I came to the Virginia legislature with an entrepreneurial background. As such, whenever I am asked to consider the regulation of any industry, I am alway careful to being continually mindful of the balance between ensuring the public’s safety and general welfare and ensuring that entrepreneurs and small businesses are given the room to create, innovate, and create jobs as they see fit. Wielding regulation to specifically attempt to curtail an industry is an unfathomable and unjust approach.

This type of approach would be even more inconceivable if the curtailing was directed at charitable organizations while expanding similar for-profit industries. 

As such, I am confident that VDACS will gladly take action to correct the instances in these draft regulations that give the appearance of granting for-profit gaming companies advantages that are denied to charitable gaming organizations. 

Specifically, I would note that the prohibitions in these draft regulations on the conducting of concurrent tournaments, the prohibition on customers voluntarily offering gratuity to poker dealers, the limitation of locations, and the re-buy prohibition all harm the charitable gaming industry, do not discernibly benefit the general public in any meaningful way, and are not regulations that the for-profit gaming industry is subject to. In fact, the re-buy, concurrent tournament, and gratuity prohibitions decrease options for the playing public, which in some cases lead to their only option to participate to be at stakes with which they are not comfortable. 

Regulations should never lead to the picking of winners and losers. I hope to see these changes made so that these regulations are not exactly that.