With his trademark holographic sunglasses and his quiet, studious demeanor, Greg Raymer came out of nowhere in 2004 and won the World Series of Poker Main Event. Today, he has quit his job as a patent attorney and represents a gambling site and plays tournaments around the world each year. He is also an active libertarian who works with the Poker Players’ Alliance (PPA) to represent players’ interests in the political sphere.

The midnight passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which was attached to an unrelated piece of legislation in 2006, gave a new awareness to many poker players of the dangers they face from government intrusion. There have also been various law enforcement and court actions against poker players in such states as South Carolina, Kentucky, and Colorado. According to its materials, PPA exists to protect poker players in court when they run up against the law, and to spread the political message that poker is not a crime. (One of their most successful tactics in court has been to argue that poker is a game of skill, not chance.)

As part of his activism with PPA, Raymer attended CPAC last week and spent a few minutes talking with NRO about his career, his libertarian philosophy, and the preservation of freedom on the Internet.

DAVID FREDDOSO: Tell me about your background.

GREG RAYMER: I went to the University of Missouri at Rolla, got a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. I went to the University of Minnesota, got a master’s degree in biochemistry and my law degree, and then my first job out of school was in Chicago. I didn’t like working for them — a big litigation firm. I took a job with a different firm in San Diego — I worked there for three years, and I didn’t like law firms, I realized after that. I took a job with Pfizer, lived in Connecticut for six years, and then I won the [World Series of Poker] Main Event in 2004. FREDDOSO: You don’t do the whole poker circuit, do you? Or at least you didn’t when you had the legal fight with the World Poker Tour?

RAYMER: Yeah, there were seven of us that sued them for anti-trust violation. But I still do a lot of traveling, it’s just that I’m not out there playing the U.S. tournaments as often. I represent PokerStars.com, and they sponsor poker tours in Europe and Asia and Latin America, they just opened a new poker tour in Russia, and new ones in Australia and New Zealand. I play maybe three dozen tournaments a year. I’ll play about two dozen when I go to the world series in the summer, and then maybe two dozen for the rest of the year. FREDDOSO: You have been active in politics regarding the legality of online poker. Tell me about the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which was quietly slipped through Congress a couple of years ago. How did that change the poker culture, and how did poker players deal with that?

RAYMER: One very literal point — the UIGEA did nothing. It actually has zero legal impact on poker. The UIGEA says that it is illegal to engage in financial transactions with illegal online gambling sites. It doesn’t define what those are. Online poker isn’t illegal under federal law, so UIGEA doesn’t apply to sites that only do poker.

FREDDOSO: But a lot of players were intimidated by UIGEA, and participation in the World Series Main Event declined rather dramatically in the year afterward.

RAYMER: Yes. That was because the Rio and Harrah’s decided they couldn’t do business with the online sites. In the past, before that law was on the books, people would compete on PokerStars to win their seat in the Main Event. But if you won your seat, you needed to show up in Vegas. PokerStars would buy you in directly, in your name, and then you were given your receipt. But when the casinos decided they wouldn’t deal with the sites, they couldn’t do it that way anymore. Now what they had to do was put $11,000 in your account — the $10,000 buy-in plus a thousand for expenses — and then they have to expect you to withdraw the entire $11,000 and use it to travel to and play in the Main Event, which a lot of people didn’t do.

Imagine if you’re just an average American, you’re working hard, you’re making somewhere between $20,000 and $80,000 a year, and you play online poker. In your bank account, you probably almost never have more than $1,000. Now, all of the sudden, you have $11,000. Do you think your wife is going to say, yeah, take that ten thousand and go play in a poker tournament where 90 percent of the people make no money at all? Most spouses would say no way. If you’re in that situation, how can you justify playing in a $10,000 tournament when you can just keep the money?

So this law really did affect the World Series. And it also intimidated players and poker sites. At the time, the biggest poker site (PartyPoker.com) decided they would reject all American customers. Anyone who was a resident of the United States would be told to withdraw their money and leave — you’re not allowed to play on our site anymore. I think that company made a huge mistake. I would have gone to court and fought it. I would have set it up so that the U.S. could arrest me. Everyone knows I represent PokerStars. The government’s never come after me for doing business with an illegal online casino, because they know they’d lose. The Department of Justice will threaten you, but they’ve never sought an indictment against anyone who has ever stood up to them.

FREDDOSO: Have you been threatened?

RAYMER: No, but Card Player magazine is a perfect example. They were running ads for real money sites — when you see a TV commercial right now, it’s for sites that only give you access to play money games. Card Player magazine was still running commercials for sites that offered real-money poker games. The Department of Justice was threatening them, sending them letters, that if they didn’t cease and desist, arrests would follow. They then came in with warrants, searched the offices, seized documents, maintained copies of those documents to use in a prosecution. But they never sought an indictment. In my opinion, it’s because the Department of Justice knew that if they actually went to court with Card Player — and the Department of Justice knew they would fight, that they wouldn’t settle out of court — then they would have to live with whatever the judge said.

