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"Nicki" is showing a pair of eights, "Michael41" appears to be playing for a high straight, and "Dreamer42" is limping along with a pair of fours.
But when the betting -- in $4 and $8 increments -- is over and the cards are turned up, Dreamer42 has another four and a pair of kings to go with the fours on the table. It's a full house, and the dealer pushes Dreamer a pot of $118.50.
Figuratively speaking. Because the players in this game of seven-card stud are at computers in Ireland, England, Alabama, Florida, Texas and Los Angeles; the "dealer" is a software program; and the "table" is controlled by an outfit in Costa Rica called ParadisePoker.com.
The money, however, is very real, part of a $3.1 billion global industry involving more than 6 million customers, half of them American. This is 21st-century gambling: computerized, anonymous, convenient.
But is it legal? And if it is, who's going to regulate it -- and profit from it?
Those are questions politicians are wrestling with from Canberra to London to Sacramento, and the answers so far have been a mixed lot.
Two months ago, the Australian Parliament approved a ban on Internet gambling in that country. But last month, the British government proposed lifting many of that nation's restrictions on online "punting."
Last week, Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that will allow Californians to use the telephone or their PCs to bet on horse races. But Congress is pondering legislation that would ban most forms of Internet betting and penalize credit card companies that offer their services to cyberspace casinos.
"In the end, it doesn't really matter a whole lot what individual governments decide," said I. Nelson Rose, a professor at Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa and one of the leading gambling law experts in the United States. "The Internet doesn't pay much attention to geography."
Undeterred by legal niceties, it's indisputable that Internet gambling is growing.
Gaming industry analysts say the number of Internet companies offering gambling has swelled from a handful in 1995 to more than 350 today, operating at least 1,400 separate sites in the United States and other countries. They offer everything from bingo to blackjack and have seen revenues triple in the past three years.
"The overall state of the online gaming industry is very healthy," said Marc Falcone, a gambling industry analyst for the brokerage firm Bear, Stearns & Co. "How healthy it stays depends a lot on what happens with the legal issues."
The U.S. Justice Department contends Internet gambling is illegal under the Wire Act, a 40-year-old law designed to prohibit betting over the telephone, although Congress last year approved an exemption from the law for state-regulated betting on horse races.
Last year, federal prosecutors won their first -- and so far, only -- case against an online operator when a San Francisco man was convicted of taking sports bets at a Web site. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
But a federal judge in New Orleans ruled in February that the Wire Act applied only to betting on sporting events.
"At this point in time, Internet casino gambling is not a violation of federal law," Judge Stanwood R. Duval wrote in dismissing a civil lawsuit against credit card companies that extended credit to Internet gamblers.
The case is under appeal before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
"If the ruling is upheld, and I think it will be," said Las Vegas attorney Anthony Cabot, a gambling law expert, "the show's over for the Justice Department's use of the Wire Act."
California law prohibits running any game of chance that is "banked," meaning games in which the bettors play against the house, except at Indian casinos. But legal scholars say it's unclear whether a state law passed in 1885 makes it a crime to play the games as well as run them.
"It depends on who you are asking," said Nathan Barankin, spokesman for state Attorney General Bill Lockyer. "If you ask us, we'll tell you yes."
The ambiguities and threats of prosecution have driven most online casino operators offshore, where countries such as Costa Rica and Antigua welcome them as long as they pony up licensing fees of up to $100,000 a year.
Pay the license, fork over as much as $250,000 for the software and thousands more for advertising, and your casino is open for business.
At most cyberspace joints, players open an account with a credit card. If they lose, the debt is charged to their card.
Until recently, winners who wanted to cash out usually received their money in the form of a credit to their card. But fearful of legal entanglements, many card companies are refusing to accept the credits, meaning winners must wait for the casinos to issue them a check.
Collecting one's winnings is only one of the chances cyberspace gamblers take. Another is having some assurance they can win.
Many of the 56 nations that play host to online gambling firms lack, or fail to enforce, regulations to ensure the companies are not dealing from the bottom of the electronic deck.
To lessen players' misgivings, some of the larger sites offer certification from reputable accounting firms that their gambling software is based on normal mathematical odds.
