BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/ Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com Host: Tim Pool @Timcast (everywhere) Guest: Doug Polk @DougPolkVids (X) My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL Trump Bill Will END Fantasy Sports And Pro Poker, POISON PILL Could BAN Gambling ft. Doug Polk
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Yeah, like if I'm if I'm in Vegas, you think I want to see this pass if I'm like at any level of government if I'm in any of the casinos if I'm DraftKings if I'm fan duel if I'm you name it I'm MGM I'm saying like any of these entities They're not gonna want to see this pass because it's gonna hurt their bottom line And look like I hope you're right. | ||
| I hope maybe that's what this is, but you certainly feel the heat when it's your industry on the line from newsweek Trump's big beautiful bill could kill professional gambling. | ||
| This is an incorrect headline. | ||
| It could actually end gambling as we know it. | ||
| Now, many conservatives are cheering for it. | ||
| Okay, by all means, like, I don't care. | ||
| You're allowed to have that opinion. | ||
| I think gambling is largely bad as well. | ||
| I got no problem with people having booze. | ||
| I have a problem with alcoholism and addiction, and I appreciate treatments for this. | ||
| I've got no problem with gambling. | ||
| I have a problem with gambling addiction and people whose lives get destroyed by it. | ||
| Within a certain, within reason, these things can be fine and okay, but they do get abused. | ||
| And so when you see the mass expansion of casinos, you have to wonder what's happening to our society. | ||
| So naturally, if there are regulations or restrictions, I'm not going to cry about it. | ||
| But I'll tell you what I really think with this. | ||
| I think that this provision was put into the bill to sabotage it because they can't afford to have even one GOP member of Congress break. | ||
| And now they have to. | ||
| What this bill will do, as I've been talking about yesterday and this morning, and again, we're going to be joined by Doug Polk, who's going to break down for us how this will affect the poker pro industry and what it means for professional gaming. | ||
| This means that even if you are a casual player, it's not about professional gambling, a casual player, let's say you go to Vegas just for a weekend and you want to see Katy Perry. | ||
| Well, you can't. | ||
| She got fired. | ||
| But let's say you want to see Penn and Teller. | ||
| And while you're there at the old Rio, you say, I'll play some blackjack for a little bit with my friends. | ||
| It's a little bit of gaming. | ||
| You're not addicted to gambling. | ||
| You're just having fun with your friends and it's fun to see what the cards come up. | ||
| And so you set a budget for yourself for your holiday weekend. | ||
| It's two weeks out of the year. | ||
| You say, I'm going to bet 500 bucks. | ||
| I'm going to play 500 bucks. | ||
| It's all I'm going to do. | ||
| You know, I'm here to have a good time. | ||
| You get free drinks while you do it. | ||
| Hey. | ||
| What people don't understand is what this bill does, it says you can't, you can only write off 90% of your losses, no matter who you are, pro or otherwise. | ||
| If you play $500 and you're winning half the time and losing half the time, you might actually just end up leaving even, maybe a little bit down. | ||
| However, if you bet $500 one time and you win, your winnings are $500. | ||
| If you then bet $500 again and lose, your losses are $500, of which you could only write off $450. | ||
| Meaning, the government considers you to have made $50. | ||
| That's what this bill will do. | ||
| It makes literally no sense. | ||
| And I'm going to say it again. | ||
| I believe it was intentionally put in the bill because they want it to fail. | ||
| They put something in that conservatives are going to cheer for, which will cause one Republican to bail. | ||
| So instead of just sitting here rambling on it for eight hundred time, what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull in poker professional Doug Polk, who's going to talk about how this will affect his industry. | ||
| I want to ask him about the size of the industry, where we're at with things like the World Series of Poker, which I'm a big poker player and poker fan as well. | ||
| But this is a big issue, which could sabotage the entirety of Trump's agenda. | ||
| Hearing what Doug has to say will be particularly interesting. | ||
| So we've got Doug Polk here. | ||
| Now, Doug, can you hear me? | ||
| Yeah, I can hear you, Tim. | ||
| How's it going, man? | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| Thanks for joining me. | ||
| So for those that are not familiar, do you want to just briefly introduce yourself? | ||
| Yeah, my name is Doug Polk. | ||
| I've been a professional poker player for, man, I don't even know 10, 15 years. | ||
| I have a poker YouTube channel called Doug Polk Poker, where I do everything poker. | ||
| I represent a poker room online. | ||
| I have my own poker room in Texas. | ||
| Actually, we have two locations. | ||
| So I'm basically everything poker, Tim. | ||
| Right on. | ||
| So this, Trump's big, beautiful bill, one of the most important pieces of legislation, if not the most, for Trump's agenda. | ||
