WASHINGTON STATE LAW IS AN OVER-REACTION
4 May 2007
Equating online gambling with possessing child
pornography, fleeing police or robbing a grave is a
strange perspective
The outspoken columnist of the Seattle Times, Danny
Westneat, is a pragmatic writer we have quoted before,
and this week he spent some time with a skilled online
poker player to find out why the draconian laws against
online gambling in the state of Washington consider this
pastime a Class C felony on a par with possessing child
pornography, fleeing police or robbing a grave.
The piece was topical in that last week it appeared that
the law had been sensibly amended to exclude online
poker players pursuing their passion for recreational
purposes in the privacy of their homes. That was the
proposal submitted by Representative Chris Strow who was
having second thoughts about the severity of the
punitive measures imposed by his home state. Alas, the
announcement was wrong following a snafu in the official
posting of the result on a vehicle licensing bill (see
earlier InfoPowa report) and the felony C penalties
remain.
The Republican politician characterised the
criminalisation of citizens who are joining a game from
their homes as an "amazing intrusion on personal
liberty."
Westneat spent time with an online poker player who
multitasks his way to around $45 000 a year despite the
risks entailed. The columnist describes a typical 90
minutes of play in which the 26 year old player,
operating from the bedroom of his townhouse, engaged
with players all over the world in poker rooms located
in places as diverse as Cyprus and the Isle of Man.
Westneat comments: "He's good at it. Last year he netted
$45 000. He does it in a dizzying display of patient,
mathematical multitasking.....he simultaneously used two
screens to play poker at nine tables in four separate
casinos. He considered the probability distributions for
nine hands of cards at a time, placed bets and managed
nine accounts, all while talking to me and surfing the
Web.
"He played 250 hands in 90 minutes - 10 times the rate
of play when you go to a cardroom in person. He's like
the Wal-Mart of gamblers - high volume, low margin,
steady success."
"I'm the video-game generation," the player told
Westneat. "I'm good at focusing on bursts of information
for a split second, then moving on. It's like a series
of brain teasers to me. That's the thing about online
gambling. We're mostly math nerds who'd otherwise be
playing video games."
The player, who's name is disclosed in Westneat's
column, sees having his name in the paper is an act of
civil disobedience. He's practically daring the state to
catch him if it can.
"I want to challenge the law," he said. "I'm a regular
guy. I work a 9-to-5 job. I go to Mass every weekend.
And, yes, I gamble online. This makes me a felon?"
Westneat points out that online players are diverse and
numerous on an Internet that is as anonymous as it is
borderless. The player he visited has, in common with
thousands of others, virtually met skilled poker players
from Ohio to Australia. Yet he's also run into gamblers
who aren't people at all, but card-playing software
bots.
The US situation is described as a government that
"...continues to try, in vain, to put a digital
anti-gambling wall around America. Even as lotteries and
other types of homegrown gambling flourish."
He goes on to reveal that in the night he spent with the
online player there were 141 000 players just in the
casinos and poker rooms that were visited.
"When I left [the player] to walk to my car, it was
nearing midnight. It was so quiet I could hear frogs
croaking. That telltale blue glow radiated from many of
the identical town homes," Westneat concludes his
column. "What were people doing in there? Where in the
world were they going? And what, if anything, should be
done about it?
"The mind reels."
Online Casino News courtesy of InfoPowa
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