We, the undersigned Virginia residents, urge the Virginia General Assembly and Virginia's federal delegation to establish a licensed regulatory framework for peer-to-peer online poker.

Virginia online poker players currently operate without meaningful consumer protection. Working and retired Virginians alike — whether they play for strategic challenge or recreational entertainment — are pushed toward unregulated offshore poker sites where every deposit and withdrawal triggers a wallet-to-wallet taxable event under current IRS rules, or toward sweepstakes-based platforms such as Global Poker and ClubWPT Gold, where predatory operators issue players a 1099-MISC classifying withdrawals as prize income with zero cost basis. A player who deposits $1,000, satisfies the mandatory wagering requirement, breaks even, and withdraws $1,000 will have that $1,000 reported to the IRS as pure taxable income. Any attempt to claim cost basis contradicts the platform's own IRS filing. The player is legally trapped: report accurately and pay income tax on money they didn't gain, or claim cost basis and risk an IRS discrepancy. The operator bears no corresponding tax obligation whatsoever.

Virginia has already drawn a regulatory line between gambling and skill-based competition — it simply drew it in the wrong place. Sports betting, horse racing, and the lottery are undeniably gambling: the bettor has zero agency over the outcome. Virginia licenses and taxes all three. Professional golf and billiards are undeniably skill-based competitions: Virginia imposes no gambling framework on either, treating them as sports — despite the fact that participants pay non-refundable entry fees to compete in events where environmental variance entirely outside their control can determine the outcome. PGA Tour players pay entry and qualification fees of up to $400 or more per event to compete in conditions where wind, course conditions, and equipment variance can override skill on any given shot. Professional billiards players pay entry fees of $500 or more per tournament — as seen at the 2026 Super Billiards Expo Diamond Open — to compete on tables where felt texture, humidity, and ball tolerances introduce meaningful randomness. Neither activity is classified as gambling in Virginia. Peer-to-peer online poker operates within a mathematically bounded environment where variance is produced by card distribution — quantifiable and skill-subordinate over time — unlike the uncontrollable environmental variance of golf or billiards, yet receives no framework at all. The inconsistency is a categorical misclassification that predatory operators have learned to exploit.

We ask that this be corrected. Not to expand gambling — but to protect players, establish fair tax treatment, and bring an existing activity under transparent, enforceable rules. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada have already solved these problems by licensing peer-to-peer online poker. In those states, licensed operators are required to treat deposits as player funds held in trust — establishing cost basis, eliminating the 1099-MISC tax trap, and ensuring players are only taxed on net gains. Other states are responding to sweepstakes poker by banning it outright. Virginia can do better by following the example of the former states and regulate from a position of knowledge rather than ban from a position of ignorance. A licensing framework would protect the estimated 500,000 Virginians among the approximately 15 million Americans who play online poker regularly (based on national participation data) — including retired and disabled residents for whom an online poker community may be their primary social outlet — and ensure operators serving Virginia residents are accountable to Virginia law.