Regulatory Differences in Online Casinos

How Is the Industry Changing?

Is there a huge difference in the regulation of licensed online casinos within the United States, or more to the point, in player treatment compared to offshore ones? Brandon James doesn’t think that there is a huge difference, and in this study, compares in-state online casinos to those from out of the country to highlight what few differences there are.

Introduction

One of the major changes in the United States, in recent years, is that several different states have legalized online gambling of one form or another.

New Jersey was the first state to do so when it was still up for debate whether or not a state could actually do that. One of the problems with the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was that it gave several people the impression that gambling online was totally illegal. Not only was that NOT true, but it wasn’t even close to what the UIGEA did.

The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act did quite a few things, but the biggest part of it was actually a fairly specific type of enforcement. Essentially, it said that United States based financial institutions could not knowingly engage in financial transactions with offshore Internet casinos (or any at all, really) IF such online gambling were illegal in that state or illegal for the resident of that state.

From that, people once had a long-standing impression that online gambling was totally illegal in the United States, even for players, which was never close to being true. In fact, I did a comprehensive study of all of the states in the country for Wizard of Odds (that I am not going to link to as it seriously needs updated) and found that a great many states did not make gambling online illegal for mere players, and even if they did, the UIGEA would only impact them as far as their financial institutions maybe refusing to engage in the financial transactions.

Of course, the vast majority of states as of just a decade (or less) ago, at the time, had online gambling either expressly illegal within the boundaries of the state, or at least, illegal by implication by way of a general prohibition against, “Unlawful Gambling,” which would usually be defined as any form of gambling that was not specifically regulated and overseen by the state.

When it comes to whether or not states had any laws that were targeted at individual players, or still do, the answer is: it depends. Some states have it written into their, “Unlawful Gambling,” laws that, essentially, only operators or those who stand to profit (meaning, the casinos or bookies themselves) could face any legal consequences as a result of Unlawful Gambling taking place. In other words, as long as you are just a customer, you’ll always be, presumably, fine in those states absent some sort of highly unusual local ordinance to the contrary.

There are a pretty surprising number of states that have it codified that mere players can face criminal consequences (in theory) with most of them being the equivalent of it being a petty offense or low-grade misdemeanor that would typically (again, theoretically) result in a small fine. However, these states have little to no interest in actually enforcing that law, and even if they did, would have little reason to suspect players anyway and it would also be difficult (read: near impossible) to establish the probable cause that they would need to get a search warrant when it comes to online gambling.

Essentially, there would have to be a law in the

that would have anything to do with criminally potentially penalizing mere players. Even where such laws do exist, we can find no instance of them having ever been enforced for someone who was just playing from home on an offshore website. The second thing that would have to happen is that the Government would have to establish probable cause; the only way we figure that could be done is if an online gambling operation got busted on the operator side and you happened to be in their records when the records were seized.

Offshore Operators

Of course, that’s generally not going to happen when it comes to offshore operators because the United States Government does not have the jurisdiction to actually do anything to them. The only thing that the United States Government can actually do to offshore operators who are not in United States Government jurisdiction is arrest them if they enter the United States—which they probably know not to do. Even then, they probably wouldn’t have their company give up its records and, even if they did, the United States Government does not itself have the jurisdiction to go after players within U.S. States—the individual states would have to do it and it would not be their investigation anyway.

As far as the individual states are concerned, they have no legal reach to do anything to offshore operators because they have no legal jurisdiction over them. Once again, such operators (or those foolish enough to operate an illegal online casino from the state) could be arrested if they were to enter that state, but again, that’s not going to do anything to the players who are just customers of the casino, even if they are found out in the first place.

Essentially, the only way that we would imagine most players could face any consequences is perhaps if they were engaged in, “Unlawful Gambling,” in a public setting in one of the states that prohibits a person from even being a player. Alternatively, we guess that someone could technically call and report a person for playing online, but we think that it’s highly unlikely that the police would actually care to do anything about that.

Another thing that should be mentioned is that knowingly is a very important word when it comes to the United States financial institutions. It is for that reason that, historically, offshore online casinos will do something to disguise the nature of the transaction, such as handle the deposits via a third-party payment processing intermediary that will make it appear to be a transaction unrelated to gambling. For instance, they might make it look like something innocuous, like the sale of some books, coffee or something goofy like a woodworking kit.

It should also be mentioned that, if a player has access to financial institutions outside of United States banks, then none of that even matters. At that point, it just becomes a question of the policies of that particular institution or the laws concerning the financial transactions with online gambling from wherever they happen to be regulated.

