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BGonline.org Forums
Bad news from Belgium
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: Bad news from Belgium (Rich Munitz)
Date: Friday, 8 October 2010, at 4:23 p.m.
generous benefactor to come forward and fund a court case in order to establish legal precedent that backgammon is a skill game.
Won't happen. I don't mean the part about a generous benefactor. I mean the part of proving that backgammon is a game of skill -- entirely a game of skill. There's no getting around the fact that backgammon uses dice. Dice introduce an element of randomness, variability, chance, luck. It's not a game in which chance has no prominent role in the same sense that chance has no prominent role in a game lke chess. In backgammon skill and chance combine to determine who wins and who loses.
It can be argued that backgammon requires great skill to play well. It can be argued that certain conditions of play (which I won't detail but will call "tournament backgammon") both greatly decrease the element of luck and decrease the resemblance to games of chance. It can be argued that backgammon is a combination (of skill and luck) game in which skill predominates. It can be argued that tournament backgammon bears a great resemblance to tournament bridge, which has a similar element of randomness, variability, and chance, and in which understanding and utilization of probabilities are elements of skill integral to that game's generally (but not universally) recognized standing as a game of skill.
But the bottom line is that it cannot be proven that backgammon is a luck-free game. Which means that it is entirely a political decision whether authorities choose to regulate (or not) backgammon, and which of a variety of regulatory schemes available to the authorities that regulate games of skill, games of chance, and games that combine skill and chance, are applied to backgammon.
I am very sorry to hear that Belgian gaming authorities have classified backgammon as (apparently) a forbidden game of chance. Readers of this forum are probably not aware that tournament backgammon nearly came to an end in Denmark this year. Yes, Denmark, where a national federation has guided backgammon for decades, and where backgammon has been officially recognized as a "mind sport," making the backgammon federation (along with the federations of many athletic sports and fellow mind sports chess and bridge) eligible for government subsidies paid for (I believe) out of the profits of the state's monopoly on domestic lottery and sports betting wagering.
The threat was a March 2010 multipartisan legislative proposal intended to improve and modernize Denmark's gaming laws. The problem was that unlike chess and tournament bridge, which were never intended to be subjected to the proposed revisions, backgammon was classified as a "combination hazard game," and faced two unpalatable prospects: outright illegalization, or subjection to onerous restrictions with regard to venue, participation, entry fees, prize pools, licensing, and other regulations which would have made it impossible for the Danish federation to continue running tournaments as it has been doing so well for so many years.
Only after vigorous participation by the Danish backgammon federation in the legislative review process, in the form of letters to and meetings with the government tax ministry whose influential commentary on the proposal guided the finalization of the proposed legislation, was a compromise reached that saved tournament backgammon in Denmark. The tax ministry proposed that "tournament" backgammon be specifically exempted in the language of the final bill. The ministry's proposal was accepted, and the bill is now law after passing by unanimous vote in the Danish parliament. However, in making this concession, the tax ministry reiterated its position that other (non-tournament) forms of backgammon (specifically, forms in which the amount of the wager can rise in the course of a game), very much would be subject to the legislation and therefore prohibited unless permission to hold such games -- as with other combination games and games of chance regulated by the legislation -- was sought and granted, insofar as the final legislation might allow that possibility.
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