You place your bets, you take your chances

Wanna bet?

Without breaking the law?

Play the South Carolina Education Lottery.

Just don't expect to win. Educate yourself on the lottery's odds, and you'll learn that it's a sucker's play.

On the other hand, the more than 60 people arrested in the last week or so as the result of a 10-month Charleston County Sheriff's Office poker-ring "sting" aren't riding winning streaks, either. Most of them would have probably bet that the police wouldn't go to such lengths over such an offense.

See, there really is no such thing as a sure thing.

After all, life itself is a relentless series of gambles that test fickle fate.

Still wanna bet?

Ponder this wide range of maddeningly random, potentially devastating and generally unavoidable games of everyday chance: You could be mugged. Your home could be burglarized. Your car and/or its contents could be stolen. You could catch a stray bullet from a turf-war gunfight between drug dealers.

All the while, some law-enforcement officers could be protecting you, not from those modern menaces, but from poker rings.

At least you're now far less likely to become the victim of the alleged big-money poker-game operators and players caught in that undercover net.

Why devote so many resources for so long to so few jail-term offenses (the vast majority of those arrested face only fines if convicted)? Maj. John Clark of the Sheriff's Office told our reporter that this was a "high stakes" enterprise that charged "buy in" fees of up to $1,000 and paid dealers up to $1,300 a night.

And Charleston County Sheriff Al Cannon told our reporter: "It may be an old law, but so is murder."

That's indisputable.

So is this: While few poker games produce a fatality, every murder does.

The image of undercover officers wearing ski masks while processing the accused gamblers at the Charleston County Jail was another lousy public-relations hand for the sheriff's office.

OK, so those officers need to protect their identifies. So let somebody else do the processing instead of making our good guys look so sinister — a practical shift that Maj. Clark said the Sheriff's Office will try to implement.

Then again, a mask worked quite well for the Lone Ranger.

Unfortunately for the authorities, there's no masking the inherent hypocrisy of bringing the long arm of a state law down hard on private citizens' poker games even as our state's lottery imposes a gullibility tax of sorts on the most easily taken. Poor folks produce lots of lottery losings, helping pay for college scholarships that are, in many cases, tantamount to middle-class welfare. Those lottery-funded scholarships have been predictably accompanied by soaring tuitions at state colleges.

At least the S.C. Education Lottery's Web site still urges us to "play responsibly" and includes a toll-free "help line" for those caught in gambling's grip. At least our lottery hasn't sunk as low as the Illinois Lottery did when it made this hard-sell pitch from a billboard in a Chicago slum:

"This could be your ticket out."

But S.C. lottery revenues are bound to sink, due in part to competition from North Carolina's relatively new lottery, and overall S.C. tax revenues are sinking due to a lousy economy. That raises the temptation to raise our lottery's take by raising its advertising intensity — and the habit-forming allure of its games.

Meanwhile, even as the Charleston County Sheriff's Office was busting poker players, millions of Americans gambled on the NCAA basketball tournament via office pools across the land.

You didn't have to be a Kansas or Memphis fan to have a "high stakes" rooting interest in Monday night's final, an overtime thriller won by the Jayhawks. If you won money in such a pool, you don't have to pay taxes on that windfall — or worry about being hassled by "The Man."

Or do you?

Reliable sources reveal that some "high stakes," tax-free, NCAA-pool cash changed hands in the Charleston area — and that some other gambling pools based on other sports, including football, baseball and golf, also thrive in these parts.

Reliable sources reveal that some folks around here — as yet unapprehended — regularly get together to play poker for money.

Thus, another gambling dilemma emerges: Clam up or turn state's evidence?

Wanna bet?

Frank Wooten is associate editor of The Post and Courier. His e-mail is wooten@postandcourier.com.

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