6 ms·

Can anyone comment on why poker is illegal in most of the U.S.? I'm in the UK, and the government leans on the side of restricting freedom, yet poker-for-money

by forloop 11y ago

Can anyone comment on why poker is illegal in most of the U.S.? I'm in the UK, and the government leans on the side of restricting freedom, yet poker-for-money is totally legal here.

marincounty 11y ago
Actually, a part of me wishes all gambling was illegial in the U.S., including the lottery. I have seen the damage it does to poor, and middle class families. The cards are stacked against us here; it's real easy to end up homeless. It's fine when your young, and single, but I have know families that lost everything, and as I said before; we don't have much of a safety net. (I haven't traveled much in the U.S., but every town I been in has had legal poker tables. I think poker is legal here?)
- tP5n 11y ago
  Poker is not a lottery, the cards are not 'stacked against us'. I'd also question the subtext that gambling (addiction?) only harms the poor. I wish people would be able to make educated decisions in regards to their own life. I would not want the state to decide on how I, or others, spent our pastime.
  - valarauca1 11y ago
    >I wish people would be able to make educated decisions in regards to their own life. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
    - mod 11y ago
      You're adding a slant to his comment that didn't exist. He wants the ABILITY to choose one's own path. He's not commenting (positively or negatively) on the paths others have chosen.
    - tikhonj 11y ago
      I suspect "able" here means "allowed". "I wish people would be allowed to make educated decisions…" is not criticizing anyone except perhaps the people who wish that people would not be allowed to make certain decisions themselves.
  - duncanawoods 11y ago
    >> Poker is not a lottery, the cards are not 'stacked against us Not quite. Cash games with rakes and evenly matched players are effectively "stacked against you". Every player at the table will be a loser. Even if you are +ev, a high rake can still make you a loser. Very large field MTTs are close to lotteries. A good player can not expect to play one hundred 1000 player tournaments and beat variance. Assuming the typical definition of a good player being twice as likely to win, confidently beating variance requires 1000s of tournaments.
    - mod 11y ago
      Nobody is twice as likely to win the lottery. Saying that it's "close to a lottery" is clearly wrong. Similarly, no game is evenly matched, and there's no particular reason any given player can't elevate their game to the point of beating the rake.
- forloop 11y ago
  Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man[0]. Is there any factual basis? Or historical reason(s) which influences the psyche of the U.S., inducing an irrational response to poker? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c
- j42 11y ago
  Do you see how your argument breaks down when you can substitute any potentially-addictive activity in place of [gambling]? Any pleasurable activity from video games, to food, to alcohol, etc. can be done to a destructive end. That doesn't make the activity intrinsically destructive on its own. There is a well-established correlation between poverty and addiction--don't make the mistake of assuming that just because the correlation applies to a variety of real-world activities it is causal. Current research is actually leaning in the opposite direction: lower socioeconomic status/poverty has a negative long-term effect on the brain's plasticity & stimulus response which may pre-dispose individuals to addictive tendencies (through altered reward pathways or lessened inhibition re: changes in the pre-frontal cortex). Please don't make the mistake of trying to impose value judgements on society in the name of "protecting" people -- that line of "reasoning" has led to some really problematic and harmful public policies. Regardless of how you feel about the activity itself, treating addiction as a neurophysiological state has produced consistently better outcomes. Trying to ban potentially-addictive triggers for at-risk populations isn't really helping them at all, and in a sociological context can actually have the opposite effect.
  - stdbrouw 11y ago
    > Do you see how your argument breaks down when you can substitute any potentially-addictive activity in place of [gambling]? Ehm, well, yes, and governments ban or discourage destructive and addictive activities all the time. Also, fighting symptoms isn't great, but if it's all you've got, it's often better than nothing. It's not entirely clear to me how banning gambling could make poor people any poorer. I don't really have an opinion on whether or not gambling should be illegal, but I just don't find your argument against regulating harmful activities very convincing at all. It's very close to "just look at Stalin, how did that work out?"
    - j42 11y ago
