Sadly I think in modern society we have shifted from having to justify why something should be illegal, and today for many the default assumption is that all activity should be illegal and one should need to justify the value, subjective "goodness", or utility of an activity, business, device, etc for it is be ruled "legal"

>by the state itself! But it is illegal for me to gamble on a skill-based game like poker or predict-it

I think you have hit on the root cause, poker and other games of skill is harder for the government to inject themselves into it, harder to control the odds and revenue (like lottery), etc.

> The bigger question here is, why is it illegal?

So to be clear, you're asking why unregulated online gambling is illegal?

Because that's something you can look up, you know.

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> Most rational adults

Rational adults are what an internet economist says when they don't want to deal with the real world.

It's like when a physicist says "assume a cuboid cow three feet on an edge."

No, I don't think that I will.

Your attempt to ignore the hundreds of years of law and sociology that underpin this well examined decision with a few fly by the seat guesses about "rational adults" are not actually very compelling.

I find that people on HN frequently fail to understand that the law is a carefully crafted work by tens of thousands of professionals over centuries, that they almost cannot actually upgrade with a hot take.

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> Here in New York I can today bet on sports and horse racing from my phone or my computer.

Hooray for you.

Maybe if you'd like to look into it, you could learn about the New York gambling regulations, and why they don't fit this institution, and why this institution went to the CFTC for an exception.

After that, maybe you can read the CFTC decision, where they said "we gave them a special exception if they followed some rules, and they didn't follow those rules."

When you're done with that, possibly you could explain to me how what you just said was in any way related to what's happening.

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> But it is illegal for me to gamble on a skill-based game like poker

Er, no, it's not. Also, poker is not skill based. You may be surprised to learn that the ordering of the deck is random.

Yes, I know people all over the HN thread are claiming that there's a legal decision based on whether it's skill or chance based in flight, that came down to "it's skill."

I look forward to you citing that decision, because it isn't real. I expect you to attempt to cite Jack Weinstein's 2012 Brooklyn decision. I expect you to cite the New York Times article claiming that a circuit judge found that poker was a game of skill, not chance.

Of course, the Times' coverage quality has been in decline for a very long time.

At the end of that article, you will notice that it says "but the judge put off the decision." You'll notice the article was never updated.

So then you look up the decision. And gee, what do you know? It says that poker is, as is obvious, a game of chance. So do statistical analyses: fewer than 10% of 4 player 5 card draw hands can be changed win-vs-lose by player behavior. Most hands, what you drew is generally whether you win or lose.

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> I am pilloried with ads to play lotto - perhaps the worst form of gambling

It's not gambling if it's not for money, friend.

The ads are playing an ugly game with definitions, and sooner or later they're going to get sued out of existence.

They sell you things that affect your win rates, but you don't actually pay to play, and so under the 1950s law which wasn't written with this in mind, technically it isn't gambling, because even though you can spend money, and even though you can win money, you didn't spend money for the chance to win money.

Their (legally false) argument is that it's like a chess tournament with a prize but no entry fee, which charges for food and refreshments. You can win money, they claim, without spending a dollar, and you only spend money for related enjoyment while you're there.

It's an absurd and false premise, but nobody has bothered to hunt them yet.

Now that Unity is merging with one of the worst malware offenders in the ad market, I kind of expect this to change.

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"Most rational adults understand that the arbitrary decision to ban adults from X in certain ways, while promoting X in other ways is absolutely ridiculous."

what you just said was "if someone else can commit crime, i should be able to too."

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> But it is illegal for me to gamble on a skill-based game like poker or predict-it.

let's just come back to this again.

much like poker is (obviously!) not a game of skill, neither is predict-it.

it's not clear to me what you think "game of skill" means under the law. it doesn't mean "a game that someone can be good at."

a game of skill, under the law, is a game where you have all the information and every choice made is fully under the control of one of the two players.

there was a 15 year stretch where people weren't sure if chess was a game of skill because you flip a coin to see who goes first, and chess has a significant first player advantage.

if a single coin flip before any choices are made means it's potentially not a game of skill, i don't see how you could possibly hold that predicting the future, or poker, are. it seems to me like you're just repeating the phrase because you've heard it, and you don't really know what it means.

one of the problems with attempting to argue the law without taking the time to learn the history is that it very frequently doesn't obey the rules that a casual observer might expect.

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> It reeks of the authoritarian hypocrisy that is the defining feature of our government on every level.

"it's authoritarian hypocrisy that i can't use an unregulated gambling website which failed for eight years to follow the agreement that it made with the government"

lol.