It’s also for that reason that, when players would request to be paid their winnings in the form of a check, the online casino’s name will usually not appear anywhere on that check. Typically, it will look like the name of some generic company. In the case of the United States, the check will often be cut from some Canada-based bank account, at least, in past years.

How that turned into the notion that online gambling is illegal in the entire United States, I have no idea, but that notion was never correct.

Sports Betting Legality Issues

With that, we will turn our attention to sports betting. Illegal sports betting was something that was illegal across most of the United States (exception to Nevada and a couple of ‘Sports Lotteries,’ which are really just parlay pools in a state or two) and enforcement efforts would be conducted by states AND the U.S. Government that would frequently target players as well as operators…though they were mostly concerned with the operators.

The reason for this law was a Federal Legislation known as the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, whose entire purpose was to keep gambling from influencing sporting events. Essentially, the Federal Government (for reasons that I will never understand) was concerned about the integrity of the sporting events (that they don’t even regulate as it is up to various leagues) and wanted to ensure that no bookmaking was being done such that athletes, coaches, etc…would be placing money on games themselves or would work in concert with other bettors to, “Shave points,” or throw games outright.

While that may seem like a highly unusual thing to have happen, it’s actually something that has occurred throughout the history of this country. The most well-known historical example is that of the 1919 Chicago White Sox who, in an incident that is now called, “The Black Sox Scandal,” would throw the World Series in the hopes of being paid off by a group of wealthy sports bettors in a scandal with Arnold Rothstein as its kingpin. There’s actually an excellent movie about this scandal called Eight Men Out, and is based on a documentary non-fiction book with the same title, so we would recommend watching that movie or reading that book. The second link is to a short, but solid, book review done by Stadium Journey.

Of course, trying to influence the outcome of the World Series was a pretty brazen act, so much so, in fact, that Rothstein almost didn’t get on board with it as he was sure that they would be caught out.

 Other gambling scandals in major professional sports throughout the years would include Pete Rose being banned forever from Major League Baseball when he placed sports bets as the manager of the Cincinnati Reds in the 1980’s. His main defense was that he never bet against his own team, but that’s not really that solid of a defense when you consider that he might base his relief and starting pitching decisions around trying to win a particular game. Obviously, it would have still been a pretty major scandal even if he had never bet on games involving his own team, but at least he would have had a defensible position that nothing that he did could have influenced the outcome of his bets—which was the major problem.

As you would expect, these sorts of scandals would pervade other sports, as well. Bleacher Report published an article ranking the Top 10 NCAA College Basketball scandals of all-time, and four of them involved some sort of points-shaving scandal.

That comes as no surprise as these events would take longer to figure out than did the Black Sox Scandal. One of the aspects that makes College Basketball attractive for people who wish to engage in a points-shaving operation is that many of the games involved are not going to draw a ton of attention. As you can see if you follow the link, one such scandal involved a Northwestern team that only won five games that season, so it’s safe to say that very few people were paying attention to most of those games.

There have been more point scandals in college basketball that that, of course. I’m sure many readers here are familiar with the speeding analogy that says, “If a cop pulls you over for speeding, then chances are he didn’t catch you on the only time that you have ever sped in your entire life,” so you can take that and use it as an analogy for points-shaving scandals. For every single one that we DO know about, there are probably several that never got caught out.

Basketball is also an attractive sport for points-shaving just because of the nature of the game. With only five players per side during the games, it’s an easy sport for a single player (especially if he is a key member of the team) to have a huge influence over the game’s outcome. Additionally, it’s not unusual at all for a great player to simply have an, “Off game,” from time-to-time, so as long as his efforts to shave points are not over-the-top ridiculous, then it’s going to take awhile to put the pieces of the puzzle together if it is something that he has done frequently enough.

Much like speeding, you’ll most likely get away with it if you do it only once, unless you have a cop right behind you, of course. Please don’t take that as an invitation to speed and please do not hold me responsible if you do speed only once and get caught!

Robert Duff of Sports Betting Dime also penned a brief article about point shaving. As you can see, most of those listed in this article have to do with Men’s College Basketball, but there are a few other sports such as Football (Soccer if you’re an American, like me) and Cricket listed as sports in which major point shaving scandals have taken place.

Former Commissioner of the National Football League, Paul Tagliabue, also expressed some concern about potential points shaving in an article and video posted by Mike Florio of NBC Sports. We’re not going to link that one because we’re not actually quoting anything and NBC doesn’t need any cross-traffic help from us, but it’s easy enough to search.

