Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Politico reports that the odds of getting Barney Frank's bill to explicitly legalize and regulate online gambling in the United States passed are increasing because of the recent seizure of more than $30 million in poker players' money by the U.S. Attorney's office:
The chairman of the House Financial Services Committee believes the recent seizure of millions of dollars in online poker receipts only strengthens his hand because it reminds voters and politicians how sweeping -- and potentially unclear -- the existing law is."It helps," Frank said after the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York seized, or froze, $34 million in bank accounts belonging to 27,000 online poker players.
And the opposition is still making bad arguments:
Even his Republican counterpart, who led a charge last year to defeat legislation gutting the law, believes Frank is holding much better cards in the current Congress than he had in the last one."It's going to be an uphill battle to stop it this time," said Alabama Rep. Spencer Bachus, the ranking Republican on the Financial Services Committee and a longtime gambling opponent who calls the pastime the nation's "fastest-growing addiction."
But the evidence does not support that claim. In fact, research shows that addiction to gambling has gone down while gambling on the internet has exploded in this country. And even at its highest levels, the rate of gambling disorders is below 1% of those who gamble.
Gambling addiction, while it is a serious problem for those individuals who suffer from it, is not even a minor societal problem much less a significant one. It is authoritarian madness to restrict gambling for 99.4% of the population that gambles responsibly and moderately on the grounds of protecting the .6% who cannot do so.
Politics
Comments
Fair enough. If those opposed to online gambling had motivation to ensure the fairness of gaming to consumers, it'd be better than just a crude protectionism on behalf of whoever lobbied them most recently.
OTOH, I don't see how any but the most deluded can believe that, online, they're getting into a fair game (try getting their source-code under FOI). As far as I can tell, we have a combination of gamblers who think it might be fixed but that adds to the thrill, and gaming corps who have redefined gambling as simply paying them for that momentary thrill, with no chance of winning or even fairness.
This to me is amorality on both sides and good luck to you both, but the real harm comes when that attitude spreads to other fields where regulation is demonised: minamata, monsanto, etc.
Posted by: eddie | June 28, 2009 11:56 AM
I think the point here isn't an attempt to stop gambling. It's an attempt to drive gamblers back to places where the state and the casino industry can get the profits.
Nobody actually cares about gambling per se; they care about it being done where it can be profitable to the 'right' people.
Posted by: Longstreet63 | June 28, 2009 12:40 PM
People are going to gamble, the opportunities are limitless and it is pretty much impossible to police. I have seen men gamble while racing roaches, on professional sports (of course), and on how far a kid learning to ride a bicycle will go before falling over. But in each of those cases the betters are estimating a random process and the odds they might be cheated.
As far as I can tell computers are incapable of generating a truly random process so the game, from the start, is bogus. But it doesn't stop there. The depiction of a game on screen is usually a depiction of other players that are assumed to be independent. Of course the system is entirely capable of depicting independent players that are entirely virtual and not independent. Playing poker in person it is fairly easy to tell what information is revealed or exposed and if people are sharing information or pooling resources. Online this is impossible to verify.
But the issues don't stop there. The depictions on the screen are handled and delivered through a multistage system of servers. It is entirely possible for the information to be manipulated or delayed.
Seems to me that you engage in a virtual game of chance entirely dependent on the game host and the assumed integrity of the information flow. Being a suspicious sort I am leery about trusting people that far. On the other hand if you are clearly made aware of the risks and your inability to confirm randomness, fairness, and even compliance with the rules of the game, and it is still okay by you then by all means you should be able to play as you see fit.
There have been several cases in the media that I have seen where the online games have been shown to be fraudulent. And I seldom pay attention to such matters. I wonder how many there really are and how many don't make the news.
I suspect that I would also be happier if there were some sort of 'widows and orphans' fund for gamblers that would provide for families and dependents of gamblers who lose the rent money. No matter if the gambler is addicted, or entirely un-addicted.
Some reasonable provision for treatment of gambling addiction and some way of excluding known addicts would seem to be reasonable. Not that I have any idea as to how such systems would be financed and function.
Posted by: Art | June 28, 2009 2:48 PM
If I hooked up a Geiger-Muller counter to a computer, would you be happy?
Posted by: steve s | June 28, 2009 8:46 PM
"If I hooked up a Geiger-Muller counter to a computer, would you be happy?"
No, I would not be happy, reassured, enough to engage in internet gambling. Reporting bias and the other points I mentioned still require too much unjustified confidence in the operators and administrators of the systems to satisfy my skeptical side when significant amounts of money are on the line.
But then again I don't presently gamble online and really don't desire to do so. So I'm not the target audience. People who are presently satisfied with the present system or those who are close to being satisfied might be reassured by including such mechanisms but it wouldn't go far enough for me.
I do note that some online gaming sites avoid the use of RNGs, or anything as complicated as your Geiger-Muller counter, by simply rolling dice and recording the results for later use.
Even the US navy uses dice to decide certain sequences of maneuvers which they desire to keep as unpredictable as possible. Billions of dollars of submarine and weapons and they have found that the most random and reliable mechanism for making the call is a fifty cent pair of dice. Go figure.
Not that use of dice would change my mind. Those rare times I wish to gamble I will do it in person.
Posted by: Art | June 28, 2009 11:19 PM
Art: Dice rolls aren't truly random either, whatever that means, after all the motion of a dice can be predicted in principle by the laws of physics. Randomness is a term best applied to your knowledge of a process, not to a process itself.
Posted by: James K | June 29, 2009 12:54 AM
Art (No 5):
Do you have a reference for the Navy dice thing? That sounds interesting.
Posted by: MPL | June 29, 2009 1:44 AM
As usual, the (partial) solution to the flaws Art points out is regulation, not prohibition. There's already federal and state (in at least Nevada and New Jersey) agencies tasked to keep gambling businesses running fairly - putting online gambling under their purview would seem simple enough (needed funding to be paid by taxing the businesses), and would then encourage U.S. gamblers to use those sites over unregulated foreign sites. It still won't stop collusion by the players themselves, but would at least limit the problems with the system itself.
As for the limits on RNG randomness - slot machines are also run by RNGs, aren't they? And yet they're random enough to meet government gaming rules.
Posted by: BobApril | June 29, 2009 6:16 AM
Art "As far as I can tell computers are incapable of generating a truly random process so the game, from the start, is bogus. "
I have more faith that a deal is "random" on the internet compared to human dealer. It takes 7 shuffles to create a truly "random" deck. A RNG while not truly random can at least "shuffle" the deck thousands of times under a second and producing a much more random deck than any human dealer.
Posted by: Jim | June 29, 2009 2:34 PM
Some of you are talking about this like it is hypothetical, when we have several years of evidence from when the poker sites were running with no interference from the government. There were no known scams on any of the major sites that I was aware of, and I played on at least 14 of them (the Ultimatebet scam happened after the "Frist bill"). It was possible to make a living wage playing fairly modest stakes ($200-$600 pot limit buy-in), and many people did so. I was one of them.
That leads into the other problem with some of the comments here that talk about poker like it is a game against the house where the worse your results the better the house take. In poker (like sports betting), the house just takes a (hopefully) small percentage of the bets. The house is guaranteed money on every single hand played, and based on pot size, not who wins, so the motive to cheat is lessened. It's a gravy train.
Posted by: Science Avenger | June 30, 2009 8:01 PM