https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracies_against_the_laity
There really is no reason to legalize gambling casinos. It is just an inefficient way of moving money around. It doesn’t actually create new value for society as a whole. (Friendly poker games amongst friends and family with small pots are probably fine).
When you make gambling illegal you just drive it underground and fund organized crime, with all the additional crime and corruption that brings with it.
The arguments against making gambling illegal are similar to many of the arguments against making drugs and prostitution illegal, such as consenting adults should be free to do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else.
So long minimum wage and workplace safety laws, welcome back indentured servitude.
In Korea, by law you have to prove you're a foreigner. In the Bahamas it is legal for the locals to bet, but the casinos kick them out. They've had enough experiences of a guy coming in on payday, losing his money, then his wife coming in the next day with a baseball bat to destroy the machine that took the money. Don't want any more.
That's almost certainly not the reason. They want the revenue but not the societal ills from gamblers.
Why should the government outlaw my ability to give my money away however I want to? If I want to go put all my money on black because it's fun to me, why should that be illegal?
From "Who is buying Powerball and Mega Millions tickets?" [1]
> The survey showed the most frequent lottery players earn between $36,000 and $89,999. About 56% of that group bought tickets in the last year. Fewer of those making under $36,000 bought tickets, only 40%. About 53% who make above $90,000 bought a ticket.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/06/news/powerball-mega-million...
>But other studies have shown that when lower income players do buy tickets, they spend far more money on lottery tickets than wealthier players. A study published in the Journal of Gambling Studies found that those in the bottom fifth of income spent the most on lottery tickets, and more than twice as much as the richest lottery players - $433 a year vs. $193 a year.
Most everyone buys a Powerball ticket when it hits a cool billion or whatever it is; but that's not the vast majority of lottery enjoyers.
> The poorer lottery players also buy far more of the lower prize games, such as scratch-off instant games which account for the majority of lottery sales.
> The richer buyers are buying the multi-state jackpot games such as Powerball and Mega Millions. And the wealthier players are likely to be drawn in by the big jackpot prizes like those being offered right now by both Powerball and Mega Millions.
The lotteries are not exclusively taxing the poorest members of society, which is what you originally claimed.
I am one. Although, I only enter once per drawing, and only when the pot is large enough that I can pretend it's +EV.
There's a lot of games where I can't even pretend it's even close to reasonable odds, and I don't get much entertainment, so I'll leave those alone.
I do think casinos tend to be regulated to pay back a way higher % than lotteries though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Whittaker_%28lottery_winn...
There might be a crime involved when someone wins at roulette, there might be negligence by the casino in maintaining their games. There might be luck. Some people do win hundreds of millions of dollars on a $2 lottery ticket.
The police where I live do not follow up investigating store robberies, they do not follow up on people who pass bad checks, and they definitely do not follow up on eat and runs. More often than not they will answer the phone when someone calls 911, but not much more often than not.
So yes, the idea that the police seem to be at the beck and call of the casinos to detain people with no hard evidence that any crime at all has actually been committed is concerning. At least let us know what phone number they are calling that the police actually pay attention to.
Exactly. And so, the police investigated. When they determined there wasn't a crime (or at least had no proof or evidence of one), they released the accused and required the casino to pay them their full winnings.
Your "exactly" was wrong, because you're using a different meaning of "might be" than the person who wrote the quote, and given the childish "you said it" reply it seems like you did that on purpose.
Better than equal. Most Blackjack is -0.6% EV playing basic strategy, but with counting, each true count is an extra ~0.5% of EV, leading to big betting on high count hands with EV of 1-3%. Of course, that's why casinos kick out counters. They're literally "too good" at the game, and they don't want that.
6 decks, as opposed to 1 or 2, does make counting less accurate. But ultimately everything I said previously applies. Those stats are based on the current common game of 3-2 Blackjack, H17, 6-deck shoe, no continuous shuffle, and double after split.
Counting works but the way to profit from it is easily detected. You have to bet big when the count is favorable, and a casino will see that and stop you.
The MIT Blackjack Team beat this, with the strategy to have one player at the table who would bet small while counting cards, incurring the expected slight losses to the house edge, and signal a teammate to jump in and bet big (like $5k per hand) when the count was favorable. Casinos now know to stop this - if you walk up to a table and want to bet big, they will require you to wait for the next reshuffle (or just reshuffle immediately.)