Ms [redacted]’s poker roadtrip

Do players have the right to gamble without state scrutiny or are moves towards monitoring their spending and habits in their own interests, asks SBC Americas Editor

JESSICA WELMAN.

Once a week I make the trek to Cincinnati to play poker. I grab a chunk of my bankroll, a coconut milk latte, and hit the road. Sometimes I stay only long enough to play the morning tournament. Other times, I don’t leave the room for 12 hours playing a tournament, cash, and then another tournament. Sometimes I win a grand and other times I leave down several hundred dollars.

The only thing that remains constant is that the only person who truly knows exactly how much I am up or down is me.

I’ve never really interrogated this fact until Department of Trust’s Charles Cohen posed this question to an audience at the UNLV Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking:

Do we have the right to gamble anonymously?

In the realm of online gambling, we seem to have collectively decided the answer to that is no. Operators need to know exactly who you are and you have to prove it. Moreover, operators are beholden to track exactly how much you are spending, winning, and losing.

There is no rounding to the dollar and, in a growing number of jurisdictions, there are regulations in place about these operators notifying you when you hit certain spending thresholds.

If the buzz around cashless payments is correct, this version of gambling is headed to the brick and mortar space. But given how often in the past casinos have trumpeted a switch to cashless and how little it has taken hold, are customers really clamouring for that?

In the United States at least, customers are still keen to deal in physical cash. While it is admittedly a pain and can result in some hefty ATM fees, the anonymity has enough value to be worth it, particularly come tax season. Unless you hit a big jackpot and trigger a W2-G, most casual gamblers are happy to call their wins and losses a wash and leave Uncle Sam out of it.

However, in a cashless world, taxes would inevitably become a larger part of the equation. Right now, casinos can provide players win/loss statements but any funds that aren’t attached to a player’s card can’t be accounted for at the end of the day. With exact calculations, those that do end up winners for the year would have a more difficult time leaving those winnings off their taxes.

The argument in favour of cashless inevitably invokes responsible gambling as well. The suggestion is that people will be more aware of their losses if they are tracked to the penny. With the accountability of tracking too, players might not be able to easily hide when they have a bad night.

Here’s where I will argue that requiring cash in order to gamble in casinos has its responsible gambling benefits too. Certainly there are some who get lines of credit from a credit card at a terrible interest rate, but for many, it is a means of ensuring that you are not gambling with money you do not have. Moreover, with daily ATM limits, it makes it harder to drain your bank account.

I could be defending the cash approach because it is what I am used to though. Perhaps those younger than me will demand the ability to use Apple Pay at the blackjack tables.

If that day comes, I will think about Cohen’s question. As much as I am not interested in taking my casino experience cashless, I don’t know if I can defend that I have a right to pay with cash.

Regulators are certainly moving towards tracking how much people spend and you simply can’t do that and remain anonymous. On the flip side though, lawmakers are realising the consequences that come with tracking someone’s every move on the internet and have introduced measures like GDPR to protect consumers.

These efforts ensure that online companies can’t mobilise and monetise your data, but if the push to track you comes from a mindset that you need to be protected from yourself, will there be the same amount of pushback?

In the US, I think the fierce sense of independence instilled in our citizenry will keep us wary enough of Big Brother, at least for now. But as the online and real worlds continue to blur and intermingle, younger generations may not defend their right to be off the grid so ardently. They may revel in it. And I suppose that, well… that’s their right.