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WA Law: 5 Years in Prison for Gambling Online
tpoker writes "Online gambling has been an ongoing legal issue for the federal government, but Washington State has recently decided to take matters into their own hands. The Seattle PI reports, 'Beginning next month [June 7th], Washington residents who play poker or make other types of wagers on the Internet will be committing a Class C felony, equivalent under the law to possessing child pornography, threatening the governor or torturing an animal. Although the head of the state Gambling Commission says it is unlikely that individual online gamblers will be targeted for arrest, the new law carries stiff penalties: as much as five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.'"
Buddy, it was a total accident. This guy got blamed for everything. The place was in total code violation yet the idiot fire inspector never did anything. He's the one who should have been tried.
Washington is a politically diverse state. Once you get outside of the major population centers, it gets rural and Red pretty quickly, like in Oregon. This is why the races there tend to be so close.
The state profits on gambling from horse racing and the state lottery. The Indian casino lobby is huge. Since the online guys don't kick back to the state, and since the Indians have deeper pockets, guess who gets the shaft? Nothing to do with the churches this time.
Jack Abramoff's main gig (as far as we know so far) was lobbying for "antigambling" laws to stop new casinos from competing with his casino clients. Also under the guise of "protecting gamblers from themselves", even enlisting the most popular Christian political organizers.
Sounds like "antigambling legislation" is a bigger rigged game, a nest for money launderers, mobsters, bribers and bribees. We should protect our legislatures from themselves by keeping them out of the business. They're welcome to stay in the business of busting money launderers, mobsters, bribers/bribees and extortionists, and rehab for compulsive gamblers - but I doubt they'll be as interested in that losing game.
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make install -not war
Washington is run by Democrats, top to bottom. They passed this bill. Just wanted to point that out in case anybody thinks one party has a greater affinity for freedom than the other.
You cause kill a nursing home patient through gross negligence and get about 10% of the fine you get for showing a breast for 1/4 second during the superbowl.
Welcome to the USA.
Funny how Magic the Gathering Online, run by a Washington state company, now falls under this gambling bullshit. You can buy tickets to participate in matches, and the winners of matches can be awarded prizes -- therefore it's gambling in the eyes of the law.
Congratulations on supporting local businesses, Gregoire! Oh wait you're in the pocket of the tribal casinos... I forgot.
"Either that or it's a persuasive tribal lobbyist."
F actBook2004.pdf page 75. My thanks to "Dan" of the 2+2 Forums for finding the contributor information.
Bingo!
I wondered, "Who sponsored this and who contributed to the sponsor's election?" The sponsor was Senator Margarita Prentice (D) 11th District, and here are some of her financial supporters -
WA INDIAN GAMING ASSN OLYMPIA WA
NISQUALLY INDIAN TRIBE OLYMPIA WA
MUCKLESHOOT INDIAN TRIBE AUBURN WA
CHIPS CASINO LLC BREMERTON WA
CONF TRIBES OF COLVILLE RESERVATION NESPELEM WA
GOLDIE'S SHORELINE CASINO SHORELINE WA
This is from http://www.pdc.wa.gov/datarequests/factbooks/pdf/
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
All that's needed to circumvent the law is for me to have a machine with SSH login in another state (or country). I then can do
putty -D 8080 -ssh hostname.com
And set my browser to proxy requests through SOCKS proxy. No one ever will know what sites I'm contacting. Granted, most poker players are incapable of launching a free tool from the command line and obtaining a free shell account, but the smart ones will still play wherever the heck they want.
Your comments about bots are quite misinformed. I have played hundreds of thousands of hands online in the past few years (multitabling shorthanded games you can easily get 500+ hands/hr) and made more per hour than I do at my job. I have friends who make a living playing fulltime online. For a good player, there is plenty of money to be made. Bots are a complete non-issue (except insofar as fear of bots scares off potential fish). The best bots today cannot beat anything above the micro-limit games. If you think it is possible to buy a program that you can just start running and beat the games, you are very mistaken. If that were possible, everyone would be doing it (and there would be no more games).
There are frameworks available to play online, but they only handle the clicking of buttons and avoiding detection from the site and so forth. They do not include any useful AI. You need to write your own code for actually making tatctical decisions.
Collusion (from humans, not bots) is a bigger concern and you do need to look out for that. But the sites generally do a fairly good job of detecting it since unlike a casino, they can analyze every hand you've ever played including the cards you fold and look for suspicious patterns (e.g., you always sit at the same table as Player X and when he has a good hand, you raise even though you have nothing).
I'd rather be lucky than good.
There should be a law that you can't put a law on the books with no intention of enforcing it.
You forget, in our state, if someone commits a felony that there's a financial penalty tagged to it, you can turn them in for a bounty (usually 10 percent of the fine, sometimes higher).
