In fact, it would be against the law of almost every country in the world. The only way to operate a legal on-line casino is to have a license from the local government. Which is expensive and usually has many restrictions, none of which SecondLife would be in compliance with. Anyone who thinks this is a purely USA based issue doesn’t really know much about the gambling industry.

For everyone else who does like gambling, or sees nothing particularly wrong with it, and is a US citizen, this seems like good advice.

Really then why did they give casino owners zero time to sort there land out the paying of tiers etc. If they knew of this months ago surely the right way of doing things is to give notice anywhere in the world if no policy has been broken and fees etc paid up to date. It just goes to show that Linden Lab really is Mickey Mouse !!

San Francisco’s Law on gambling…. duh. It wasn’t LL’s choice.

However, I always thought of every casino as a scam and every casino owner a scammer.

Don’t let the proverbial door hit your virtual ass on the way out.

Other than that…wtf this is waaay too good to be a herald article.

Considering most of SL gambling is slot machines, I say good riddance!! Video Poker’s a joke and so are most of the games in SL. You think those things are ACTUALLY generating random numbers? No. I’m sure there are some honest scripters making honest machines but in a gaming industry that’s all about earning money while giving the player the illusion of a possibility to win it’s too easy to rig the system. Has no one here seen the movie Casino?? Come on, addicts!!

I don’t have a problem with RL gambling with card games, though. Those are harder to fake (but still possible obviously).

But if you want to give away your money to feel like you could make some money then go for it. I play a similar game…it’s called SL.

Not in the Netherlands, unless you limit the number of visitors to just friends and colleagues. It’s funny but these last months playing Poker has become extremely popular here. So popular that losers have started to complain very loudly about the amount of money they’ve lost. Then again, those amounts start to become ridiculously high. Result? Many people with large debts because they played and lost.

You might not realize it but outside the USA, gambling might be even more limited than you think. In the Netherlands there’s Holland Casino which is the only company as far as I know which can legally have casino’s here. There are plenty of slot machines in bars and other locations, though. But even those are under very strict control. Organizing any tournament with a reasonable amount of price money (Say, a few hundreds of Euros) will require a proper license and of course there will be taxes too on the price money.

And it’s funny but technically I could visit some foreign gambling site and gamble all my money away, then contact my credit card company and demand a refund of all my money since online gambling is illegal in the Netherlands and thus none of my money can be given to some organization that violates the law. I would of course also end up in a legal dispute myself, though. Not wanting to try and lose a lot of money this way.

Quote: Casino are one of them, abusing people whom has lower IQ.

Some, yes. The biggest problem here are things like slot machines where things are completely random. They eat up just small amounts of cash every time but you also end so close to winning that you just try and try over and over again. Sometimes you even win a bit thus you just continue to gamble away your latest winnings again. It’s not people with low IQ’s whom are abused. It’s greedy people who are abused. And to be honest, I think losing at gambling is a fitting punishment for greedy persons…

Quote: I’m sure people with high IQ can count cards in their head.

I know I can. But it’s no use when you’re playing electronic card games or when the deck gets reshuffled after every game.

Quote: Ever heard why Las Vegas was also known as “Sin City”?

City of Greed, right? People go there for the money because without all the gambling it’s nothing more than a desert.
True, the casino’s in Vegas earn so much that they can afford giving away rooms and free drinks to visitors. As long as people will gamble there. And you could wonder why casino’s even manage to make a decent profit if all they do is pay out as much as they receive themselves.
Then again, it seems to me that they’re not earning money on just the gambling. They’re a bit like banks. Places where a high volume of cash trades hands. Millions of little transactions with possibly even smaller transaction fees. Like a bank, casino’s make money through all those little transactions. And I know, it sounds unbelievable but it’s not. Casino’s are like banks, except that the money they keep isn’t linked to a specific bank account. They just move it around from one person to the next. And with every move, they earn a little. These are micro-payments but if you have enough micro-payments…
So I do believe that respectable casino’s will keep all games fair. There will of course always be exceptions, though.

