The chairman of the Poker Players Alliance, Alfonse D'Amato, has called on U.S. President Barack Obama to implement a "New Deal" for poker and help the ailing economy in the process, setting out the PPA's wishes in an editorial in Washington D.C. newspaper Roll Call.

Referring to the financial crisis that has dominated debate in the capital in the first few weeks of Obama's presidency, D'Amato wrote that the new president could look to one of his favorite hobbies, poker, for a solution, by regulating and taxing it.

"While business leaders and politicians debate how much, or how little, we should regulate the business community, the online poker industry and the millions of Americans who play on the Internet have been crying out for regulation and taxation," the PPA chairman wrote.

"The absence of government regulation, and in fact the quixotic efforts to ban Internet poker, has left U.S. consumers vulnerable and left billions in potential tax revenue on the virtual poker table."

D'Amato, who served as a U.S. Senator for New York as a Republican from 1981 to 1999, referred to surveys made public on Obama's citizen's briefing book website, in which regulated Internet poker was consistently in the top 10 of the most popular proposals Americans want Obama to enact while in office.

He wrote that regulation would not equal an expansion of gambling in the United States, but to the contrary would simply allow the government to respect and make good economic use of a game played by an estimated 15 million Americans and 100 million people globally.