BY TOM SOMACH

Throughout American history, U.S. Presidents have enjoyed playing poker:

*Harry S Truman played poker as a judge in Missouri, and later as senator, Vice-President and President. He especially enjoyed playing aboard the Presidential yacht as it cruised the Potomac River, and also when he vacationed at the so-called “Little White House,” his vacation retreat in Key West, Fla., where his poker table is now on public display. Among his Presidential poker pals were congressmen, Supreme Court justices, Cabinet members and even a future President, Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson.

*Richard Nixon learned to play poker in the Navy during World War II. He used money earned from that poker-playing to finance his first political campaign, a successful run for the U.S. Congress.

*Warren Harding had regular twice-a-week poker games at the White House, including an infamous match in which he bet–and lost–an expensive collection of White House china. Cabinet members were frequent players at the Presidential poker games and became known as the “Poker Cabinet.”

*John F. Kennedy was an avid poker player, conducting games after hours at the White House. His poker playmates included Presidential press secretary Pierre Salinger, a skilled player who taught JFK much about the game, and VP LBJ.

*When he was stricken with polio before he became President, and his physical activities were limited, Franklin D. Roosevelt passed his time reading, bird-watching and playing poker.

And there were others…

So as America honors its past presidents during the holiday of Presidents Day on Feb. 19, it seems ironic that the present president will go down in poker history as the person who did more harm to the game than anyone has ever done.

Yes, it was the U.S. Congress that last year passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), but it only became law when President George W. Bush signed the bill, a bill he could have vetoed.

Before UIGEA, poker was booming in the U.S., mostly due to the explosion of Internet poker playing, which brought the game to the masses.

But after UIGEA effectively thwarted the growth of online poker and other forms of online gambling, by cutting off ways to fund the activities, poker–although still immensely popular–began to fizzle.

Websites that track the number of poker players playing online confirm that online play is down.

And the people who run the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas predict there will be fewer entrants in this year’s tournament, because fewer people will qualify for the tourney online.

And those once-ubiquitous poker shows on television? There are still a lot of them, but nowhere near as many as there used to be.

Will things ever get better?

Well, a British newspaper reported last week that Barack Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois who is running for President, was an avid poker player in his youth.

Should he become President, might he reverse UIGEA and the fortunes of online poker?

It’s a long shot, of course, and only time will tell, but at this point it might be the only shot online poker players have.