Facebook Poker Under Legal Scrutiny?
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Zynga’s popular Texas Hold’em application for Facebook - reportedly the most used app, with over 11 million players - may soon be a victim of its own success. It appears that a competitor to Zynga has commissioned a legal brief concerning the legal viability of Zynga’s poker application. The brief’s conclusion: Zynga’s Texas Hold’em may be running in violation of various state and federal laws.
That’s according to Sarah Lacy in her article in Techcrunch. Lacy says a source at competing company leaked the brief - “written by a former federal prosecutor and senior Department of Justice official” - to her.
Given the numerous inaccuracies in the article regarding the current legal state of online gambling in general and poker specifically, Lacy’s legal analysis should probably be taken with a grain of salt. However, the basic facts of the leaked brief are likely legitimate.
The core issue at hand doesn’t have much to do with the game itself, as Zynga poker is a play money game. Where things get tricky: chips actually do have some value, as you can buy chips from Zynga directly and buy and sell chips in secondary markets online.
In that context Facebook poker may constitute illegal gambling under some state laws and some interpretations of a few federal laws as something of value is being wagered, a common bright line of anti-gambling statutes.
Zynga would be potentially culpable because it provides a mechanism for users to transfer chips to one another, essentially facilitating the sale of chips.
What’s the likely impact? Minimal at this point. A prosecutor would have to pursue Zynga over the issue, and Zynga could easily just shut down the transfer mechanism and likely kill the whole issue right there. As far as Facebook poker players go, there’s virtually no concern on their parts as long as they’re not engaging in the secondary market for buying and selling chips, as that violates Zynga’s terms of service.
If anything, the issue does little more than highlight the invasive, overreaching and at time ludicrous web of anti-gambling statutes, under which something as banal as play money Facebook poker can be construed as illegal activity worth the time and resources of taxpayer-funded prosecutions.