But what is the difference between regular casino’s and online/SL casino’s? Well, in Second Life the transactions are even smaller and the methods to earn money by investments or interest is even more limited. There are no banks in SL yet where you can deposit your cash for later. It’s Linden Labs themselves where you can add credits to your account and perhaps reserve large amounts of cash for later. So I think that there will be people in SL who will take advantage of the greed of others by changing the odds a bit.
And I think that the same problem applies to online gambling. There will be casino’s that make sure people have a fair chance but it’s so easy to set up a webpage dedicated to gambling online. But unlike a real casino with real cards and chips and whatever, all electronic gambling games can have the weirdest odds and most will favor their owner.

Question remains: what is the biggest economic boost in Second Life? Gambling is big, but not the biggest, I think. Prostitution and porn are high too but still don’t think they’re the biggest. Generic shops can make a decent living if they sell enough stuff but the problem with shops is that you need lots and lots of new visitors all the time. Because once people have bought what they need, they’re probably not going to buy a lot more.
No the biggest economic boost in SL are still the custom jobs, where residents are asked to build something specific for another user, often for fairly large amounts too. Comparable to what you would earn with any decent regular job. So what we need are people who build and people who want something being build for them. And there are plenty of both in SL. They are the main economic powers. So the disappearance of gambling and even porn might cause a little dent, it will not hurt the economy a lot in the long run.

I agree with the article and this cannot be about LL cleaning up their image. Why would they clean up gambling before sex industry. It doesn’t make sense.

Yeah…. stay out and build a land for LL to be apart from any country’s ground law.

Seriously… get over it and get a real job.
(you always can make a casino in your own home)

“We make a great vote of conscience, because there’s no chance of us actually winning!”
And not forget to mention that there’s no real chance of actually winning a casino if they were legal at all, hardly.

The law was created not because they wanted to control you but wanted to control a form of society which should have been in the first place. Founding Fathers of USA wanted to get away from greedy controlling idiot whom lack of manner for other people, no matter how poor they were, King George so badly. To live in a equal manner society. Think casinos are being fair with your money? If you want to be abused, go live outside of USA. I’m sure you’ll find a big difference.

Whenever I hear people chanting “freedom”, all I can think is “anarchy”. When it come to anarchy, how do you trust other people from abusing you? from killing you? from stealing stuff during your sleep? from raping you with a broken condom? All that when they have their rights to do it to you?

Screw freedom, human without respects are hidden disease to all society.
Such a shame that we still have some of those people in USA.

Casino are one of them, abusing people whom has lower IQ. Ask yourself… How often does a person with higher IQ ever lose at Casino?
I’m sure people with high IQ can count cards in their head. They’d win, but Casino don’t allows card counters… ever wonder why they don’t want you to use your own brain to win? Cause they want you to lose money to them no matter how good you should be. Go count how many people walked into Casino to play and count how many ever win. Go ahead guess how Casino are paying for their new building, which easily built in a month or 3. With bunch of lighting crap all over it, the power bill would be so damn thick that you can’t imagine how you could’ve used it all up in your own home.

Ever heard why Las Vegas was also known as “Sin City”? If it was the Churches said that… then where are the gothic, paganus, satan’s whores, heathen folks, wicca people? So pretty damn sure you won’t find them in Casino. Ahh hell… Church has nothing to do with it… Bright people called them Sin city because they knew it’s all about stealing your poor hard earned money with pathetic odds to win.

Sure… they would say “we’re not stealing if they are paying us”…. no but they sure know how to work with human’s addiction and brainwashing color lights. Bunch of poor strippers performers, so busy spinning their tats to get your damn attention. Bunch of open bars where you can wash your brain down with alcohol so you can be so dumb to pay even more money out of your pocket. Never knew what people are laughing about? I’m sure it wasn’t because someone told a good knock knock jokes, they were laughing at you, doing in their bidding.

Don’t be an idiot. Casino is not your home.