In the interview, Tagliabue was concerned that, with the spread of legalized sports betting (including online betting) that the probability of points shaving—which would probably be done by a player making a crucial mistake at a critical moment—is now more likely.

Personally, I disagree with this take because Las Vegas (well, all of Nevada) has been home to sports betting for a long-time now. Another thing that has existed for a long time are phones. Phones are relevant because as long as there is legal sports betting somewhere, then you can have a person AT that somewhere to get the necessary bets down. In other words, in order for points shaving to not always have been a theoretical risk, then sports betting would have to be completely non-existent.

Besides, why would legalized and regulated sports betting make such a thing more likely? That notion makes no sense on its face as, like we saw with the Black Sox Scandal, they threw an entire World Series at a time that Sports Betting was totally illegal.

We would also suggest that Football is a sport where people could worry less about such scandals because the players are so handsomely compensated for their efforts. What could you possibly offer a player to risk his entire career when he is already making millions, tens of millions, or sometimes even hundreds of millions of dollars throughout his career!?

That’s another reason that Rothstein was able to target the Chicago Black Sox. It was a pretty widely known fact that the players were not satisfied with their salaries or the way that they were treated by team ownership. In addition to the scandal itself, they were often sometimes called the, “Black Sox,” because they were made to play in dirty uniforms as the team owner wanted to save money on laundering costs. Basically, players were frustrated with their circumstances…and the MLB was such that a team basically owned you for life as they was not really a concept of Free Agency absent a team simply choosing to release a player.

The way that it worked was that players would sign contracts of a finite duration with the teams, but even when the contract would expire, the teams themselves would still have the rights to that player. In other words, unless a team were to waive its rights or trade its rights to draw up a contract to another team, players could be forced to only having the option of going back to the team that they had already been playing for.

One of the players most frustrated by this was Eddie Cicotte, who was famous for having pioneered the knuckleball. He was also well-known for throwing a variety of other pitches (such as the spitball, the shineball and the cutter—you would actually scratch the ball so it would change directions, or, ‘Cut,’ in an unexpected way) that were either illegal at the time (but tough to prove) or legal at the time.

“Chick,” Gandill was one of the architects of the Black Sox Scandal and the first, “Inside Man,” on the team to start orchestrating the thing, but the reason that they went for him (aside from his importance to the team) is because Rothstein wanted him to get Cicotte on board with the World Series fix, as having a pitcher or two in the bag was instrumental to the plan working. Again, that’s one of the components that makes baseball a tougher game to fix…there are only a few positions in which an individual player can change the entire scope of a baseball outcome, but pitcher is certainly one of them. Outfielders, for example, might never see a ball the entire game…and even if they did…it’s unlikely to be on a close defensive type of play. Essentially, to have a major impact, they would have to drop something really easy or make a seriously errant throw deliberately.

Infielders can have more of an impact and see a lot more balls throughout the game, but again, fixing a game would often involve these guys screwing up a bunch of routine plays. Another aspect of baseball that makes it difficult is that it is REALLY difficult to screw up several routine plays, yet make it look like you are actually trying, simultaneously.

For that reason, it was important to get a pitcher or two on board as they represent one of the only positions on the field that can screw the thing up whilst making it appear as though they are giving their best effort.

This becomes quite clear when we look back at the Black Sox Scandal. There were murmurings even before the start of the World Series that some unsavory things might be afoot, which led one of the journalists for the games started making notes of all of the defensive plays that they considered suspicious—of which there were several. In fact, there were even some individual plays in the games that were pretty clearly ridiculous with multiple incomprehensible errors being made even on the same play, at times!

One of the big issues with the Black Sox Scandal, for instance, is that the gamblers were really slow about paying off the players and, in some instances, didn’t pay them off the promised amounts, if at all. For one thing, they lamented the fact that so many players came to know about it (one utility infielder for the team actually found out on accident, but had to be cut in, or he was going to rat out the whole operation), and secondly, the bettors did not make as much money as they had originally anticipated as murmurings of the fix being in caused a ton of money to come in on their opponents, the Cincinnati Reds.

With that, most intelligent young men and women who are amateur or professional athletes and are offered such ideas will immediately refuse outright. If someone is willing to stoop to bribery and game-fixing, then it’s a pretty safe bet that they’re not going to have a problem with throwing you under the bus when the time comes. They’ll also not have a problem with using what you have already done to make you essentially a beholden slave to whatever their plans are for you in future competitions. Basically, they pretty much have you for life.

With that, it made a certain kind of sense that the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act would be passed, with the underlying problem being twofold:

1.) While the intent to keep sports clean was a noble one, none of it is really any of the business of the Federal Government in the first place.

