Washington State Law Over-Reaction

Published: Monday, April 30, 2007 Online-Casinos.com

WASHINGTON STATE LAW IS AN OVER-REACTION

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 Online-Casinos.com/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, whose 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."