Skill Games Included In US Financial Ban?

Published: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 Online-Casinos.com

WILL SKILL GAMES BE INCLUDED IN NEW US FINANCIAL BAN?

The new law says betting includes games 'subject to some chance'

The Denver Post posed a question that skill game providers may be pondering in the wake of the proposed new US anti-online gambling law this week; will skill games also be subject to the ban?

Opining that the impact of the new Internet gambling law might not be limited to casino games and sports betting, the newspaper pointed out that skill games such as online checkers, could also fall under the measure's wide net. Several major companies own websites that charge users a fee to play games such as Memory Match, Bejeweled and chess for cash prizes.

"Internet skill games may or may not be legal," said gambling expert Professor I. Nelson Rose, a law professor at Whittier College in California. "The new law says betting includes games 'subject to some chance."'

The new law doesn't exempt skill games like those offered by Liberty Media, which recently paid $195 million for Toronto-based FunTech. The only games it specifically exempts are horse racing, fantasy sports and lotteries. Fun Technologies operates a number of sites, including SkillJam.com, that allow users to pay to play games against other players for cash prizes.

Traditionally, sites like SkillJam claim that it offers games of skill, which makes the games legal. It is the same argument that poker groups have made, but the activity is still generally viewed as gambling.

"Unlike casino games (which are mostly games of chance), your chance of winning one of our games is directly related to your skill level in that particular game," SkillJam's website claims. "For instance, the more trivia you know, the better your chances are of beating the other players in the Trivia Challenge tournaments. As a result, SkillJam operates within the legal gaming framework of the respective states."

However, according to SkillJam, some states already prohibit playing games that the site offers for cash. Those states are Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina and Vermont.

In SkillJam's fantasy sports tournaments, users pay fees that usually range from $1 to $10, and "the prizes awarded are directly related to the number of participants in a particular tournament," according to its site.