| When the Senate debated over the weekend, they put in this, and I've been investigating this. | ||
| So we'll get to that in a little bit, a provision that says that you can only write off 90% of gambling losses. | ||
| Now, you are the poker guy. | ||
| You're one of the big poker guys. | ||
| You're one of the biggest influencers in the space. | ||
| So what I want to say first to most people, as I already stressed before we started, again, I think this is a poison pill meant to sabotage Trump's agenda because this is a nuclear bomb on Las Vegas, Atlantic City, any casino in the country, the entirety of the poker industry, fantasy sports. | ||
| But let's start from the beginning and you, as a poker professional, explain to me what this bill would do to your businesses, your clubs, your industry. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So taking a step back here and just looking at specifically this carve out, right? | ||
| Because there's a lot of stuff in this bill, all kinds of different things going on. | ||
| I'm trying not to take a political stance, any of that, just as it pertains to gambling specifically. | ||
| The way that it's written appears to me, not written in the best terminology, so a little bit tough to decipher, but basically it seems like you can only write off up to 90% of your losses. | ||
| I can give you a couple of like really basic examples here. | ||
| So let's just say you gamble over the course of the year, you win $1 million, you lose $1 million. | ||
| In any other industry, you break even, right? | ||
| You're out zero. | ||
| You made nothing. | ||
| You owe on nothing. | ||
| Nothing really happened, right? | ||
| You netted out. | ||
| But what this new provision says is that you actually owe on 10% of the winnings because you can only write off 90% of the losses. | ||
| So basically, you are now taxing either losing gamblers, you're taxing winning gamblers extra on top. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's basically just, you know, yeah, we'll take a little piece of that. | |
| Why? | ||
| Oh, just because it's thrown into this bill at the last second. | ||
| We're just going to go ahead and do it. | ||
| So the impact this has on gambling is tremendous. | ||
| It most impacts people in two specific scenarios. | ||
| Let's take a look first at like if you're a recreational gambler, maybe you like to play slot machines, you have to go to blackjack, play blackjack, you go to Vegas every now and then. | ||
| Well, maybe over the course of the year, you know, you lose $20,000, $30,000 gambling, $10,000, $5,000. | ||
| It doesn't really matter. | ||
| And then you have that big score. | ||
| You hit the jackpot for $20K, whatever it might be. | ||
| Well, if you now go to your taxes and you want to deduct all of those losses beforehand, now you actually can't deduct all those and you're now paying taxes on money you lost, which is fundamentally wrong. | ||
| Additionally, and this is probably more impactful for people kind of in my sector, If you are a professional gambler, well, now it is imperative that your edge is gigantic. | ||
| And just to break that down a little bit, there are many gambling industries where people just have a fraction of a fraction of an edge. | ||
| I think of the movie 21, right, where the MIT blackjack team had to count the card to get a small edge. | ||
| Those guys, they had like one, two, three percent edges at most where they're betting these huge dollar amounts. | ||
| You now need to break this 10% barrier to even be able to gamble profitably. | ||
| So what that means is for people that are smaller edge professional gamblers, which let's face it, that's most professional gamblers today. | ||
| You can no longer profitably be taking these bets because you can't clear that 10% barrier. | ||
| So it impacts recreational gamblers. | ||
| It impacts professional gamblers. | ||
| I would imagine, Tim, that there are tens of thousands of professional gamblers in this country that their jobs will be eliminated immediately if this bill goes into effect. | ||
| Thousands of Texans in my states, tens of thousands of people outside of the state. | ||
| And personally, like, I don't think this is even an issue that either side, the left or the right, is kind of passionate about. | ||
| It just feels like this got thrown in there. | ||
| You're alluding to maybe a poison pill. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But there's no mistake here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If this passes, its impact on gambling will be tremendous. | |
| The mayor of Las Vegas came out with a press conference this morning saying the bill was bad because it's going to strip medical care and stuff like that. | ||
| And I got to be honest, I just laughed because we talked about it last night on Timcast IRL. | ||
| And I said, there's no way Las Vegas will let this bill pass. | ||
| And sure enough, first thing in the morning, the mayor of Vegas comes out saying, oh, this bill is really bad. | ||
| We can't have it. | ||
| You've got a gaming caucus. | ||
| All the Democrats, of course, are going to vote no because they oppose Trump's agenda. | ||
| And the Republicans, you'd expect largely to vote yes. | ||
