

Ask HN: How do Dave&Buster's and Chuck-E-Cheese avoid anti-gambling laws? - sourcerer

At arcades like this, you can often pay to play games which give you tickets depending on how well you do, and then exchange these for items of value, like XBoxes. Kids are allowed to play these games, so they can't legally be considered gambling, but...why not?
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jacquesm
The key is that for gambling to be gambling the element of skill has to be
less important than the element of chance.

Otherwise it is a game of skill, not of chance.

So, lottery -> 0 skill -> game of chance

As soon as you get above a certain threshold of being able to influence the
outcome of the game it is considered a game of skill.

good article here, apologies for the ad (just click 'skip'):

<http://www.phoneplusmag.com/articles/361FEAT4.html>

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AmericanOP
I'm imagining a really hard arcade game which costs a dollar to play, and if
you win, you get a million dollars and the game can never be played again by
anybody. The business makes money from players as they try to up their skill,
and nets everything at the end minus the reward.

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jacquesm
Go try it !!

Who knows, you just may have found a loophole. And if not I'll come visiting,
promise ;).

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anateus
In addition to the skill/change thing, there's something I've been told by a
Linden Labs employee (when they closed the casinos in Second Life) is that
there's a specific provision for "game tokens" versus real money. That is, as
long as all you can earn from gambling is tokens the government doesn't really
care. Casino chips, however, are basically proxies for money and thus cannot
be considered game tokens.