      Perhaps it was too direct a rebuttal... in my perspective I view any proclivity to "vice" as intrinsic to the nature of societies & human curiosity. This is, thus far, corroborated by the behavioral sciences. In that model there are two essential approaches (aside from negligence) one can take: enforcement or empathy. The former says "it is in the greater good for this to be restricted," without paying much mind to the individual. The latter focuses instead on the individual or condition and says "how can I help this individual transition from a destructive state to a healthy one and/or integrate them into society?" I think we see the enforcement approach fail when banned activities can't be clearly demonstrated to cause acute harm. It's easy to stand behind a law designed to restrict a deadly substance, reduce drunk driving, et al. -- that gets harder when you start restricting abstract behaviors that don't have graphic or clearly-definable consequences (e.g. a drunk individual behind the wheel of a car is a simple and acute danger; I challenge you to quantify the impact of a generalized, individual "gambler" on society). Regardless of your own value associations, we as humans are dynamic creatures and "laws" are static values -- that is to say they exist on a spectrum of opposing force that occasionally shifts dramatically in one direction. I think we're seeing that shift now through the lens of the failed "war on drugs," in how innate these behaviors are to our biology. You may feel better banning an activity that you feel is destructive, but you shouldn't be so naive as to assume your ban will have any effect on individual human motivation when dopamine is involved--it's deferring the problem, and distracting from the factors that predispose an individual to "destructive behavior" in the first place. I do think enforcement is necessary (re: balance, the key to everything in society), but it's hard to argue that the "war on drugs" (as an example) has done anything other than establish a black market global economy, the supply chains of which bring instability and violence to much of South/Central America... not to mention the egregious legal precedents toward non-violent offenders we have set in our own country under the guise of reform and in the interest of subsidizing for-profit prisons. If we're really interested in improving our quality of life as a society, maybe we shouldn't regulate "activities" so much as how we respond to them in terms of statute and precedent...
- ILIKEPONIES 11y ago
  In the long run, poker is a skill game. It's played against random opponents, not the house. As such, the cards aren't "stacked against you." To bucket it with all gambling games, especially the lottery, demonstrates a lack of understanding.
  - jib 11y ago
    Poker (in any casino) is raked in some way, either by seat fee or by pot rake, so the game is stacked against you. You can certainly overcome that edge by being more skilled than your opponents (which is a nice difference from most other casino games), but over the entire population of poker players, playing poker is a losing proposition. In the eyes of a casino, there is no difference in running a poker game or any other game (except possibly that poker is a pretty expensive game to run, compared to how much you can rake without it being obvious that the rake is significant, as it has fairly slow rounds and few participants per staff needed to run it).
    - ryandrake 11y ago
      That's like saying the movie theater is stacked against you because they charge admission to get in. There is a huge difference between playing a game against the house which is mathematically set up to lose you money in the long term, vs. paying an entrance fee to compete against other players.
  - learnstats2 11y ago
    I disagree that it demonstrates a lack of understanding: - In poker, the house takes a cut that typically overwhelms the benefit of being a skilled player. An unskilled player is losing to the house and their competitors. - An unskilled player may not be playing against random opponents. Part of the skill you are talking about is the skill of picking vulnerable opponents and milking them. - Gambler's ruin still takes effect: you have a finite bankroll so you can only ride out a finite amount of bad luck before you're bankrupt. Fine, if you're rich or the house. - Many of the best poker players in the world have bankrupted or have had to take deep loans to continue playing.
- asift 11y ago
  Even if it were illegal, it would still happen all of the time (it would just be one more way for local governments to profit off of policing the poor). That said, I'm all for abolishing state-run lotteries. The government simply has no business running a lottery. The profit from these lotteries also stifles the potential for better alternatives such as Prize-Linked Savings plans. Freakonomics has had some decent discussions of these types of accounts. http://freakonomics.com/2010/12/02/freakonomics-radio-who-could-say-no-to-a-no-lose-lottery/ http://freakonomics.com/2010/12/02/freakonomics-radio-who-co...
ChazDazzle 11y ago
In 2006 the religious right & existing casinos partnered together on a law which made online poker effectively illegal in the US. Even still, the bill only passed because it was tacked on to unrelated "must-pass" legislation at the last minute in the Senate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_Internet_Gambling_Enforcement_Act_of_2006 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_Internet_Gambling_E...
- ILIKEPONIES 11y ago
  Adding context to the original question (from Wikipedia): "According to a study published in May 2015, players from the USA are banned in more than 72% of the world's online casinos. Having considered multiple factors, such as ISP blocks of online casinos and restrictions for casino financial transactions, the report concluded that as of 2015, the USA is the worst country for online gambling of the 225 studied[1]." [1]http://www.keytocasino.com/en/article/online-gambling-access-around-the-world.html http://www.keytocasino.com/en/article/online-gambling-access...
boomshucka 11y ago
Poker is in fact legal in a lot of the US in some form. Whether it be indian casinos or regular casinos or legal poker only rooms, the majority of the population has access (say, within a 1 hr drive) to a public game of poker which is legal.

