| |
BGonline.org Forums
Neil Kazaross issue = Backgammon is a sport
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Neil Kazaross issue = Backgammon is a sport (Stick)
Date: Tuesday, 2 February 2010, at 3:34 a.m.
Stick wrote:
Gambling to me is defined as the first entry in the dictionary: to play at any game of chance for money or other stakes.
Yes. A friend of mine who made an extensive legal survey of the different definitions of gambling in various states of the U.S. said that in the majority of cases, gambling could be boiled down to three elements: (1) consideration in; (2) an element of chance; (3) consideration out. Theoretically, if a game is a game of pure skill and involves no chance, then it's not gambling.
The trouble in practice, though, is that there's no sharp dichotomy between games of skill and games of chance. Even in chess, where there's no element of chance in the definition of the game itself, is subject to chance elements if you want to get into a legal quibble about it. The player might be feeling ill on any particular day or might suffer a random mental lapse of concentration. Or he might just happen to play the variation that the opponent has a prepared refutation of.
It's possible to remove all skill from a game and make it a game of pure chance. But it's not really possible to remove all chance from a game and make it a game of pure skill, because a test of skill must, almost by definition, have some unpredictable or uncontrolled element in it. So the person who wants to argue that some wagering game is gambling can always make some case. It's just that that case becomes less and less plausible as the skill factor becomes more and more dominant.
| |
BGonline.org Forums is maintained by Stick with WebBBS 5.12.