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Why is online poker illegal?

Brendy

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Mar 15, 2008
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Can someone give me one good reason that online poker should be illegal?


The most common reason is that it can be addicting and someone may lose all their money. Well in response to that, i say if you believe that is a valid reason, then you MUST also believe we should make cigarettes illegal because they are addicting and kill people. Also you must believe that we should close all bars and ban all alcohol as it can be addicting and people die in drunken driving accidents and overdoses.

Also you must believe that off track betting should be illegal for the same reasons you are banning online poker. Yet congress passed laws making online poker illegal while giving off track betting an exemption.

Tens of millions of people in the USA play poker and millions of people in the USA play online poker.

So please, give me one good reason why it should be illegal.
 
Brendy said:
Can someone give me one good reason that online poker should be illegal?


The most common reason is that it can be addicting and someone may lose all their money. Well in response to that, i say if you believe that is a valid reason, then you MUST also believe we should make cigarettes illegal because they are addicting and kill people. Also you must believe that we should close all bars and ban all alcohol as it can be addicting and people die in drunken driving accidents and overdoses.

Also you must believe that off track betting should be illegal for the same reasons you are banning online poker. Yet congress passed laws making online poker illegal while giving off track betting an exemption.

Tens of millions of people in the USA play poker and millions of people in the USA play online poker.

So please, give me one good reason why it should be illegal.
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Think of the children!
 
Is it illegal?

It has gained a pretty big popularity over the past few years here, with pokertv shows almost every (late) night. And poker stars becoming celebrities. It is also a way into fame and fortune for mathematically skilled young males. (I am not saying females can't do it, but they just won't do it. sitting in front of a computer screen for 10 hours a day might not be very attractive) I know quite a lot of nerdy students who live on online poker. The thing is, it really is possible to make money on a consistent basis if you have some skill and the discipline needed, as long as enough people of less skill keep showing up.
(and of course, you hear success stories and not the failures) But I have seen enough of those success stories close up that I know it is not all a fantasy dream but can be very real.

I didn't realize it was illegal in the USA. When I played a few years ago, I would especially select playing time based on the behaviour of americans... (prey on certain stereotypes)
 
Matthew Best said:
If that's true, in what sense is it illegal?
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There are a few states in the USA that have made it illegal to play online, but it isn't illegal to play poker in the other states, at least according to most people's interpretation of existing laws.

However, in September 2006 (maybe October), a rule 10 violation named Bill Frist attached a law called the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act (UIGEA) onto a bill about port security. It wasn't possible to vote against it without also voting against the law that was supposed to make make it more difficult for terrorists to get WMDs into the country.

Something is of course very wrong with a system that allows things like that to happen, but I'm drifting off topic here, so I'll just explain what the UIGEA does. It makes it possible to prosecute banks and credit card companies who transfer money to online gaming sites, and also the sites who receive that money. This hasn't stopped poker players in the US from playing poker, but it has limited their options. Before the UIGEA, most players were using neteller.com for money transfers, but Neteller kicked out all their US customers to comply with that law. This made it more difficult for US players to deposit money to poker sites. I think many of them quit because of that, but there are other options available now.

Some poker sites also decided to comply with the UIGEA, e.g. Party Poker, who was the biggest poker site in the world at the time. They kicked out all the US players, about 80% of their customers, all at once. Some of the other sites decided to just ignore the UIGEA, and have probably made a lot of money because of it. In particular Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker.
 
Brendy said:
Can someone give me one good reason that online poker should be illegal?
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No. The fact that some people get addicted is the only reason that makes any sense, but as you pointed out yourself, other forms of gambling are allowed, and so is alcohol.

The reasons given by politicians who supported the UIGEA are often quite hilarious. Some of them argued e.g. that if you allow Americans to deposit money to poker sites, then terrorists can use those sites for money laundering. So if you play poker, you're supporting the terrorists! :rolleyes:

They use the addiction argument too of course, but when they do, they usually present numbers (about the number of addicts, etc.) that are so absurd that no one who thinks for one second can believe them.

I would like to ask another question: Why do people in the US believe that it's illegal to play online? Did they think so before the UIGEA, or was it the UIGEA that made them think so? (I've seen a few indications that people believe that it's illegal. Take e.g. the episode of Psych where Gus plays poker online, but only for play money. When Shawn thought he was playing for real money, he answered "that's illegal").
 
It's naughty. It's....Gambling, after all....

Those who are familiar with the gambler's mentality know that they will find a way to gamble.
My wife recalls watching a group putting down pretty good money on which raindrop would run down a window first....

