(Shutterstock) 1. No Trump Today
This will be my least-read newsletter of the month. But I’m going to need a couple days off from Trump-Harris between now and November 5 and this story is interesting: The legalization of online gambling was a mistake and at some point the federal government should fix it.
There’s a practical aspect to this discussion: Why was it a mistake? What has happened? But also an ideological aspect: How much freedom should people have to hurt themselves? And how much freedom should people have to take advantage of others?
In short: This is the kind of conversation that I’d like to have here pretty much every day—if we lived in a world where the authoritarian crisis was over and our democracy was stable.
So for a minute, let’s pretend that we’re in that place and have the luxury to talk policy.
Because here’s the hook: Robots have taken over online gambling and they’re transferring wealth from uneducated poor people to corporations and wealthy hustlers.
This is not something society should allow.
Start with poker.
I linked to a Bloomberg story yesterday about a Russian bot operation that grew to devour the world of online poker . It’s really long and maybe you didn’t read it, so the relevant points are: If you play online poker, there’s a good chance the “people” you’re playing against are bots. These bots are significantly better at poker than most of the best professionals. So your money gets siphoned in two directions: The bots (who are controlled by a third party) win most of your money while the online poker site takes a percentage of all the action (this is called the rake). How prevalent is this dynamic? Vitaly Lunkin , a professional poker player, told Bloomberg, “I believe there is no clean game online.”Sounds bad, right? Normal people who don’t know better show up to play poker online and discover that they can’t win because they’re getting pantsed by robots.But the full story is actually worse.Because as the bots began taking over, online poker sites noticed that IRL human players quickly got […]
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