The Worst Laydown of All Time PDF Print E-mail
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From the Editor - March 2009
What could Anurag Dikshit possibly have been thinking?

What could Anurag Dikshit possibly have been thinking?

One of the founders of PartyGaming (parent of PartyPoker), Dikshit caved in like a cardboard suitcase when The U.S. Justice Department put the finger on him a few months back for taking online wagers from U.S. citizens. What he did was plead guilty to violating the Wire Act, an archaic 1961 law designed to deter people from placing and taking bets over telephone lines. Bush’s people tried unsuccessfully for years to use the Wire Act to slow down online gaming, even though courts always ruled that the law only applied to sports betting. Still, the DOJ under Bush always insisted that it applied to Internet wagering. Despite this insistence, however, DOJ prosecutors never tried an online gaming operator in a court of law for violating the Wire Act. Nor would they, because they know they would not win that case.

In other words, their strong-arm tactics with PartyGaming was nothing but a bluff. Unfortunately, Dikshit – a UK citizen – couldn’t fold fast enough and handed over a good chunk of his fortune ($300 million) which was sitting in the pot. If he grows a pair and raises (by saying “I’ll see you in court”), the DOJ has to fold, because they are not going to court.

Dikshit was bluffed, pure and simple. And he was bluffed out of 300 million bucks! That would make it the worst laydown IN HISTORY.

What’s that you say? It’s his money? Well, it’s not that simple. What if the DOJ wants to prosecute an online site under the Wire Act in the future? Previously, court cases were pretty clear that the law only applied to sports bets. But now prosecutors can point to Anurag Dikshit. “This guy pleaded guilty under the law and paid $300 million,” they will argue. “He wouldn’t plead guilty if the law didn’t apply, would he?” Law is all about precedent, and this is a bad one.

As Doyle Brunson wrote in a recent blog: “Anurag Dikshit is appropriately named. You would think he would feel a sense of obligation to online poker, the industry that made him a rich man. Instead, he folded up like an accordion and pleaded guilty to breaking some kind of mystery law…It certainly created some ill will from the other online poker sites. I personally can’t imagine what was going through his mind when he made his decision.”

John ‘Johnny Quads’ Wenzel
Editor-in-Chief
 

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