| The Worst Laydown of All Time |
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| From the Editor - From the Editor | |||
| Written by John Wenzel | |||
 I’ve known a lot of dikshits in my day, in fact, many poker rooms are full of them. But this dikshit is the king of all dikshits. I’m talking about Anurag Dikshit, the biggest dikshit of all time.What could this guy possibly have been thinking? That is, when he did any thinking at all beyond saving his own skin, which really wasn’t in jeopardy anyway. Dikshit was bluffed, pure and simple. And he was bluffed out of 300 million bucks! That would make it the worst laydown IN HISTORY. One of the founders of PartyGaming (parent of PartyPoker), Dikshit caved in like a cardboard suitcase a few months back when the Justice Department put the finger on him for taking online wagers from U.S. citizens prior to Party leaving the U.S. market in 2006. 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. Prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to use the Wire Act to slow down online gaming, even though courts have always ruled that the law only applies to sports betting. This is common knowledge. Still, the DOJ under Bush insisted that it applied to online gaming. Despite this insistence, however, they never tried an online gaming operator in a court of law for violating the Wire Act. And they never would have, because they knew they would not win that case. In other words, their strong-arm tactics with PartyGaming was nothing but a bluff. Unfortunately for anyone who cares about poker, Dikshit – a U.K. citizen – couldn’t fold fast enough and handed over a good chunk of his fortune, which was sitting in the pot. If he grows a pair and raises (by saying “I’ll see you in court”), the DOJ prosecutors have to fold, because they were not going to court. 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. It looks like 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.” As Bogie once said: Out of all the dikshits in all the towns in all the world, we have to be stuck with this one. John “Johnny Quads” Wenzel Editor-in-Chief
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| Last Updated on Sunday, 17 May 2009 17:40 |
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