"There are bad operators out there, but I think they are relatively few," said Sue Schneider, chairperson of the Interactive Gaming Council, a Canada-based organization of gambling sites on the Web. "Consumers need to do what they would do with anything else: Get as much information as they can before spending any money."
Consumers aren't the only ones to get burned occasionally. Credit card companies have found that it's sometimes hard to collect debts run up by cyberspace bettors.
"Under California law that goes back to when California first became a state, gambling debts are unenforceable," said San Rafael attorney Ira Rothken, who has successfully sued credit card companies to prevent them from collecting Internet gambling debts.
After Rothken filed suit on behalf of a Santa Clara County man who had run up Internet gambling debts, Discover Card agreed to drop the card charges and pay attorney's fees. It also agreed to stop doing business for three years with online casinos that offer their games to Californians. Several other card companies have taken similar steps.
Cyberspace casino shoppers can't fall back on the comfort of dealing with big brand names yet, but that may change.
Apparently deciding that what you can't beat, you join, Nevada legislators earlier this year abandoned the state's ban on Internet gambling and instead gave conditional approval to Nevada casinos' entry into the field.
To open Internet casinos, the Nevada-based companies must show, among other things, that they know precisely where the bets are coming from and that the bettors are at least 21 years old.
"The technology is there," said analyst Falcone, referring to things like mini-global positioning systems that can pinpoint a computer's location and biometric units that match thumbprints. "But I think it could be one or two years before the (Nevada) casinos can meet all the conditions."
In the meantime, Congress is pondering legislation that would make most forms of gambling on the Internet a federal crime, and cut off use of credit cards to open accounts with offshore casinos. Similar efforts have failed each of the past three years.
In California, a bill that would make it a crime to both offer and play online gambling games -- except horse racing, which is regulated by the state -- has passed the Assembly and awaits state Senate action.
But legal experts say the chances of effectively enforcing any government ban on Internet gambling are about as good as those of winning the state-run lottery.
"It's absolutely not enforceable," said Rose, the Whittier Law School legal expert. "... if people want to gamble, they'll gamble."
But when the betting -- in $4 and $8 increments -- is over and the cards are turned up, Dreamer42 has another four and a pair of kings to go with the fours on the table. It's a full house, and the dealer pushes Dreamer a pot of $118.50.
Figuratively speaking. Because the players in this game of seven-card stud are at computers in Ireland, England, Alabama, Florida, Texas and Los Angeles; the "dealer" is a software program; and the "table" is controlled by an outfit in Costa Rica called ParadisePoker.com.
The money, however, is very real, part of a $3.1 billion global industry involving more than 6 million customers, half of them American. This is 21st-century gambling: computerized, anonymous, convenient.
But is it legal? And if it is, who's going to regulate it -- and profit from it?
Those are questions politicians are wrestling with from Canberra to London to Sacramento, and the answers so far have been a mixed lot.
Two months ago, the Australian Parliament approved a ban on Internet gambling in that country. But last month, the British government proposed lifting many of that nation's restrictions on online "punting."
Last week, Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that will allow Californians to use the telephone or their PCs to bet on horse races. But Congress is pondering legislation that would ban most forms of Internet betting and penalize credit card companies that offer their services to cyberspace casinos.
"In the end, it doesn't really matter a whole lot what individual governments decide," said I. Nelson Rose, a professor at Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa and one of the leading gambling law experts in the United States. "The Internet doesn't pay much attention to geography."
Undeterred by legal niceties, it's indisputable that Internet gambling is growing.
Gaming industry analysts say the number of Internet companies offering gambling has swelled from a handful in 1995 to more than 350 today, operating at least 1,400 separate sites in the United States and other countries. They offer everything from bingo to blackjack and have seen revenues triple in the past three years.
"The overall state of the online gaming industry is very healthy," said Marc Falcone, a gambling industry analyst for the brokerage firm Bear, Stearns & Co. "How healthy it stays depends a lot on what happens with the legal issues."
