Not long ago, legislation to legalize online poker seemed a good bet to pass Congress. But the retirement of Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., last year has left online poker players without a key Senate GOP ally and a card short of a winning hand.

Since the federal government largely shut down the Internet poker industry in April 2011, poker players and the casino industry have been lobbying furiously for the legalization and regulation of the online game at the federal level. Those efforts have resulted in the introduction of several pieces of legislation, including a high-profile effort last year from Kyl and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

For a time, there was even talk of attaching the Reid-Kyl bill to an omnibus spending package, but House Republicans balked at its inclusion. Reid, whose state is home to several large gaming companies, has since soured considerably on the prospects for federal poker legislation, telling the Las Vegas Sun recently that he’s pessimistic about anything happening in the near future.

Supporters of legalizing online poker agree that Kyl’s departure has left a leadership void on the Hill that has yet to be filled.

“The biggest challenge is that there is no real non-Nevada Republican in the Senate that would take the lead,” said John Pappas, executive director of the Poker Players Alliance, which represents more than 1 million online poker players. “A lot of people viewed Kyl as being a very reasonable counterpart in all this, someone who can credibly go to gambling opponents [in Congress] and say, ‘This isn’t about expansion of gambling, it’s about regulation of activity that’s going on in unregulated fashion.’”