Sports betting is so endemic and so lucrative that it's hard to imagine any sort of successful program against it. Long before the institution of large lotteries, the inner-city areas all over the country had "policy", likely as well-run as any state lottery is now.

I well recall my first week as a police officer back in 1968. My training officer gave me a stack of representative reports to read, so I'd be familiar with the elements. One of these was of a six-person arrest for "gambling by card" at a private household, where a penny-ante poker game was duly broken up and all the participants arrested by sterling police work.

I was thinking, "Jeez, that could have been my mom and dad. They had poker parties every week..."
 
Bikewer said:
Sports betting is so endemic and so lucrative that it's hard to imagine any sort of successful program against it. Long before the institution of large lotteries, the inner-city areas all over the country had "policy", likely as well-run as any state lottery is now.
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Better run actually. The illegal lotteries pay better than the official ones!
 
The heads of some European online poker operations risk arrest should they ever set foot in the US. Peter Dicks, former head of SportingBet was arrested on that exact basis:

"On September 7, 2006 Mr Dicks was detained by U.S. Customs officials at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport. He was detained under an outstanding warrant issued by the state of Louisiana that charged Mr. Dicks with running a gambling enterprise by computer, a crime under Louisiana law.

His arrest came two months after the arrest of competitor David Carruthers, CEO of rival firm BetonSports. In contrast to Carruthers, who is being held on Federal charges, Dicks is charged only with violating Louisiana law.

Dicks was released on $50,000 bail on September 9; shortly thereafter he tendered his resignation as Sportingbet chairman and fought his requested extradition to Louisiana. A hearing scheduled for September 28, 2006 was postponed until the following day to allow New York court officials time to reach a decision.[2] On September 29, Judge Lopez announced that the warrant would not be enforced, and that Mr. Dicks was free to return to the UK. New York governor George Pataki stated that because internet gambling is not a crime in New York, the state does not have the authority to extradite Mr. Dicks to Louisiana.

Mr. Dicks didn't live in the United States as he is a citizen of the UK and only came to the U.S. for business matters unrelated to internet gambling. This led to controversy as to whether it was legally permissible to punish Mr. Dicks as he was not physically in the United States at the time of the alleged crime." (Wikipedia)

David Carruthers is actually being held under house-arrest at a St. Louis hotel for similar "crimes". Astonishing.
 
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The legality of online poker is something of a grey area, really.

A couple years ago, a law was passed that made it illegal for US financial institutions to allow fund transfers to online venues that involved "games of chance." Most people interpreted this as including poker, but others have pointed out that since poker is as much a game of skill as of chance, it's not particuarly clear.

Bills have been introduced to clear up the issue (and specifically legalize online poker). Now that the "Moral Majority" crowd is a minority, and we have a self-professed poker player in the White House, they might actually pass.

For news on the issue, check out the Poker Player's Alliance.
 
Fredrik said:
No. The fact that some people get addicted is the only reason that makes any sense, but as you pointed out yourself, other forms of gambling are allowed, and so is alcohol.

The reasons given by politicians who supported the UIGEA are often quite hilarious. Some of them argued e.g. that if you allow Americans to deposit money to poker sites, then terrorists can use those sites for money laundering. So if you play poker, you're supporting the terrorists! :rolleyes:

They use the addiction argument too of course, but when they do, they usually present numbers (about the number of addicts, etc.) that are so absurd that no one who thinks for one second can believe them.

I would like to ask another question: Why do people in the US believe that it's illegal to play online? Did they think so before the UIGEA, or was it the UIGEA that made them think so? (I've seen a few indications that people believe that it's illegal. Take e.g. the episode of Psych where Gus plays poker online, but only for play money. When Shawn thought he was playing for real money, he answered "that's illegal").
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What planet are you living on?
Poker is a game of skill-reading your opponents, deciding whether he's for real or bluffing, and whether your cards are worth gambling on. That skill requires face-to-face. Otherwise it's just a game of chance.
And manipulating chance to certainty is not particularly hard with computer control...
It is illegal for Casinos to defraud. Using marked cards, stacking the deck, all that stuff are the reason gambling has been illegal for years, and why it is highly regulated now.
Card cheats used to get shot at the table, and now you want to give 'em free rein while also giving them access to a whole pot of your money?

It would be soooooo easy to cheat in a non-face-to-face environment that skill and chance hardly enter into the equation.
 
I'd say it's illegal because gambling in the US is illegal except in places where it has been declared legal.