Which means $1000 to rat out the guy downstairs in your dorm who's underage and gambling online and bragging about the fancy car he got from gambling.
I think there will be lots of takers for that one.
Maybe they'll do a new TV series "Gates: Bounty Hunter" which has scenes like this:
Gates: Hmm, I see Muffy's got a new Cadillac DeSalle parked in front of the Sorority.
Sidekick Allen: Didn't she turn you down for the Spring Fling, Bill?
Gates: Yup, and she's going down for online gambling - I can use that $1000 reward for turning her in to buy another double core processor for my Opteron! Quick, to the Internet Sniffer, Paul!
music crescendo - And So Another Day In The Life of Bill Gates, Internet Gambling Bounty Hunter, and Another Villian Will Be Brought To Justice! - music diminishes
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There are a lot of good comments here explaining why this is simply a waste of time for the U.S. government. But representatives are not going to read any of these and be influenced to vote against the internet gambling prohibition act. Please write you opinions to your congressmen. You can find you congressman at this site by entering your zip code. As a poker player I strongly urge you to spend a few moments to contact your representative and tell him to stop wasting his time and tax payers dollars on silly legislation. The bill currently in congress is "H.R. 4777, the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act". Please reference it if you decide to contact your congressman.
The data presented here: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html
Shows that prison populations, murder rates, organized crime, etc... all went UP during prohibition and went down after it ended....
from that source:
"The most telling sign of the relationship between serious crime and Prohibition was the dramatic reversal in the rates for robbery, burglary, murder, and assault when Prohibition was repealed in 1933. That dramatic reversal has Marxist and business-cycle crime theorists puzzled to this day. For example, sociologist John Pandiani noted that "a major wave of crime appears to have begun as early as the mid 1920s [and] increased continually until 1933 . . . when it mysteriously reversed itself."[50] Theodore Ferdinand also found a "mysterious" decline that began in 1933 and lasted throughout the 1930s.[51] How could they miss the significance of the fact that the crime rate dropped in 1933?"
I don't even gamble but this stupid law makes me sad to be a resident of Washington State. Sometimes the greed in our State government knows no bounds. They weasel their way into raising our tab fees after we voted them down and they screw us on our road bills where they say roads will be paved with high grade concrete only to be stripped and replaced with asphault, guaranteeing more idiots working the roads and less efficiency in our state funds going to improve more infrastructures. Vote Libertarian and force these pukes to follow through and put the money where they proclaim it will be put and no more.
Let the idiots who become addicted to gambling shrivel up in their own miseries for being weak. Re-privatized our Liquor stores that presently force everyone to drive to the reservations for reasonable prices. Good for the reservations and their exemptions but come on! Stop screwing your residents. Fix out power grids with a joint private venture so we are less susceptible to power outages and real jobs are created instead of the various strip mall retail service ilk.I'm a long time resident of Seattle and very few people in my state understand the influence our Indian Casinos have over politics in this state. They make tons and tons of money and arent afraid to spend it politically to get what they want.
This law is a direct result of that. They dont want the online competition to their casinos.
Just a few months ago they were the main sponsors of an initiative to ban smoking in all bars and restaurants. Surprise surprise... casinos are excluded from the law. So the only place WA residents can smoke are in the indian casinos.
It's really ridiculous. I'm all for gambling, but right now we have a gambling industry that exploiting government purely for its own advantages. Now we cant smoke in bars or gamble online mainly because the Indian Casino owners dont want competition. And the liberal politicians of the state follow along like lemmings.
Re:Might as well kill someone before you gamble. (Score:-1, Offtopic)
How is this off topic?
The story was about a doctor who was killed by a SWAT team because he was gambling (in this case, coaxed into placing an illegal bet by an undercover cop).
Either the mod is a LEO-bot, or the link to the Fox News site must have offended the Slashbot hive mind.
It's not surprising:
http://www.theagitator.com/archives/026550.php#026 550
From the article:
Probably won't surprise you to learn that the bill's sponsor is heavily supported by Washington State's thriving bricks-and-mortar casino industry.
Simply trying to protect their business. I am just waiting for the day that our bought and paid for legislators are kicked out of office.
Do you have ESP?
The casino ripping you off isn't as much of an issue with online poker, since you're playing against other online poker players. The casino doesn't benefit by one player winning versus another. The casino is getting it's cut, regardless of who wins. It's only with games where you're playing _against_ the casino that the casino possibly cheating you becomes an issue.
That said, you can still be cheated, by groups of other players jumping on the same table and sharing card information out of band (IM, cell phone, etc) in order to gain an advantage. From what I understand online casinos track player activity and kick people off for this type of activity... but I doubt this is much of a deterrent.