The U.S. Justice Department contends Internet gambling is illegal under the Wire Act, a 40-year-old law designed to prohibit betting over the telephone, although Congress last year approved an exemption from the law for state-regulated betting on horse races.
Last year, federal prosecutors won their first -- and so far, only -- case against an online operator when a San Francisco man was convicted of taking sports bets at a Web site. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
But a federal judge in New Orleans ruled in February that the Wire Act applied only to betting on sporting events.
"At this point in time, Internet casino gambling is not a violation of federal law," Judge Stanwood R. Duval wrote in dismissing a civil lawsuit against credit card companies that extended credit to Internet gamblers.
The case is under appeal before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
"If the ruling is upheld, and I think it will be," said Las Vegas attorney Anthony Cabot, a gambling law expert, "the show's over for the Justice Department's use of the Wire Act."
California law prohibits running any game of chance that is "banked," meaning games in which the bettors play against the house, except at Indian casinos. But legal scholars say it's unclear whether a state law passed in 1885 makes it a crime to play the games as well as run them.
"It depends on who you are asking," said Nathan Barankin, spokesman for state Attorney General Bill Lockyer. "If you ask us, we'll tell you yes."
The ambiguities and threats of prosecution have driven most online casino operators offshore, where countries such as Costa Rica and Antigua welcome them as long as they pony up licensing fees of up to $100,000 a year.
Pay the license, fork over as much as $250,000 for the software and thousands more for advertising, and your casino is open for business.
At most cyberspace joints, players open an account with a credit card. If they lose, the debt is charged to their card.
Until recently, winners who wanted to cash out usually received their money in the form of a credit to their card. But fearful of legal entanglements, many card companies are refusing to accept the credits, meaning winners must wait for the casinos to issue them a check.
Collecting one's winnings is only one of the chances cyberspace gamblers take. Another is having some assurance they can win.
Many of the 56 nations that play host to online gambling firms lack, or fail to enforce, regulations to ensure the companies are not dealing from the bottom of the electronic deck.
To lessen players' misgivings, some of the larger sites offer certification from reputable accounting firms that their gambling software is based on normal mathematical odds.
"There are bad operators out there, but I think they are relatively few," said Sue Schneider, chairperson of the Interactive Gaming Council, a Canada-based organization of gambling sites on the Web. "Consumers need to do what they would do with anything else: Get as much information as they can before spending any money."
Consumers aren't the only ones to get burned occasionally. Credit card companies have found that it's sometimes hard to collect debts run up by cyberspace bettors.
"Under California law that goes back to when California first became a state, gambling debts are unenforceable," said San Rafael attorney Ira Rothken, who has successfully sued credit card companies to prevent them from collecting Internet gambling debts.
After Rothken filed suit on behalf of a Santa Clara County man who had run up Internet gambling debts, Discover Card agreed to drop the card charges and pay attorney's fees. It also agreed to stop doing business for three years with online casinos that offer their games to Californians. Several other card companies have taken similar steps.
Cyberspace casino shoppers can't fall back on the comfort of dealing with big brand names yet, but that may change.
Apparently deciding that what you can't beat, you join, Nevada legislators earlier this year abandoned the state's ban on Internet gambling and instead gave conditional approval to Nevada casinos' entry into the field.
To open Internet casinos, the Nevada-based companies must show, among other things, that they know precisely where the bets are coming from and that the bettors are at least 21 years old.
"The technology is there," said analyst Falcone, referring to things like mini-global positioning systems that can pinpoint a computer's location and biometric units that match thumbprints. "But I think it could be one or two years before the (Nevada) casinos can meet all the conditions."
In the meantime, Congress is pondering legislation that would make most forms of gambling on the Internet a federal crime, and cut off use of credit cards to open accounts with offshore casinos. Similar efforts have failed each of the past three years.
In California, a bill that would make it a crime to both offer and play online gambling games -- except horse racing, which is regulated by the state -- has passed the Assembly and awaits state Senate action.
But legal experts say the chances of effectively enforcing any government ban on Internet gambling are about as good as those of winning the state-run lottery.
"It's absolutely not enforceable," said Rose, the Whittier Law School legal expert. "... if people want to gamble, they'll gamble."