Amount pledged: $2,841.49
Amount collected: $1766.10
(As of 12/3/2014)
PAYPAL INFO: Make out donations to pokerkindness@gmail.com and select “send to family and friends.” Try to avoid paying any fees, especially if your donation is very small.
*** ***
Ever since we kicked off #SAPK in earnest one week ago, its evolution has taken me completely by surprise. What was supposed to be a mild-mannered gesture expected to net “only about a hundred bucks” quickly ballooned into a collection that today totals over $1,700 – and counting.
That’s $1,700 the poker community elected to donate to charity, without any particular cause in mind.
It was not originally my intention to launch and sustain a full-fledged fundraiser – I was practically convinced it would remain small – but by the time it started snowballing, I could not in good faith turn away the responsibility to manage it (this is about as self-important a comment as you’re going to get from me – save your loudest applause for the donors). Since taking on this effort, I’ve been humbled by all the work and attention to detail that went into making sure the collection of funds can be done efficiently, transparently and ethically.
Selecting a charitable cause, or causes, was another critical point. Early on, I had made a faint allusion to a toy drive, but it quickly picked up broad support. It was around this time that I found out a poker player named Billy Vogel (who took down the inaugural DeepStacks Poker Tour Western New York Poker Championship in 2012) has been collecting donations from his friends in the online poker community and giving them to charity for years, splitting the total between a local toy drive and a lump donation to the Global Medical Relief Fund. (More information and material about Vogel’s efforts can be found here, here, here and here.) He’s been doing this for five years! And here I thought I was the Bono of poker.
I’ve since gotten to know Vogel and spent some time learning more about his efforts. What I like about them is that they have two things in common with #SAPK:
- Both are powered by the goodness of the poker community, and
- Both originate in key U.S. iGaming states – Billy lives in Brigantine near Atlantic City, New Jersey and I live in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Those who are familiar with my work know that I have covered the U.S.-regulated iGaming industry quite a bit. I’ve listened to countless testimonials about why online poker should (or shouldn’t) be legalized and regulated in the United States. Now listen: LOTS of good people in the iGaming space – regulators, legislators, assorted advocates and professionals – do an exceptional job taking the online gaming community’s interests into account. But that’s not always the case across the board. Many times, the U.S. online gambling public in general is effectively reduced to a faceless horde of unsophisticated automatons whose gambling proclivities would be entirely repulsive if not for the convenient fact that we can tax them. And these are the proponents – we won’t even get into what the Sheldonesque opposition thinks.
This antecedent makes up much of the reason why I’ve enjoyed seeing homegrown charitable initatives by the online poker community gain so much traction and support, like we’re seeing with Vogel and like we are now seeing with #SAPK. To me, this shows that the poker community is, for the most part, a good one, made up by a considerable number of decent, altruistic citizens who can take matters into their own hands and perform good deeds for the communities around them, without requiring the tax man to step in.
What this means for #SAPK is that I would very much like to put the money raised so far, plus any future donation, to supporting local causes – including Billy Vogel’s. Part of the money will go to what he’s doing in Atlantic City, and the remainder will go to a Nevada-based cause that I am presently in the process of selecting based on suggestions by #SAPK’s Nevada-based donors.
The symbolism of this bicoastal philanthropy is not lost on a U.S. iGaming junkie like me. Nevada and New Jersey are both states where state-regulated iGaming came with the promise of supplementing the state’s tax income (ideally for the purpose of public service). But the early days have been very competitive, and Ultimate Poker has had to pull out from both states. Others are shutting down too. This is probably good news for the market leaders’ bottom lines, but it’s also the eradication of multiple fonts of tax revenue for the state. Through charity, the poker players themselves can pick up where the shuttered sites left off.
#SAPK will tentatively accept donations until the holidays. In terms of transferring the money, the most practical solution so far has been the “friends and family” option through PayPal because, when configured properly, it entails no fees for either the sender or the recipient. This is important for #SAPK because many of the donations are so small – pennies on the dollar from incoming Ultimate Poker checks – and practically every other transfer method, including crowdfunding (which I initially considered), can entail up to a 30 cent flat fee.
I am accepting donations to a personal PayPal account created exclusively for #SAPK. If you are interested in donating any amount to #SAPK, please PayPal it to this address: pokerkindness@gmail.com. Please make sure to avoid paying fees by selecting the option “send to family and friends.” If it says you gotta pay some anyway, or you’d rather donate another way, email me at agentmarco87@gmail.com and we can try to work it out.
All the money collected will tentatively be donated by the end of this year. As noted, part of the money will go to Billy Vogel’s initiative. Vogel is trying to meet a December 7th deadline, so if you’re pretty sure you will eventually donate, I would like to ask you to do so as soon as you feel like it. The remainder of the #SAPK fund will go to a Nevada-based cause. I don’t know yet what percentage will go to either recipient, but donors will be heard from and kept updated. I will not keep any of the money for myself, nor will I use it to cover any sort of expense.
I will do the best I can to keep the public periodically informed about the total balance and all pertinent donation-related info. In case you have doubts about the legitimacy of this endeavor, or simply wish to communicate with me, you are encouraged to contact me at agentmarco87@gmail.com.
In closing, I invite anyone who has a small balance or inconsequential amount of money on an online poker site, be it Ultimate Poker or other, to consider cashing out and donating that money to the #SAPK fund, so that the sum of donations can make a difference, unlike the individual amounts. I certainly don’t wish to take money away from the online poker economy, but I’m also pretty sure that a lot of really tiny amounts are just sitting there in inactive balances, untouched for months if not years (I know I have a few like this). Chances are that by the time you feel like playing again, if ever, you will want to redeposit anyway. May I suggest that you make that one of your 2015 resolutions, and cash out the piddling amount you have now to support a good cause?
(For more information about the nature and origin of #SAPK, see this post. I should be doing a better job presenting all relevant information in a more compact manner, but to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, “I did not have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”)
