Tue, 03/29/2011 – 01:04 – PokerPages Staff

The devastation wreaked by the awesome power of nature has once again touched the world, as millions watched helplessly while Japan suffered a massive earthquake and tsunami. Contrary to some portrayals by moral zealots that gamblers are all purely concerned with their own self-enrichment, however, the disaster provoked generosity and compassion from the poker-playing community.

The earthquake struck during the final table of the Main Event of the poker TV show, ‘The Big Game’. When the news broke, the whole table came to a stop as players spontaneously ceased their cardplay to watch the unfolding events on TV. Victor Ramdin and Joe Hachem, who were playing heads-up at the time, considered halting the tournament for the night, so shocking was the scale of the devastation descending on Japan.

Poker players from across the planet who had been watching the show began to send in a deluge of tweets.  After early expressions of compassion for and solidarity with the Japanese casualties, poker players began to get more actively involved in helping out. Today’s players are children of the Internet and used the World Wide Web brilliantly to organize their support.

Pros like Shane Schleger and Chino Rheem helped raise awareness of how other players could get involved by posting the Red Cross text number, 90999. This is an emergency number which makes donating money fast and easy. In comments which anti-gambling zealots could barely believe, Schleger immediately called for the world’s poker community to spend money on an issue which was bigger than themselves and donate at least $10 each to the Red Cross. In another generous gesture, Full Tilt Poker’s Justin “BoostedJ” Smith offered to donate $1 for every re-tweet of the 90999 number – and that applied to everyone, not just the poker community.

Maria Ho from UB donated a seat to her weekly $300 buy-in $50,000 guaranteed prize-pool tournament to the first person sending her a tweeted picture of their $10 donation text to the Red Cross. She confessed to having been heartbroken by the coverage of the destruction in Japan, and said that she believed it was “important to take action.” She, too, urged people to text the word “REDCROSS” to 90999 and make a $10 donation “instead of spending it on your Starbucks run in the morning.” She also suggested volunteering to help put together disaster relief kits at local Red Cross centers, or going out to collect items for the kits from donors in the neighborhood. Help did not necessarily have to be monetary, she said.

This isn’t the first time that the poker playing community has stepped up to the plate when it comes to helping out in disaster relief. They were prominent in assisting the victims of the appalling earthquake in Haiti, and consistently take part in charity tournaments all over the world. Many successful players remain loyal to causes dear to their own hearts and donate generously on a regular basis.

Gamblers, it would seem, don’t match the description routinely offered by militant prohibitionists as self-obsessed, out of control narcissists who think only of themselves. As the Japan crisis amply demonstrates, they’re usually good and generous human beings who will rally to the support of those afflicted by natural catastrophes in the time it takes to make a tweet or send a text donation.