by CHRIS BARRY

Montreal's poker community took a big hit Saturday, May 28, when the MUC police decided it was finally time to take down one of the larger illegal gaming houses in town, the VIP club on Ste-Catherine W. Working under the handle of Operation Snake Eyes, over 40 gun-toting cops raided the establishment that evening, arresting all present, effectively intimidating most, if not all, of the city's private poker clubs into shutting their doors - for the time being, at least.

According to Jay Kastner, the man behind www.playerforhire.com, Montreal's definitive source for all things poker and one of those arrested in the raid, "They burst in screaming their heads off, guns drawn. I was just, like, ‘What the hell?' I didn't even take it seriously at first. But then they cuffed us, took our mug shots and confiscated everyone's money. One guy lost the eight grand he had on him. The police just took it. I respect that ignorance is not an excuse, but probably 99 per cent of the players in Montreal didn't even realize these places were illegal until the raid."

They do now. The maximum penalty for running an illegal gaming establishment in Quebec is two years in jail, although most of the players swept up in the bust are hoping to escape with a simple fine and no criminal record - although this is certainly not guaranteed.

Booming business

Poker has become huge over the past couple of years. Playerforhire.

com, which only went online last September, now registers over a million hits a week. Kastner believes his site is partially responsible for both the rise and fall of the local private poker clubs.

"I started [the site] mostly as a self-promotion kind of thing, sort of, ‘Look at me, I'm Jay Kastner, stake me for a game.' But then I put up a forum and all these rooms started posting their games on it - and it just got bigger and bigger. By December, a couple of big clubs had opened up and a lot of us started playing at them - it became more of a business to the actual players then. You know, you'd go there, gambling maybe three, four, five thousand dollars and walk out making maybe 10 grand - so a whole group of us started going as often as five nights a week to some of these clubs. On any given night you could go to any [of these establishments] and there'd be 40 or 50 people playing. And there were at least eight clubs going for a while there."

Unfortunately for the poker community, however, the police were paying pretty close attention to the Playerforhire.com forum as well, which ultimately led to the raid on the VIP club last month and the apparent demise of the underground poker scene.

Coming soon to a casino near you

"You know," says Kastner, "if the Montreal Casino had poker, the group of players that I play with would be making quite a good living - and a legal living at that - just by playing at the casino. But the reality is, poker, compared to black jack, roulette, any other game, it's the least profitable [for the casino]. So maybe that's why they don't do it."

According to Jean-Pierre Roy, spokesperson for Loto-Québec, this is a situation likely to change very soon. "We're just waiting for government approval to set up a poker room at the casino, but we can't do anything until then," says Roy. "Sure, it's true poker isn't especially profitable, but games like Texas Hold 'Em are so popular right now that we feel the need to take advantage of the phenomenon while it's hot." Roy says a poker room at the casino could possibly open as early as late summer.

Until it does, however, local players will have to console themselves by organizing private games, playing online or heading over to the Akwesasne reserve in New York State to play at the casino over there.

"That's what we all used to do anyway [before the advent of the local poker clubs]," says Kastner. "That's where I first met a bunch of the guys who ended up either starting up or playing at the Montreal clubs. And understand, we're not talking organized criminals here, just avid poker fanatics, guys really into the game looking to offer something to the players. Look, some of the people running these places were kids, 23, 24 years old; these weren't organized criminals, just poker players."