The first is that there are hundreds of millions of dollars to be made. But really, it starts with the fact that Californians love poker.

"If you look at the World Series of Poker in 2015, played in [Las] Vegas at the Rio [Hotel and Casino], over 15,000 people entered that," said Steve Stallings, councilmember of the Rincon tribe, which runs Harrah's Rincon casino in Valley Center. "The vast majority No. 1 state where players came from was California."

Stallings points out that even though playing online poker in California is against the law, people are doing it anyway.

"We have hundreds of thousands of people in California already playing illegally. Their money is not protected. The integrity of the game is not protected because those are all offshore sites," he said.

The fact that so many people are playing illegally is a big part of the reason people who support online poker say it needs to be regulated.

Internet poker was a $3 billion industry when the U.S. government cracked down on it on Black Friday in 2011, essentially ruling that online poker was illegal and that each individual state could legalize it within its own borders.

That didn't stop some websites based in other countries from letting Californians play, and that is very risky.

Maria Ho, a Californian and highly successful professional poker player, wondered, "The two biggest fears are: Am I being cheated? Is this game being run with integrity? And also, am I going to be able to cash out my money if I win?"

Steve "Chops" Preiss is a poker industry expert. He told 10News there have been examples of people winning hundreds or thousands of dollars, only to have the site they were playing on shut down, keeping all the cash.

"The biggest risk they have is their money," said Preiss. "They are depositing into sites that have no controls in place to segregate their accounts."

Despite the risk, thousands of Californians are playing anyway. Poker's biggest star, Daniel Negreanu, says the danger to Californians now is enough to warrant action.

"The current environment we have is unregulated poker. It's just not something that is going to go away," said Negreanu.

Another argument, of course, is the profit. Conservative estimates suggest that about $200 million would be spent in the first year, and that that could rise closer to $1 billion within a few years. Those in favor of legalizing online poker in California argue the state should keep that money in California and tax it.

Negreanu agrees.

"It just makes sense from a revenue perspective," he said, "that rather than that money go offshore to providers we don't even know, it makes more sense for it to go to helping develop education, obviously the water shortage -- things the government of California is looking to fund."