Police apparently decided against shutting down Thursday night's poker tournament at the Buckhorn Bar in Laramie

Police apparently decided against shutting down Thursday night's poker tournament at the Buckhorn Bar in Laramie, one day after pulling the plug on a similar activity at the nearby Cowboy Saloon.

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Buckhorn owner Mike Hopkins said police did not show up at the Buckhorn on Thursday, although they had threatened to do so when they canceled the poker tournament Wednesday night at the Cowboy, which Hopkins also owns.

"They never came down," he said.

He said he called police Friday to ask what was going on, and an officer replied that they now intend to wait until they get a legal ruling on whether state law prohibits bars from hosting poker tournaments.

Such tournaments have sprung up across the state in recent years, and several establishments in Laramie, Casper and Cheyenne, among other towns, host poker nights on a regular basis.

Acting Laramie Police Chief Jim Kyritsis did not return repeated phone calls Friday from the Star-Tribune for the second consecutive day. Laramie Police Commander Dale Stalder, who often handles public relations for the department, was in training Friday afternoon and was unavailable for comment, a staffer said.

Laramie Vice Mayor Jodi Guerin said she had not heard about the poker issue as of Friday afternoon, and neither police nor the public have brought it to the council's attention.

Cheyenne Police Lt. Don Simmer said his agency is aware of several poker tournaments in the Capital City, but police don't plan to break them up unless either the local district attorney or state attorney general's office rules that the tournaments violate the law.

"We've had several questions about the legality of it," Simmer said. "We are waiting for an opinion of the attorney general to say yea or nay. ... We haven't taken any action against these places to shut them down."

Deputy Chief Attorney General Liz Gagen said she did not know of any existing attorney general opinions on the issue, but the agency's point person on gambling issues was out of the office Friday.

"We don't have any formal requests for such an opinion, and the person who is kind of the gambling expert isn't here today," Gagen said.

Source: Bill Luckett, Star-Tribune capital bureau