It’s interesting to see this sort of paternalism — not only from the federal government, but from state governments as well — when it comes to gambling. Because most of these states have state-sponsored gambling, and it almost appears that they are trying to preserve their lotteries at the expense of other forms of gambling, such as people playing poker in their own house, on their own computer.

When they’re making money on it, like by running a lottery, they like it. But when they’re not making money on it, then they’ll say that they’re trying to protect society and protect family values and all that kind of stuff. And that’s just because the politicians think that will get them votes, to say they’re against this immoral enterprise. As far as I’m concerned, morality has no place in politics. I don’t want the government pushing a religion on me in the form of morality against gambling.

FREDDOSO: But it’s really also an issue of plunder, isn’t it? Because there’s someone else out there who wants to make money on the gambling, so they try to cripple the websites.

RAYMER: Well, exactly. And that’s why they’re speaking out of both ends. One end is your mouth, and you know what the other end is.

The only states that don’t have any form of legal gaming are Utah and Hawaii. So they’re the only ones, as far as I’m concerned, that aren’t speaking out of both ends. But that’s only two out of 50 states. As far as I’m concerned, home games should be legal in every state, and online gambling should be legal in every state, and there shouldn’t be a federal prohibition against either of them. I don’t want the government telling me what to do, as an adult. If I’m dumb enough to hurt myself as a competent adult, then I have to suffer the consequences.

FREDDOSO: You would consider yourself a libertarian?

RAYMER: Absolutely. I was quite close to running on the libertarian ticket for vice president. I was floating the idea for a year, The only reason I didn’t do it is that my current career as a poker pro keeps me away from my family about seven months out of the year. And if I’d decided to run for office, I would have been away from them almost 100 percent for about nine straight months. I just couldn’t justify that. I don’t know. Maybe a few election cycles down the road, when my daughter is grown up and my wife can travel with me full time, then there’s a chance I’ll do something like that.

FREDDOSO: So — Mike Matusow. Is he for real?

RAYMER: Yes. Mike is just being himself. He just amplifies it a bit when the cameras are on. In 2005, I went very deep in the Main Event. Mike made the final table, and I finished 25th. We were both among the chip leaders for the last several days of the tournament. And two nights in a row, when we were finishing at night, bagging our chips to come back the next day, Mike came up, put his arm around me, told me, “Brother, you know I love you. But if we draw the same table tomorrow, I’m going to give you so much s—. I’m just going to say things about you constantly. And I’m telling you, it’s all for the camera . . . so don’t take any of it personally, Because I don’t mean any of it.” So Mike, Phil Helmuth, and most of those guys with really big personalities, they have big personalities naturally, but it’s just like Hollywood stars. They put it on overdrive when the camera is running.

FREDDOSO: Let me ask you about the time you were almost robbed at the Bellagio. What happened?

RAYMER: It was at the door of my room on the 20th floor. They grabbed me at the door and tried to shove me into my room. The guy dropped his bag — they had duct tape and stuff in there, so they intended to tie me up and rob me. There was one smaller guy and one really, really big guy, but he was all fat and no muscle. And I shoved all of us back into the hallway, knocked them away from me, and I had been yelling for help the whole time after they grabbed me. Then the small guy pulled a gun out of that bag. I stopped yelling for a couple of seconds, and in that one or two second period, what went through my mind was: They intend to tie me up — if I hand them the money, they won’t just run away. I’ve already seen their faces. If they decide to tie me up, they’ll realize this, and they may decide to kill me. If they decide to kill me once I’m tied up, I’m dead — 100 percent certainty. If I’m shot in the hallway — well, most gunshot victims survive. So I figured that if they shoot me in the hallway, they’ll shoot and run. So I decided my greatest chance of survival lay in fighting and not giving in.

FREDDOSO: In other words, you knew the odds.

RAYMER: I started yelling for help again. The big guy tried again to grab me. I knocked him down, and when I looked at the small guy, thinking he was about to shoot me, he was trucking down the hallway, running away. The big guy ran after him. They got away that day, but they were caught several months later in San Diego, did a plea bargain with the prosecutor and went to jail.

FREDDOSO: For our readers online — if they want to get better at poker, what would you recommend?

RAYMER: You have to work hard at it. For every hour you play poker, you probably need to spend one to two hours studying, practicing, educating yourself. There’s tons of options out there. You can just buy poker books — there are wonderful poker books. If you go to my website, I have a list of recommended books. I also highly recommend a site (ProPayLive.com) — we’re about to do our official launch. You join the site, pay a monthly subscription fee, and you get to watch as many of our training videos as you like. A lot of people have given credit to these online video-training sites for turning them into big winning players. You can also go to the World Series of Poker Academy. I teach at their live poker camps, which are hosted all over the country.