another aspect not touched on in your article is the presence of LAG. this game lags like a mofo online, and even if you and your opponent have boss internet connections the distance between you (if you are playing across international borders in particular) nullifies the ‘skill’ involved. tight, cautious contests are usually settled by a long ball played through a patch of lag, in which you or your opponent manages to break one-on-one with the keeper. this is incredibly frustrating, and when you are aware that this can happen at any time the thought of putting money on a game becomes infinitely less appealing.

the actual layout reminds me a lot of those online poker rooms, and so i don’t see why it is above regulation. as i think someone may have commented, it requires a significant investment of time for a player to amass any sort of winnings, and i can’t imagine that anyone other than Virgin is making a profit from this.

Bondles: Great point, that’s something I didn’t catch.

Though it’s possible that would actually make it less, to my mind. The way Virgin Gaming deals out ‘winnings’ includes your own initial loss. So, say you bet $4. The other player bets $4. You immediately lose that $4 to the house, and there is a $7.04 ‘jackpot’ (minus the 12% take) up for the taking.

So in the end you win $7.04 by Virgin Gaming’s logic, but your opponent has only lost $4.

So that $23 million figure could actually be simply the amount gambled in total, minus Virgin Gaming’s 12%. Which would make the total amount lost a bit more than half that, at something like $13 million.

Poker machines are also represented as gaming machines and are located within games rooms of clubs and pubs right across Australia. Up to a point, I agree that it could, at a stretch, pass as a game. A person who occasionally plays a poker machine with 20 dollars while simultaneously downing a beer and/or having a chat with a friend may well be playing a game.

Is it still a game when, after 5 hours and a week’s pay, the last available credit is swallowed by the machine and the punter is reluctantly left with nothing other to do than to go home with empty pockets? I think not. It is gambling.

The same analysis applies to on-line games. When the losses mount and it is no longer a game, it is gambling.

That also means twenty-three million dollars has been lost by players.

Actually, with Virgin’s absurd 12% rake, that’s nearly $26 million lost by players – the balance going to Virgin.

I’ll note that this is not a new thing at all. The grandaddy of competitive collectible card games, Magic the Gathering, has an online client that’s been running for over a decade with real money entry fees and prize payouts that can, without too much difficulty, be converted back into money. The house’s take varies between 25% and (notionally) nothing depending on the particular event, and there’s a range of options from large multi-person multi-round tournaments that can have hundreds of players with very large prize pools to heads up single game “queues” with an entry fee of (effectively) $2 and a payout to the winner of $4 (retail, actual value is more like $3.5).

I’m a massive FIFA player and so are a lot of my friends but I had no idea you could bet on games. While this definitely isn’t ideal I don’t believe it is a major problem… yet.

The payout is limited to 12% less than 1:1. Your chances are limited to your own skill. The stakes are limited to your ability to find someone willing to play at that price. You are only able to bet on one game at a time.

I just can’t see anyone – even a seriously addicted gambler – losing a great deal of money on this. There is little motivation to participate in a game where you have a low chance of winning because it has no effect on the payout.

Due to the limitation of one game per 12 minutes, any players wanting to hustle by working with someone else to drop their win ratio would find their time better spent elsewhere. If the stakes of previous games are tracked along with win-loss, hustling would only be possible with the newest and most foolish of players.

The only potential problem I can see is in this being an introduction to gambling for those that can’t make the distinction between a game of skill and a game of luck and head off into luck territory. If this game ends up being someone’s poison, they’re lucky.

To a degree it saddens me, as a gamer, that this is a reality. But as an occasional observer of reality it seems a logical progression of the medium.

Being aware of the Starcraft phenomenon in Asia, I googled “betting on stracraft.” Certainly an eye opener.

Read here if you wan’t to learn a little about a major match fixing scandal involving professional gamers and illegal gamblers.

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2010/04/134_64247.html

There are a lot of interesting and troubling aspects here which will take me time to digest and I echo previous comments by saying thankyou for this story.