| I had people tell me any Republican who votes no will never get reelected because Donald Trump is going to primary them and go up against them. | ||
| However, I'd also argue that in Louisiana, in New Jersey, in Vegas, any Republican member of Congress who votes for this bill is also not going to get re-elected. | ||
| There's one rep out of Nevada whose largest contributor is the gaming industry. | ||
| So here's one thing that I want to clarify, and you can help me out with this. | ||
| When we say things like, you wager a million dollars in one, you lose a million dollars in a year gambling and you make a million dollars, most people don't understand how those numbers play out. | ||
| They assume this means that a millionaire walks into a casino and says, I'm going to bet a million dollars just dumping money from his bank account. | ||
| And then he gets lucky and wins it all back. | ||
| But that's not actually how it works. | ||
| So when you, as like a poker pro are tracking your winnings and losings, like what is what is an average amount of total money wagered for a poker pro, say, like at the highest level? | ||
| Would it be like a million dollars? | ||
| What would the number be? | ||
| So that's a really great point you bring up. | ||
| I'd like to kind of maybe dissect that a little bit. | ||
| For a high-stakes player, there are tournaments that are $1 million. | ||
| So a very high-stakes player might be spending $5,000, $10, $15, $20 million a year just in buy-ins to play all of the highest stakes tournaments in the world. | ||
| But I just to hone in on what you're saying, because it's a great point. | ||
| I should have addressed it before. | ||
| Let's just say that you only like to gamble for a few hundred dollars at a time, right? | ||
| You go down to your local casino, you play in a tournament every day. | ||
| Well, you know, maybe that buy-in is $200 and maybe you play it 100 times. | ||
| That's $20,000 in losses that you have. | ||
| And then you deduct all of your cashes against that. | ||
| Maybe one day you had a big, a big win for $8,000. | ||
| Maybe most of the time you lose. | ||
| But the point is, it's that same money as long as it's taken over time. | ||
| It's like the net result of all of the wins and losses. | ||
| It's gross wins, gross losses, because you're supposed to be, there's two ways to do your taxes. | ||
| I'm not a tax attorney, clearly. | ||
| But just generally, as I understand it, there are two ways to do your taxes. | ||
| You can either take the standard deduction or you can itemize. | ||
| And when you have a big gambling win, typically you itemize because you can get the maximum deduction back against your gambling win. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| We're going to pay the least tax you possibly can within the confines of the law. | ||
| But this now penalizes that massively for someone who is in that scenario we mentioned earlier where you're just playing your small stakes gambling game every day. | ||
| And then finally you have that one big day. | ||
| Well, now Uncle Sam's come and knocking for 10%, even though you've lost money. | ||
| I really feel like it's wrong. | ||
| So I think the big impact, fantasy sports are going to get hit massively by this, which is massively, I think they were expecting in 2025 fantasy sports to double the amount of, I don't want to say revenue generated, but the market share, the amount of money that passes through is expected to hit something like $25 billion. | ||
| Tons of guys love, they bet small amounts. | ||
| They have a fantasy team. | ||
| They play daily. | ||
| What ends up happening is, you know, I try explaining this to people that I might say something like, oh, I've gambled $10,000 last year. | ||
| And they're like, geez, are you nuts? | ||
| You wasted $10,000. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I went to the casino. | ||
| I put $100 on a slot machine and pressed the button for a $5 bet and I won $20. | ||
| I then pressed it again and I lost $5. | ||
| Every time you bet $5 on a slot machine, your losses go up. | ||
| So I learned this from Vegas. | ||
| Was it Vegas Matt? | ||
| Is that the guy on YouTube? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The slot machine guy. | ||
| Yeah, I know you're talking about. | ||
| I love watching it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But he said in one video, he goes, I'm going to wager $100,000. | ||
| And I'm thinking, whoa, he's going to put $100,000 in machine, and then he's going to bet $100,000. | ||
| It's not what he did. | ||
| He put like $10,000 in the machine, and then he made bets, winning and losing back and forth, like 50, 50, until a total amount wagered was 100. | ||
| And then he walked away slightly up, like very little. | ||
| So there could be, for poker pros or for anybody, I think this ends gambling in its entirety. | ||
| Let's take an extreme example of that, right? | ||
| So typically speaking, the way we log results is by session or by tournament, which is typically the way logs work. | ||
| But let's just go to the most extreme, just to kind of highlight your point. | ||
| Let's just say that we wanted to look at poker by hand. | ||
| Okay, so I've played about like 7 million hands in my career. | ||
| I've looked at what the results look like when you look at all the wins, all the losses, and you just make two columns. | ||
