Posted on 12/25/2011 8:45:19 PM PST by Nachum
There would need to be a certification agency with suitable stature for foreign houses. The question also arises how can players know whether other players against them in the same rounds are counting cards? It has to be assumed they are, and for odds to be set accordingly, meaning it’s impossible to simulate non-counted games (unless for practice only, no stakes).
I suppose, if stupid people want to waste money and maybe get a virus or two in the bargain, it’s perhaps sufficient to warn them in advance. (Although even then there are antisocial aspects, like what is this likely to do to computers close to them, or that other people use.) But if foreign houses that play for stakes remain banned but state lotto plays are allowed online within a state, however, it should not be any further skin off of anyone’s nose if similar plays are allowed state-to-state, or state-to-Indian-reservation.
If you want to physically visit Monte Carlo and blow a fortune and that floats your boat, well it does pose a puzzle with what happens with your dependents whose boat was torpedoed in the process. The US being the US, it will until it becomes politically/financially impossible put these dependents on various welfare program. Debtors prisons being gone with the Bill of Rights, it’s not like you will be stuck into one to try to make up the shortfall either.
But I see a more practical problem, and it’s one that a Republican administration and Congress can’t make go away. It’s the problem of money laundering. By gaming and losing to a storefront, one can transfer just about any amount of money in an unaccountable manner. OK, so you feel copacetic with drugs furnished under prescription quality supervision and arrangement (as I would too). I don’t feel so copacetic with funding Bubba Jihad’s violent little international mission mounted from Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Nor do I feel that as long as Mexico still has drug cartels for whatever reason, we should feed them with guns.
None of this prohibits personal meetings. If there is no exemption for computer-aided penny ante among people who have all physically met one another, then there ought to be one. This should be supported with real-money accounts up front, never credit cards.
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