Chicago

POKER is America’s card game, some say its national pastime. It is certainly the game most like the free-market system. It is increasingly viewed as the quintessential American mind sport. Its popularity has always had to do with the pleasures of bluffing, as well as with the fact that money is its language, its leverage, its means of keeping score. It is deeply ingrained in the fabric of our culture, our language, our economy. And soon, it now seems, it will even be legal.

Last Monday, in a case involving a Staten Island poker parlor, a federal judge in Brooklyn, Jack B. Weinstein, ruled that poker is predominantly a game of skill and not a game of chance — the legal definition of gambling — and that game operators should not be prosecuted under a federal law that bars running an illegal gambling business.

Judge Weinstein’s decision was only the latest round in more than 160 years of legal wrangling over poker’s legitimacy. Last December, the Justice Department concluded that the Wire Act of 1962 applied only to sports betting, not poker. Together, the two decisions are likely to be a game-changing combination in favor of on-land and online poker and a severe setback for the nanny-state conservatives who’ve tried to ban them by lumping poker together with such obviously skill-free games of chance as craps, lotteries and bingo.

Judge Weinstein was persuaded by a mountain of statistical evidence, much of it supplied by Randal D. Heeb, an economist and statistician who had analyzed 415 million hands of no-limit hold ’em played online and concluded that a player’s skill “had a statistically significant effect on the amount of money won or lost.”