News Analysis: Skill Gaming and Hypocrisy in US Gaming Laws

There are many laws on the books that are outdated, out of fashion or plainly no longer enforced because they are no longer applicable to our society in America today. Ideally speaking, America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, should not even have many restrictive laws on its books based on moral, ethical, legal or otherwise nanny-state judgments of the legislation. However, nowhere is it more evident that hypocrisy, cronyism and powerful lobbies have influenced US federal laws against the wishes of most of the citizens.

In a recent news, FBI has began investigating the Facebook, a social network for friends to hang out and chat for possible violation of anti-online-gambling laws as people may use Facebook to facilitate their NCAA March Madness pool. Now, this is the same FBI that’s supposed to protect the nation from terrorism, crime and other threats, investigating whether adults, in a totally consenting fashion can place a few dollar bet on basketball games over the Internet. Give me a break, I’d rather have the FBI agent do … anything else.

Ironically the ban on online gaming makes no sense. How can an activity that is legal in 48 of the 50 states be a criminal act simply because it utilizes the Internet? If an American has the right to choose in the “real world,” shouldn’t they enjoy that very same right when they are online? What’s the difference between entering an office pool for March Madness (illegal) and going to the track to bet on horses (legal)?

In both cases you are betting on a sport performance (chance)
You have a limited set of statistics available to you to help you make a decision (skill)
March Madness Pool involves more skill in winning because it requires to pick many more winning combinations on the decision tree.

So why is online gambling illegal? It’s really not. Passed in 2006, with enforcement started in 2007, the United States enacted the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which made it illegal for financial institutions to process payment transactions between gambling operations and American customers, which effectively banned online gambling. So will someone please try to explain why was an activity enjoyed by millions of adult, fully consenting Americans outlaws in a sneak attachment to a law that was designed to protect the nation’s ports? I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader…

Ironically, everyone but the leaders of the free world can gamble online. EU has legal online gambling, UK has legal online gambling, South Africa is in the process of legalizing online gaming, the entire world can play poker online, except the US.

Bookmark or Share This