| You know, I've won like, I could make a headline, like I've won like $800 million in poker. | ||
| I've just also lost like $785 million in poker, right? | ||
| So if we looked at it like that, like I've done really well. | ||
| But if we look at it letter of the law here and we went by hand, like, oh, I guess I owe money on, you know, $80 million I didn't make. | ||
| And then all of a sudden I'm paying like $32 million out of pocket, you're toast, right? | ||
| So if you start to go really extreme on this and you take it and you fine-tune comb, fine-tune whatever the saying is on that, go through it, you can find a way to get dramatically high tax numbers really quickly. | ||
| And frankly, this is what I think is the most silly about this is, look, I know what's going on here with this bill. | ||
| Like there's a lot of stuff going on on both sides, but they're trying to find ways to make money that isn't in a way that impacts people where they don't feel it. | ||
| And it's like, oh, gamblers, we'll just take a little bit of the gambler money. | ||
| But it's short-sighted and it doesn't work the way that they think because you know what? | ||
| Like the people, when people make money, they're smart. | ||
| And it's kind of like when you see richer people in countries that aggressively tax them or states that aggressively tax them. | ||
| They move to where they don't get aggressively taxed at some point. | ||
| When you try and add this 10% tax onto gambling, there are now people who cannot gamble. | ||
| There are people that will not gamble. | ||
| There are people that will, instead of paying taxes, they're going to go into black markets trying to avoid having to pay those taxes. | ||
| They're going to go offshore. | ||
| They're going to go into different games. | ||
| They might quit entirely. | ||
| In my opinion, you might see that we end up losing more than this 10% back anyway, just because of the reduction in gambling. | ||
| And to the point you made at the start of this conversation, is this a poison pill to try and get gaming involved to kill this bill? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But yeah, like if I'm, if I'm in Vegas, you think I want to see this pass? | |
| If I'm like at any level of government, if I'm in any of the casinos, if I'm DraftKings, if I'm FanDuel, if I'm, you name it, I'm MGM, I'm saying, like, any of these entities, they're not going to want to see this pass because it's going to hurt their bottom line. | ||
| And look, I hope you're right. | ||
| I hope maybe that's what this is. | ||
| But you certainly feel the heat when it's your industry on the line. | ||
| Yeah, you know, like it's certainly not my industry. | ||
| And I will also add there is a strong presence of conservatives that want gambling regulated or banned outright in general. | ||
| I think there's a big distinction between social poker and casino gambling. | ||
| Obviously, with cash games, you sit down at a table, maybe you have $200 to $400, whatever. | ||
| Some places might have higher buy-ins. | ||
| Yeah, you're putting money on the line, but it's all lumped together and there's no clear line of when it becomes gambling and when it doesn't. | ||
| Obviously, we know gambling when you see it. | ||
| If you go say, I think the Bears are going to win this game, I'm going to put $100 on it, you're gambling. | ||
| But if you're sitting at a social poker game like Texas Hold'em and you don't actually make any bets and you get your cards first, you look at your cards, you fold, you've wagered no money and you play the hand. | ||
| So there's a big difference between that. | ||
| And this is going to destroy what is a sport with tournaments. | ||
| Here's what I think on the poison pill thing. | ||
| It is a bad thing. | ||
| I think the bill is not going to pass because of it. | ||
| I think it was put in intentionally because people wouldn't understand it. | ||
| Members of the Senate are going to look at it and say, well, who cares about gambling losses? | ||
| What does that even mean? | ||
| And it's a small paragraph, but it's a poison pill because it's $170 billion a year industry. | ||
| And there's no way Nevada is going to say we will lose our tourism industry and allow this to happen. | ||
| But let me bring this to regular people. | ||
| Because like I said, I know there's a lot of conservatives that are, fine, ban gambling. | ||
| For one, it's massively popular. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of how expansive gambling has gotten with all the casinos everywhere. | ||
| But what this bill would do is effectively ban all gambling with the only argument being you should lie in your taxes, of which legally no one in law, no one in the Senate is going to argue people should do. | ||
| But this means that if you go to a Vegas vacation, you're like, hey, at the end of the year, I got two weeks vacation saved up. | ||
| Vegas has skiing an hour out. | ||
| They legit, they have a mountain and go skiing. | ||
| And you can also go watch a big show. | ||
| Maybe you want to see Penn and Teller. | ||
| And you're like, I'm going to set aside 500 bucks on my vacation budget for some blackjack and some craps just to have fun with the family. | ||
| I'm not a big gambler. | ||
