will soon be cracking down on the stock market. All brokerage firms before long might be compelled to set up alternate operations where investors can gamble with monopoly money. Therefore, Merrill Lynch would have to advertise itself as Merrill Lynch.net.



And already a counterreaction is setting in. To show its opposition, NETeller, the online money transfer operation, is considering changing its name to "COMteller."



OK, I seem to be jumping all over the place, starting with Pluto and ending with dot-net. However, as in all of my columns, everything ends up seamlessly connected. You see, if you connect the dots, you end up with a compromise solution to the planetary debacle.



So, let's allow Pluto to remain a planet in good standing. Just change its name to Pluto.net.



Editor's note: While the anti-Internet gambling bill sponsored by Sen. Jon Kyl has not passed both houses of Congress, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) included a similar "add-on" bill to the port security bill that passed both the House and Senate on Sept. 29, 2006. See Allyn Jaffrey Shulman's column for more information.