AND:

2.) As long as sports betting exists somewhere, as the Government would find out time after time, match and game fixing (as well as point shaving) remains a possibility. It doesn’t matter if the sports betting is itself legal or illegal, though the existence of legal sports betting in Las Vegas (as well as any number of offshore sports betting sites—a VERY dangerous game when it runs afoul of the Federal Government) certainly helped such plans along a great deal.

Eventually, the Federal Government would come to the conclusion that there was simply no getting rid of sports betting. It took individual states to reach that conclusion first, however, and to also want sports betting of their own as a number of states (most notably Michigan and New Jersey) would bring a lawsuit to eliminate the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act to the Supreme Court of the United States.

As Natalie briefly wrote about here, this lawsuit would prevail and the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act would be overturned which, among other things, gave states the ability to license and regulate their own sportsbook operations (including online) and made some offshore operators a little less hesitant (in some cases) about offering their services in the United States.

Many gamblers within the United States probably wondered why many offshore casino companies that offered sportsbook services elsewhere would only offer casino games in the United States, and generally, PASPA was the reason why. There’s really not a ton of concern for offshore operators when it comes to running afoul of the law of individual states, as they have very little in the way of legal reach outside of the state, and technically, none at all…but many of these entities were very hesitant when it comes to potentially pissing off the United States Government!

PASPA was overturned on a few different grounds, but probably the most important (at least, in my opinion) was the Tenth Amendment grounds upon which it was overturned. For those of you who haven’t brushed up on your U.S. Constitution reading lately, let me help you out:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

There are SOOOOOOOO MANY LAWS (in my opinion) that should be challenged on Tenth Amendment grounds, and are not, but at least PASPA was one of them.

In theory, the Tenth Amendment is as simple as it reads: if the Constitution of the United States does not put the Federal Government in control of something directly, then the delegation of the responsibility to Govern that particular thing falls upon the states. Most State Constitutions are such that jurisdiction over something not handled by themselves, or the Federal Government, falls to the counties, cities, municipalities or townships within those states.

Anyway, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act was challenged on the grounds that it was a Federal Government overreach. This was, obviously, true for a few different reasons:

1.) The Federal Government does not regulate sporting events. Even if it does in some instances and to a very limited degree, it certainly doesn’t do it by way of having those powers reserved to it by the Constitution of the United States of America.

2.) Even if sporting regulations fell in the area of, “Interstate Commerce,” which the Constitution DOES give the Federal Government jurisdiction to handle (similar to the way it handles crimes that cross state lines), the sports leagues that are interstate are already regulated by private companies, institutions or non-profit organizations and are not an affair of Government. The National Football League itself, believe it or not, is technically a non-profit organization. That’s why the NFL teams are called, “Franchises,” as they are licensed by the NFL and the rights are conferred upon them to play in the league.

With that, there’s nothing that would indicate that the Federal Government has any jurisdiction over the conduct of sports leagues, in general, much less individual sports leagues. For that reason, it was a major overstep in the sense that the Government was regulating the conduct of private institutions and organizations.

That fact notwithstanding, if there is a crime committed by someone within that organization in the scope of their conduct of activities in that organization, then it’s obviously just as illegal as it would be if they were engaged ithat crime in their capacity as a private citizen otherwise. In other words, it’s illegal to take bribes or to offer them, regardless of whether or not the Federal Government directly regulates anything about sports. In addition to bribery, there are a wide variety of other Federal-level felonious financial crimes that become involved…bribery, racketeering, money laundering, failure to report income, tortious interference with economic advantage…the list goes on.

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Before I get into any of that, however, the first thing that I will do is discuss my personal experience with two online casinos in Pennsylvania, though I have played at more.

1.) Caesars Online Casino

The Caesars Online Casino shares a name with Caesars Entertainment, who are the operators of the famed Caesars Palace properties in both Atlantic City and Las Vegas. However, it appears that they have licensed out their online casino products to various entities as I was told that the ones in Pennsylvania and New Jersey (both of which I have played) have nothing to do with one another.

I didn’t really have any problems with the service here and customer service was always responsive, but getting paid was kind of a pain in the ass. Caesars Online is one of those properties that don’t really seem to care about documents until it comes time to cash out, and when it does, will usually just leave the pending document requests sit on their website (when you login) rather than send an E-Mail that a document has been requested.

Thus, the player requests to make a withdrawal and doesn’t hear anything on it until they either log in and see the document request, or the withdrawal is denied. If the withdrawal is denied (mine wasn’t), then they will receive an E-Mail and will have to log in and find that a document has been requested, or talk to chat to determine that.