| But if that $500, let's say you're playing craps and you win one, lose one, win one, lose one, after a weekend of playing, that $500 becomes 5,000 in losses, 500 in winnings, and you now owe the government on $500 in income you never made. | ||
| Yeah, you would owe the 10% of that, right? | ||
| So it's absolutely going to blow some people out of the water. | ||
| I think for the small-time gamblers, it won't be too, too impactful unless you have a big score, unless you hit a big jackpot, unless you win a big tournament, then all of a sudden, you know, the government's going to come knocking looking for their 10% on something that you didn't even win money in, which I think is like the real issue. | ||
| In the past four years, in the previous administration, they hired 87,000 IRS agents, and they also announced that they were going to be tracking any transaction over $600. | ||
| Now, the big argument was the IRS agents are going to help them track down the billionaires. | ||
| But this is why I see this as a poison pill. | ||
| I don't see how Vegas or Atlantic City or anybody, like, because Maryland's got a big casino industry now, lets this bill pass. | ||
| And if the argument is you might only pay a few hundred dollars, well, then you've got the issue of maybe right now this administration is not going to hunt you down over your gamblings, your winnings. | ||
| But I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future, maybe in a couple of years, this is how the government does it, after your taxes are filed, you get a bill in the mail saying the casino did track your winnings and losses. | ||
| Somehow they knew who you are, whatever. | ||
| And then the IRS agents come and they say, hey, look, we noticed your PayPal account, your bank account had this money come in from a deposit. | ||
| How do you explain that? | ||
| And then you're going to get a bill for a couple hundred dollars at the end of the year. | ||
| So I guess I'm curious, though, in Texas, you guys have a big, like there's a big industry of poker clubs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, are there a lot of players that are trying to make a living or are just recreational playing every single day? | ||
| Obviously, there are this how you stay in the industry, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So poker has really exploded in Texas over the course of the last 10 years or so. | ||
| We've seen the rise of a very different model. | ||
| It's people pay a membership fee, seat rental fees. | ||
| You're not allowed to rake legally in the state of Texas. | ||
| And so we've seen these rumors pop up in all of the major states where poker is being played by more and more and more players. | ||
| And I think that's also one of the reasons why when I see this bill, I realize how many people this will impact. | ||
| And, you know, you talked about a little bit earlier with people that may now try and avoid paying their taxes. | ||
| Like, let's just say, let's just, let's give it an impossible scenario, right? | ||
| Let's just say you're someone making $60,000 a year as a poker professional. | ||
| This 10% thing will put you in the red. | ||
| So now rather than making money, you're going to lose money every year. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| You say, oh, find a new job. | ||
| Oh, quit your career. | ||
| Well, okay, it's easy to say as someone talking to someone else, but as that person who might have a family, might have children, now they have to decide between like following this law or losing their career because someone in DC just tacked this onto a bill with no discussion, with no thought, with no conversation, with no debate. | ||
| You know, the impact this will have on people like, and certainly I live in Austin and Austin that I know in Houston and Dallas and San and all these major Texas cities will be giant, but it's also going to apply to all these places across the entire country. | ||
| And I want to say this just on kind of the conservative aspect of poker, because it is tricky the way that this works. | ||
| In my experience here, we've tried to pass laws in Texas to kind of clarify some things as it pertains to gambling. | ||
| And generally speaking, conservatives have been kind of split with us on whether they support us or not. | ||
| It sort of boils down to like which camp you're kind of in. | ||
| They're sort of the more pro-business wing of the Republican Party, which is like maybe something that I would more lean towards myself. | ||
| And then you have more of like the conservative Christian values side. | ||
| The way I kind of see it is like the less government, maybe this is very texting to me, I don't know, but the less government we have getting involved in people's lives and telling them what they can and can't do, you know, in terms of their taxes, in terms of their businesses, in terms of like their personal lives, in terms of anything that's not impacting the other people around them. | ||
| I feel like we should have less government, not more. | ||
| And when I see, you know, a 900-page build Tim where, you know, this is going, our industry is getting attacked this hard, it makes you wonder how many other industries might just have something thrown in there that might have something that's significant impacting them. | ||
