The Economist: Attempts to ban online gaming are doomed to fail.
economist.com
economist.com
Online gaming/gambling right now exists in an almost-perfect state of deregulation. This deregulation allows low-rake, low-vig games to flourish, and is IMO only reason why it's possible for consenting adults to play these games (online poker being the classic example) with positive expectation.
Regulation of online gambling will likely create games with 20%, 30%, and 40% vigs, as this is what a politician means when he says "regulate and tax". Most state lotteries currently extract around a 30-40% vig, meaning only 60-70% of the money going into the system is paid out as winnings. Other state-mandated games extract similarly huge percentages. Nobody complains because the money gets funneled into "education" or "public works", but state-mandated forms of gambling are far and away some of the most pernicious gambling instruments ever foisted on the public.
The endgame: if online gambling is ever widely regulated, the tax burdens and regulatory requirements imposed will be passed along to customers (who are mostly clueless about things like "rake" and "vig" anyway) and this will create a world in which the only available forms of real-money gaming on the net will be ones in which adults stare drooling at the screen, pressing pretty colored buttons in the futile hope that they can somehow "beat" a game which is now mathematically unbeatable.
I support the call for regulation. But anybody who thinks politicians like Barney Frank are going to protect low-rake, low-vig online gambling of any sort are likely going to be disappointed. Preserving a low rake isn't even on the menu.
1. Banning the activity.
2. Controlling the activity.
I prefer the third option.
[edit: spelling]
Unless you count the insurance company or taxpayer that has to support the trauma victim
In particular, privacy comes to mind. Respecting privacy denies law enforcement access to tools that might aid in the quick investigating of crimes. Why should your need for privacy be allowed to harm the taxpayer that has to support expensive investigations?
And freedom is a slippery slope to anarchy. Slippery slopes are best addressed with some reasonable theory that explains where the line is - where cost exceeds benefit. Ideally government would attempt to decide what our core values are - how we weigh privacy vs. freedom vs. equality vs. security vs. fairness - and then try to evaluate policies based on how they fare in these dimensions.
That's the same. If they ask you, you can say no, in which case they'll demand you ride with a helmet, lest be uncovered.
> with some reasonable theory that explains where the line is
I'm arguing that the particular argument of "you can't do that, it might cost the taxpayers money" is over the line. I'm for stuff like consumer protection, standards in advertising, anti-trust and a slew of other statist, communist oppressing regiments. I'm not in favour of spending the polices resources on giving you a ticket if you decide to ride your bike along the beach on a beautiful summers evening and want to feel the wind in your hair.
The taxpayer question is more complicated, since most people would probably agree that we can't allow an accident victim to bleed to death at the side of the road because they chose not to use their seat-belt. I'm fairly confident, however, that a solution could be devised without recourse to state interference in personal decisions.
There is tons of luck involved in poker games, including what types of bad and mediocre opponents sit down, what the comp policies are, and what your health is like (stamina is a huge part of poker, partially because it pays so god damned poorly).
These uncertainties do not go away in human lifespans.
But sit down and play 5 or 10 million hands online (that's under a decade of regular play, well within a human lifespan), or even considerably less than that, and luck becomes a rounding error. Mathematically. Incontrovertibly. Your long-term results in poker will reflect your skill level closely. And of course the rake plays a part as well, by turning poker into a negative-sum game instead of a zero-sum game, and dragging everybody's results slightly south of where they would have been otherwise.
But rake or no rake, there's very little "luck" in poker at depths of millions of hands, as you get in today's online games.
And even in the live game, where hand throughput is lower, luck is a small enough factor over the years that the same skilled players win consistently, and you can only win consistently by learning those skills.
Incorrect. In a game with no house, this may be true, but in a a game raking, it depends a lot on what sort of players sit down against you.
So if you want to put 'table selection' under skill, yes, I'll grant your point, but without judicious picking and choosing in that, poker can very much be a losing game just like most other casino games.
Look at the O8 games in Tunica for instance. Dead dead and deader because no one except people on oxygen tanks ever plays them.
It takes a lot of confluence of factors to beat the house drain on games (I'm talking in person games, not online games; online games are "merely" illegal, but otherwise you'll likely be fine in the longterm).
Of course, some people are compulsive gamblers and experience problems as a result. On the other hand my local 7-11 (24 hour convenience store) attracts gambling addicts too, one guy shows up there once a month and hangs out all night playing a quick lottery and smoking two packs of cigarettes. For a while I thought prohibition policy existed because the state wants a monopoly on lottery revenue, but state lotteries seem to be just as profitable in Europe as they are here despite the much lower payouts. The rates of gambling addiction don't seem much different.
I have virtually no interest in the pursuit other than buying a lottery ticket on a whim maybe once a year, but it's similar enough to video gaming that I can see how people get hooked on it - probably something akin to a dopamine deficiency. Prohibition seems pointless and wasteful; better to deal with reality and divert a percentage of the revenue to mitigation services.
Am I mistaken about what happened?
Merchants who accept credit/debit cards must code the transaction for whatever their industry is, so those in the gambling industry are easy to block and banks are required to do so.