There is a fine line between legal and illegal poker – and it seems that charitable poker is sitting right in between the two factions. With charity Texas Hold’em poker games growing vastly in numbers, some are starting to wonder where the line is for the games.

The latest poker game to push this envelope is the one being hosted Saturday night in Kansas City. The game is going to raise money for the Youth Friends mentoring program, and will be held at the Grand Boulevard offices of the Kansas City law firm Lathrop and Gage.

This takes poker playing to another level. It makes poker playing for fun intersect with poker playing for charity and law enforcement officials just don’t know what to do with that information. However, not really knowing whether the poker game is legal or not is the problem.

With the Missouri Gaming Commission posting a notice on their Show Me Gaming blog last week stating that they have no statutory authority to regulate charitable fund raising come gambling. They say that they regulate riverboat gaming and charitable bingo and that is pretty much it.

They say that they get calls all the time from people wanting to know if their poker games are legal and they refer them to their prosecuting attorney. However, they don’t know either because they have no formal guidelines regulating charitable poker games either.

So in the meantime, poker games will continue on – and hopefully at some point someone will make up their mind about them!