| This is what's crazy is my team, well connected with the Hill. | ||
| Several people have, well, we have one individual particularly who worked there for over a decade. | ||
| Shout out to Lisa. | ||
| And we've been asking around and looking, trying to figure out how this got added at the last minute in the 11th hour. | ||
| We can't figure it out, which apparently I'm being told is kind of odd. | ||
| Who was the senator that put this, it's just two small paragraphs, but it is a nuclear bomb in the gaming industry. | ||
| And again, I want to stress, you know, I had the other night, we had a conservative on Amber Duke and she laughed and she's like, good, gambling is bad. | ||
| And it's okay, fine, fine. | ||
| Like to the conservatives that don't like gambling, by all means, you're allowed not to criticize it all day, every day. | ||
| But we need to ask ourselves, how did something so nuclear get added to a bill that's putting it at risk of passing in the first place? | ||
| Because you know what I find interesting is you were mentioning you don't want to get political. | ||
| So here we are. | ||
| I'm sitting down. | ||
| I'm a news guy in politics guy talking with a poker pro, a poker pro being concerned over a spending bill, which let me just be honest, ask you, when was the last time you decided to do a big public discussion on a spending bill? | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Oh, I mean, I mean, never. | ||
| Never. | ||
| Tim, I got dragged in. | ||
| It's like, I just woke up one day and it's like, your industry is under attack right now on a bill that's going to get voted on maybe tomorrow. | ||
| You know, you just get, you get thrown into it. | ||
| I mean, you were the first person I reached out to. | ||
| I'm like, okay, who do I know that actually has a voice kind of in this space? | ||
| And obviously, like, I appreciate you giving me the chance to speak and talking about this because it's so important. | ||
|
unidentified
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But when you get dragged in, you have no choice. | |
| And you know what it reminds me a little bit? | ||
| It reminds me a little bit about 15 years ago, people might not realize this, but online poker was banned overnight, where basically all of a sudden, one day, people could no longer play online poker. | ||
| The federal government seized all of the sites and then poker went overseas. | ||
| And it's not been until very recently with sites like Club WPT Gold that people can come back and play in America. | ||
| But what happened was because of the UIGEA and basically enforcing through the WIRE Act, as I understand it, they seized all of the money of the online poker players. | ||
| And just overnight, people's jobs became illegal. | ||
| I remember having to leave my home, move away from my house in Las Vegas, Nevada, to Canada to be able to play online and continue to work. | ||
| And you know what the most messed up thing is? | ||
| I had to then pay my taxes back because America is the only country where even if you live overseas, you have this thing. | ||
| So I went to Canada to make money to send my taxes back to America because I love this country and then even just deal with these random moments like that. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
|
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It's ridiculous. | |
| This is why I think it's a poison pill that it was added. | ||
| We don't know who added it. | ||
| Nobody wants to take credit for it. | ||
| I think you are right. | ||
| They're trying to figure out ways to offset the tax deductions and make it look like the deficit's going to be smaller and the debt spending is going to be going to be smaller. | ||
| And I think they did it in a way that most people wouldn't understand, but now Newsweek's written about it. | ||
| NBC's written about it. | ||
| It's popping up. | ||
| And so Thomas Massey's a no on the bill. | ||
| Chip Roy, my understanding, is also a no on the bill. | ||
| And he's your rep. | ||
| My rep. | ||
| But it's not because of the gambling. | ||
| I don't think anybody even knows about it. | ||
| I also think it's probably, there's probably other things in the bill that we haven't noticed that are as bad. | ||
| But I can't imagine a Republican rep in any of these big gaming states deciding to vote yes on this, especially, as I mentioned with the mayor. | ||
| So ultimately, it's when you get Doug Polk doing an interview with Tim Poole on a political issue, I think for conservatives who don't like gambling, just the main takeaway from it is they put this in here to trigger a $170 billion industry into a panic against the bill to stop it. | ||
| And with a single day, I don't know how you get a debate to pull that provision out considering it's already passed the Senate. | ||
| It seems like the only possible outcome is that the bill will fail and Trump's agenda will be stopped. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And if you figured that out, that is, I got to give a tip of my hat to you, man, because that's some 4D chess, absolutely. | ||
| And it does make sense because if you think about the urgency now from my industry to step in here, from all of these big players, like I'm not a big casino guy, like I'm a small-time cardroom owner here in Texas. | ||
