News talk 2014-01-08: Online gambling war!

(Full-size illustration at link. Forbes credit: Steve Brodner.)

At first I thought Sheldon Adelson, Las Vegas gambling magnate and fifth richest America, might be interested in the integrity of poker. That’s what some of his earlier remarks, a few months ago, sounded like to me.

He was worried, it seemed, that poker couldn’t be adequately protected, online or offline. So, I talked it over with my colleague, Bill Handy, whom I’ve teamed with to create a system to identify all forms of poker cheating online. It’s called COPS (Caro Online Poker Solutions) and uses my own methodology. And it works.

So, we thought, hey, maybe Adelson will lead our charge to get true protection into an online poker arena that strangely seems resistant to it. But scrap that idea. Adelson is against online gambling for moral reasons, he says.

So, on one side, we now have the liberal icon, George Soros, fighting with other big names along with Ceasars to institutionalize online gaming. And we have conservative Adelson on the other side.

One word of caution here. If Soros and company prevail and you live with big-government regulations for a while, you’ll probably wish Adelson had won so you could find an illegal, offshore, online poker room that still had plenty of players.

I don’t care who wins this war. One side wants to save you from yourself (and possibly protect current investments) and the other wants to take your money and regulate your life..

If you don’t think government has any business at all controlling your gambling life, please read my explanation of how it all got started: → The true story of how government got involved in gambling. — MC