by forloop 11y ago

Can anyone comment on why poker is illegal in most of the U.S.? I'm in the UK, and the government leans on the side of restricting freedom, yet poker-for-money is totally legal here.

marincounty 11y ago

Actually, a part of me wishes all gambling was illegial in the U.S., including the lottery. I have seen the damage it does to poor, and middle class families. The cards are stacked against us here; it's real easy to end up homeless. It's fine when your young, and single, but I have know families that lost everything, and as I said before; we don't have much of a safety net. (I haven't traveled much in the U.S., but every town I been in has had legal poker tables. I think poker is legal here?)

tP5n 11y ago
Poker is not a lottery, the cards are not 'stacked against us'. I'd also question the subtext that gambling (addiction?) only harms the poor. I wish people would be able to make educated decisions in regards to their own life. I would not want the state to decide on how I, or others, spent our pastime.
- valarauca1 11y ago
  >I wish people would be able to make educated decisions in regards to their own life. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
  - mod 11y ago
    You're adding a slant to his comment that didn't exist. He wants the ABILITY to choose one's own path. He's not commenting (positively or negatively) on the paths others have chosen.
  - tikhonj 11y ago
    I suspect "able" here means "allowed". "I wish people would be allowed to make educated decisions…" is not criticizing anyone except perhaps the people who wish that people would not be allowed to make certain decisions themselves.
- duncanawoods 11y ago
  >> Poker is not a lottery, the cards are not 'stacked against us Not quite. Cash games with rakes and evenly matched players are effectively "stacked against you". Every player at the table will be a loser. Even if you are +ev, a high rake can still make you a loser. Very large field MTTs are close to lotteries. A good player can not expect to play one hundred 1000 player tournaments and beat variance. Assuming the typical definition of a good player being twice as likely to win, confidently beating variance requires 1000s of tournaments.
  - mod 11y ago
    Nobody is twice as likely to win the lottery. Saying that it's "close to a lottery" is clearly wrong. Similarly, no game is evenly matched, and there's no particular reason any given player can't elevate their game to the point of beating the rake.
forloop 11y ago
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man[0]. Is there any factual basis? Or historical reason(s) which influences the psyche of the U.S., inducing an irrational response to poker? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c
j42 11y ago
Do you see how your argument breaks down when you can substitute any potentially-addictive activity in place of [gambling]? Any pleasurable activity from video games, to food, to alcohol, etc. can be done to a destructive end. That doesn't make the activity intrinsically destructive on its own. There is a well-established correlation between poverty and addiction--don't make the mistake of assuming that just because the correlation applies to a variety of real-world activities it is causal. Current research is actually leaning in the opposite direction: lower socioeconomic status/poverty has a negative long-term effect on the brain's plasticity & stimulus response which may pre-dispose individuals to addictive tendencies (through altered reward pathways or lessened inhibition re: changes in the pre-frontal cortex). Please don't make the mistake of trying to impose value judgements on society in the name of "protecting" people -- that line of "reasoning" has led to some really problematic and harmful public policies. Regardless of how you feel about the activity itself, treating addiction as a neurophysiological state has produced consistently better outcomes. Trying to ban potentially-addictive triggers for at-risk populations isn't really helping them at all, and in a sociological context can actually have the opposite effect.
- stdbrouw 11y ago
  > Do you see how your argument breaks down when you can substitute any potentially-addictive activity in place of [gambling]? Ehm, well, yes, and governments ban or discourage destructive and addictive activities all the time. Also, fighting symptoms isn't great, but if it's all you've got, it's often better than nothing. It's not entirely clear to me how banning gambling could make poor people any poorer. I don't really have an opinion on whether or not gambling should be illegal, but I just don't find your argument against regulating harmful activities very convincing at all. It's very close to "just look at Stalin, how did that work out?"
  - j42 11y ago