| I do my own stuff. | ||
| I play online, all these kinds of things. | ||
| But you have to imagine the amount of money at play here, the amount of money at stake, the impact of this decision is so tremendous that, I mean, I hope it kills the bill selfishly for my industry because of how brutal it is for me. | ||
| Not because of any of the other stuff. | ||
| I've honestly not been following that closely. | ||
| I follow state level politics more than national, but certainly you rile people enough up that have enough power and enough say and lord knows the lobbying in dc from gaming institutions there's no there's no reason for this in the bill it literally makes no sense there's there's been no debate on this there's been no public debate on it there's been no cultural issue at play there's been no large gaming anti-gaming lobby this came literally out of nowhere and it is a ta it is a tax increase disguised as | ||
| some kind of policy position as opposed to a literal tax increase. | ||
| And it does so in a way that is a nuclear bomb on one of the biggest industries we have in the country that's been expanding rapidly that the only outcome could be to cause an uproar that nukes. | ||
| My mind is blown on this. | ||
| Just to stress one more time, there were a few provisions in the bill, like the Short Act and the Hearing Protection Act. | ||
| This would have made it much easier to attain a suppressor for your gun and a short-barreled rifle, which are restricted under something called the National Firearms Act. | ||
| There are lobbies that have been fighting really hard for this. | ||
| The NRA, the NG, what is it, the National Gun Owners of America. | ||
| And so this was culturally popping up in the news. | ||
| But overnight, out of nowhere, with no conversation whatsoever, they put in one of the weirdest provisions imaginable that could only disrupt Trump's agenda. | ||
| And then you just said it, Doug. | ||
| You said you hope the bill fails for that reason because it's an attack on your industry. | ||
| I think that was the play. | ||
| So let me just ask you one more question so people can understand the scale of this. | ||
| Do you know how many players so far are expected to be at the World Series of Poker starting today? | ||
| Well, the timing is crazy, right? | ||
| Because right now we have the flagship event of poker. | ||
| It's the World Series of Poker main event. | ||
| It's the biggest poker tournament we get every year. | ||
| It's $10,000 to buy in. | ||
| Last year had 10,000 people playing in it. | ||
| So this is a giant, giant, giant, giant tournament. | ||
| I don't think it will impact this year because the people going to play don't know if it's going to go through or not yet. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So I think where we will really see this rear its ugly head will be next year at the start where people already know and the series hasn't begun yet. | ||
| But yeah, like this is the biggest event of poker. | ||
| Maybe it could impact the final day or two. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| But yeah, it's going to be tremendous for tournament poker. | ||
| So specifically though, I think like two years ago there was something like close to 11,000 players who, each spent 10 grand to enter the main event and i i was one of them and indeed uh i don't actually know the number do you do you know how many people go to i think it was just over 10 000. | ||
| I think it was just over 10,000. | ||
| In total, like how many people come to Vegas for the World Series? | ||
| I would guess conservatively about 100,000 people, maybe more, 125, come to Vegas over the course of the summer to play. | ||
| So here's what I think. | ||
| I think they were trying to find a way to kill Trump's bill. | ||
| It passed only because of a tiebreaker vote from the vice president. | ||
| And they did it when one of the biggest gaming events and times of the year is taking place with the World Series of Poker, specifically with a single paragraph that would kill pro poker, aside from all the gaming industry and fantasy sports. | ||
| You've got 100,000 or so people that have traveled to Vegas for this big event where on the side of, I think it's the horseshoe, right? | ||
| They have the big WSOP logo, and it's a permanent fixture. | ||
| Sounds to me like it was a strategy. | ||
| Like they said, how can we cause the biggest problem imaginable for this bill? | ||
| They put in this one paragraph that gets largely overlooked. | ||
| People don't understand. | ||
| Meanwhile, there's 100,000 players that have just flown to Vegas who are all now hearing about this, who are not political, who I imagine are going to be talking in all of the press around the game, which has millions or tens of millions of viewers, and they're going to say, kill Trump's bill. | ||
| That does make some sense to me. | ||
| And I will say it's worth noting as well, because I've seen this take, which I think is wrong. | ||
| People are saying that this is Trump. | ||
| Trump hates poker. | ||
| Trump is doing it. | ||
| We have no clue who this was. | ||
| It could have been someone from Trump's team disseminating it down. | ||
| It could have been someone from it. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| We have no idea. | ||
| We don't know who added it. | ||