It's probably illegal because the states have no compelling interest to make it legal. If they can't tax it, then all it does is divert people from their own gambling enterprises like lotteries. In most of the US, playing poker for money is illegal, so why would they make internet poker legal?

It's probably also illegal because they can't figure out how to regulate and monitor it. If I am playing on line poker, how can I be assured that I'm playing against real players, with a real (well, virtual but "fair") deck of cards. It would be trivially easy to set up bogus gaming sites with sham players and bogus decks that rip people off. I won't say that it would be undetectable, but it would be very difficult to detect. How can the government effectively monitor these operations to make sure that people aren't being ripped off? They can't, so they ban them.
 
Brendy said:
The most common reason is that it can be addicting and someone may lose all their money.
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I have never heard that reason.

Gdnp and Rwguin have it right. There are a variety of ways to cheat. That is enough to ban it in its present form.
 
I think credit card companies should not be allowed to collect debts based on gambling. That is, if you tranfer money that you actually have to a gamling site, that should be just fine. But if you try to use your credit, it would be in the best interest of credit card companies to refuse.
 
I'm not too worried about cheating though. There are lots of poker sites, the competition is quite fierce. If some site was cheating to some significant extent, people would notice that it was significantly harder to win there. Also, I can't think of a way to cheat except by having 'sham' players that are actually working for the site. That doesn't sound very easy to maintain in my opinion. Either you would have to limit the cheating to high stakes tables where it pays off to have an actual human being who wins slightly more than expected. Or you'd need a computer playing lots of low stakes tables, but then you'd risk suspicion about these 'lucky zombie' players.

If you do it only in say big tournaments with really big wins, it also gets quite risky because either the winners would have to remain anonymous suspiciously often, or somebody would have to pretend to be a big winner, and that's not really sustainable.
 
I play a lot of poker online and before the UIGEA when I cashed out the money was electronically transferred back to my account. Now withthe UIGEA in place when I cash out they have to send me a check.
The big thing the UIGEA did to online poker is it made all the fish (weak players) feel it would be illegal so they dont play anymore. The sharks found other ways to deposit. So now online poker is full of sharks and very little easy money.
 
Merko said:
Also, I can't think of a way to cheat except by having 'sham' players that are actually working for the site. That doesn't sound very easy to maintain in my opinion.
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Two (or more) players can share information about their cards without the other players knowing.
 
Scootch said:
I play a lot of poker online and before the UIGEA when I cashed out the money was electronically transferred back to my account. Now withthe UIGEA in place when I cash out they have to send me a check.
The big thing the UIGEA did to online poker is it made all the fish (weak players) feel it would be illegal so they dont play anymore. The sharks found other ways to deposit. So now online poker is full of sharks and very little easy money.
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Multiple computers, chat lines, IM, there's this thing called a "telephone"...
 
Gambling may be shunned (in the religious community sense) because it can be addicting and people can loose their livelihood (and that of their families) to it, and that may be why it was at first illegal, along with opening for business on Sunday and buying drink on the weekend, but the main reason is verboten now is because the state doesn't yet have a way of effectively making money from it. People are supposed to report winnings as income (and loosings as an expense, but only as much or less than they win), but they rarely do. Nevada and New Jersey are tolerated because the state and the Feds can collect at the cash-in window; Indian reservations are tolerated because the Feds treated then so badly in the past, but finally developed a conscience about their promises. Other than that, it is allowed where the states and the Fed can get their piece, and the same will also happen for the rest of gaming as the smart boys (unlike the afore-mentioned Frist, who lived in the previous-previous century) figure out the angles.

I'd bet on it.
 
That is all true. The poker sites state they have software than can determine if a user is using an outside chat tool (I have no idea how effective that is though, could just be a bluff) and they can also check ip addresses. But i play small stakes poker. The game I play is called a sit and go tournament. I pay $11 ($10 goes to prize pool, $1 goes to house) It starts when 9 players sign up. The top 3 players win (1st-$45,2nd-$27,3rd-$18). So if there are 2 people working together they spent $22 to at best split $72 and knowing the hole cards of another player at the table is a small advantage at best. So if there are cheaters at my table I say best of luck because I dont need to cheat to take your money.

The big scam for online poker right now is to fund a poker account with a stolen credit card and then to lose that money to another account and that 3rd person cashes out after "winning" it. But when the credit card company does a charge back for the deposit the poker site will go to all the players that won money from him to get it back. And a lot of times they will investigate to see if the win was real or if it was chip dumping, if they suspect chip dumping the accounts are closed and all the money is conficsated, no appeals, no nothing.
 
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