    Perhaps it was too direct a rebuttal... in my perspective I view any proclivity to "vice" as intrinsic to the nature of societies & human curiosity. This is, thus far, corroborated by the behavioral sciences. In that model there are two essential approaches (aside from negligence) one can take: enforcement or empathy. The former says "it is in the greater good for this to be restricted," without paying much mind to the individual. The latter focuses instead on the individual or condition and says "how can I help this individual transition from a destructive state to a healthy one and/or integrate them into society?" I think we see the enforcement approach fail when banned activities can't be clearly demonstrated to cause acute harm. It's easy to stand behind a law designed to restrict a deadly substance, reduce drunk driving, et al. -- that gets harder when you start restricting abstract behaviors that don't have graphic or clearly-definable consequences (e.g. a drunk individual behind the wheel of a car is a simple and acute danger; I challenge you to quantify the impact of a generalized, individual "gambler" on society). Regardless of your own value associations, we as humans are dynamic creatures and "laws" are static values -- that is to say they exist on a spectrum of opposing force that occasionally shifts dramatically in one direction. I think we're seeing that shift now through the lens of the failed "war on drugs," in how innate these behaviors are to our biology. You may feel better banning an activity that you feel is destructive, but you shouldn't be so naive as to assume your ban will have any effect on individual human motivation when dopamine is involved--it's deferring the problem, and distracting from the factors that predispose an individual to "destructive behavior" in the first place. I do think enforcement is necessary (re: balance, the key to everything in society), but it's hard to argue that the "war on drugs" (as an example) has done anything other than establish a black market global economy, the supply chains of which bring instability and violence to much of South/Central America... not to mention the egregious legal precedents toward non-violent offenders we have set in our own country under the guise of reform and in the interest of subsidizing for-profit prisons. If we're really interested in improving our quality of life as a society, maybe we shouldn't regulate "activities" so much as how we respond to them in terms of statute and precedent...
ILIKEPONIES 11y ago
In the long run, poker is a skill game. It's played against random opponents, not the house. As such, the cards aren't "stacked against you." To bucket it with all gambling games, especially the lottery, demonstrates a lack of understanding.
- jib 11y ago
  Poker (in any casino) is raked in some way, either by seat fee or by pot rake, so the game is stacked against you. You can certainly overcome that edge by being more skilled than your opponents (which is a nice difference from most other casino games), but over the entire population of poker players, playing poker is a losing proposition. In the eyes of a casino, there is no difference in running a poker game or any other game (except possibly that poker is a pretty expensive game to run, compared to how much you can rake without it being obvious that the rake is significant, as it has fairly slow rounds and few participants per staff needed to run it).
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    That's like saying the movie theater is stacked against you because they charge admission to get in. There is a huge difference between playing a game against the house which is mathematically set up to lose you money in the long term, vs. paying an entrance fee to compete against other players.
- learnstats2 11y ago
  I disagree that it demonstrates a lack of understanding: - In poker, the house takes a cut that typically overwhelms the benefit of being a skilled player. An unskilled player is losing to the house and their competitors. - An unskilled player may not be playing against random opponents. Part of the skill you are talking about is the skill of picking vulnerable opponents and milking them. - Gambler's ruin still takes effect: you have a finite bankroll so you can only ride out a finite amount of bad luck before you're bankrupt. Fine, if you're rich or the house. - Many of the best poker players in the world have bankrupted or have had to take deep loans to continue playing.
asift 11y ago
Even if it were illegal, it would still happen all of the time (it would just be one more way for local governments to profit off of policing the poor). That said, I'm all for abolishing state-run lotteries. The government simply has no business running a lottery. The profit from these lotteries also stifles the potential for better alternatives such as Prize-Linked Savings plans. Freakonomics has had some decent discussions of these types of accounts. http://freakonomics.com/2010/12/02/freakonomics-radio-who-could-say-no-to-a-no-lose-lottery/ http://freakonomics.com/2010/12/02/freakonomics-radio-who-co...

ChazDazzle 11y ago

In 2006 the religious right & existing casinos partnered together on a law which made online poker effectively illegal in the US. Even still, the bill only passed because it was tacked on to unrelated "must-pass" legislation at the last minute in the Senate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_Internet_Gambling_Enforcement_Act_of_2006 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_Internet_Gambling_E...

ILIKEPONIES 11y ago
Adding context to the original question (from Wikipedia): "According to a study published in May 2015, players from the USA are banned in more than 72% of the world's online casinos. Having considered multiple factors, such as ISP blocks of online casinos and restrictions for casino financial transactions, the report concluded that as of 2015, the USA is the worst country for online gambling of the 225 studied[1]." [1]http://www.keytocasino.com/en/article/online-gambling-access-around-the-world.html http://www.keytocasino.com/en/article/online-gambling-access...

boomshucka 11y ago

Poker is in fact legal in a lot of the US in some form. Whether it be indian casinos or regular casinos or legal poker only rooms, the majority of the population has access (say, within a 1 hr drive) to a public game of poker which is legal.