| We don't know why it got added. | ||
| We don't know any of those things. | ||
| All we know is it did get added, and it got passed in this giant bill. | ||
| And so that's the political side gamesmanship that I'm totally unfamiliar with. | ||
| I just know how bad this impact will be. | ||
| And yeah, maybe this is. | ||
| Maybe during one of the biggest gambling events of the year, maybe this will help get the word out. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| Outside my skis now, I don't know what to say. | ||
| That's a crazy idea. | ||
| Well, I'll just final thought on this. | ||
| All the poker players want to see Trump's bill dead. | ||
| Many of them are blaming Trump for it. | ||
| And if Trump celebrates this victory, there is—this is—I think what will end up happening is in the midterm elections, in contested districts, there are going to be attack ads against Republicans where they say, so-and-so Republican voted against fantasy sports. | ||
| So-and-so voted to tax your sports gambling, your daily fantasy stuff, because regular middle-of-the-road guys, they're playing their fantasy sports on FanDuel or DraftKings or whatever it is they're doing. | ||
| And they're going to wonder why it is now. | ||
| It's become an impossible thing to do. | ||
| But, Doug, I do appreciate you joining and talking about this. | ||
| Where can people find you? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You can find me online, Doug Polk, poker on YouTube. | ||
| Do a lot of poker stuff, especially right now. | ||
| World Series of Poker going on. | ||
| You know, Lodge Card Club out in Austin or San Antonio if you're ever in the Texas area. | ||
| And then online at Club WPT Golds where I play online using code Doug. | ||
| So, appreciate it, Tim. | ||
| Right on, man. | ||
| Thanks for joining me. | ||
| We'll see you next time. | ||
|
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See you. | |
| The famous Doug Polk. | ||
| He's got a big channel. | ||
| He's appeared—he's one of the biggest pros in the world. | ||
| I think he's most famous for, you know, online stuff. | ||
| But I'm going to say it again because I know, guys, I'm well aware of all the comments saying, ban gambling, I don't care. | ||
| I think that's how they're tricking you. | ||
| But I could be wrong. | ||
| Maybe I'm getting all worked up for no reason and every single Republican is going to fall in line except for Chip Roy and Messi and this thing passes with the slimmest— 218 to you know uh they they have to get 218 to pass it even though there's three vacancies for the democrat side it really feels to me like i gotta say, I'm bummed to see Doug Polk say, I hope the bill fails because of how important the bill is for Trump's agenda, | ||
| particularly around immigration. | ||
| But I get it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Man, I'm a big fan of the World Series of poker. | ||
| I'm a big poker player myself. | ||
| I'm a big fan. | ||
| I do think there's a component of chance in gambling, obviously. | ||
| I think the argument is fine to have. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of degenerate overgambling and addiction or alcohol or drugs or any of that stuff. | ||
| But we're talking about 100,000 people who are flying to Vegas right now for the biggest gambling, gaming event, whatever you're going to call it, the tournament, the World Series of Poker, where people dream of entering, where the everyman has a chance, if they save up that one time, to maybe be the dude who wins the main event. | ||
| Because it's like a 16-day-long, grueling fiasco to try and win this thing. | ||
| It's a marathon where you're playing for like 16 hours a day. | ||
| It is a brutal feat of math calculations and outwitting your opponents, and people love it. | ||
| By all means, say you hate gambling, say you want gambling bad, but understand, this is maybe I'm thinking too conspiratorially, but when I'm asking my team, like, who was the senator who put this in the bill? | ||
| And the answer is, we don't know, and the staffers don't know either. | ||
| Someone put in it at some point. | ||
| Someone thought this up. | ||
| And then you get, you know, Doug Polk, he gets hundreds of thousands of views on his videos saying, and he's not a political guy. | ||
| He's like, I don't know about politics, man. | ||
| I hope the bill fails. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, that's a bummer. | ||
| Because he even mentioned he's like a pro-business, right-leaning guy, but he's not a political guy. | ||
| Anything that pulls in normies to get them to blame Trump and sabotage his agenda, to me, sounds like a poison pill. | ||
| But I'm going to wrap it up there, my friends. | ||
| I'm going to, we're going to gear it up to send this raid over to Russell Brand. | ||
| I believe Russell Brand is geared up to go live. | ||
| I always usually just pop over to Rumble and grab that URL for you guys. | ||
| Yes, Russell Brand is currently live. | ||
| Let's get that raid going. | ||
| Smash the like button. | ||
| Share the show with everyone you know, my friends. | ||
| We'll be back tonight at 8 p.m. for Timcast IRL. | ||
| You don't want to miss it. | ||
| You can follow me on X and Instagram at Timcast. | ||
| And shout out to Doug. | ||
| Thanks for joining me. |