Anyway, I went through this entire process with them and was originally going to request a Paypal withdrawal, but then it became apparent that they were going to take the full 72 hours that they gave themselves to do it (as they did in New Jersey when I did request a Paypal withdrawal), so I reversed that transaction and would instead request a cage withdrawal.

The process of withdrawing at the cage was also a pain in the ass. You would think that it would be easy, especially considering that the withdrawal had been approved in advance of my stopping at Harrah’s Chester. Go in with my ID, hand it to them, give them a code and get the money…but that’s NOT how that goes down.

The first thing that I had to do was go and pick up a phone near the casino’s cage. At that point, I had to call a particular extension, whereupon I proceeded to listen to the phone ring for anywhere from 10-15 minutes. I would eventually get tired of standing there (this is right in the main casino area, so I was in the way of a bunch of passerby), but I couldn’t really walk anywhere because of the phone cord, so I stretched out and grabbed one of the chairs from the slot machines and sat there and listened to the phone ring.

Finally, someone got on the line and said that they would be down to take care of the cage withdrawal in about five minutes, but in reality, it ended up being closer to ten.

That person would eventually come down, get my ID, have me sign something and then said it would be about another ten minutes until the cash was ready. Not really wanting to play anything as I was on my way to Atlantic City, I just meandered around the property and walked by the cage until they finally signaled that they were ready to pay me.

Overall, my stop would take about an hour in total, between waiting on their phone and waiting for everything else. Some of you might be thinking that the delay had to do with the fact that it was thousands of dollars, but nope, though I was profitable, the total withdrawal was safely under a thousand bucks.

2.) PlaySugarhouse

My other experiences I will detail is with PlaySugarhouse casino, which is actually my favorite of the regulated online casinos in Pennsylvania as they have regular additional bonuses (after the sign up bonus) that are tailored to what you actually use the website to play. In addition to that, the Live Chat staff themselves are very nice and I like the software platform and choice of games.

However, my experience with them has had a few issues. The first one is that, when I first signed up for the account, I did a deposit at the cage at Rivers Pittsburgh and wanted to use their deposit bonus. Granted, in the terms, they give themselves 48 hours to actually credit the bonus funds…but who would ever expect them to take the full 48 hours? I went and talked to Live Support, who wanted me to upload a copy of my ID, which I did, but it still took the full 48 hours.

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Bonus Abuse

When it comes to, “Bonus Whoring,” and, “Bonus Abuse,” online casinos that are regulated and legalized by individual U.S. States will also crack down on that, if they think that it is going on.

One example comes from a trustworthy friend of mine who says that Caesars Online Casino (yes, them again) had offered a Sports Bonus and accused he and a friend of doing, “Offset betting,” to make sure one of them won and the other lost.

The way that offset betting works for sports bonuses is that, imagine a casino offers you a, “Risk Free Bet,” if you lose, then you will pick a game that has some sort of half point line, have two people doing the promotion and then take opposite sides of that game.

The way that it works out, and let’s say that each player is betting $500, will look like this if both have one side of a -110 line:

Winner: $500 + (500 * 100/110) = $954.55 (rounded) Cash

Loser: -$500, $500 “Risk Free Bet.”

Okay, so the way that the Risk Free bets usually work is that the player qualifies to receive the winnings on the Risk-Free bet, if his next bet is a winner, but will not get the Risk Free Bet money back itself. With this, the two players will partially offset each other again in order to guarantee profits. You can come up with a tighter possible outcome if you want to, but I’m going to have the side with the cash bet $260 on a half point offset line:

Risk Free Bet: $500

Winning First Bet: $260 ($694.55 cash remaining)

Okay, so either side can win this one. If the risk-free bets wins, then the winnings are going to be $454.55, which gets added to the $694.55 the other side still has, for a total outcome of $1,149.10, which is $149.10 in profits on a $1,000 total deposit ($500 each).

If the side playing the cash wins, then you have:

260 + (260 * 100/110) = $496.37 (Rounded)

Which gets added to the $694.55 that person already had remaining in cash and results in $1,190.92, or $190.92 in profits on $1,000 total amount deposited.

Again, you can play around with this to achieve a tighter outcome, if you want to, just use the same formulas that I used. In this instance, if you want to tighten the two possible results a little bit, then the cash side of the equation should bet a little bit less.

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It’s probably also a good idea to do it on games that are going to get a lot of action as it is, such as Monday Night Football games, at least, if you can get a half point line on the spread or the game total. Just to be extra safe, if you’re Friends on some sort of social media (such as Facebook) Unfriend/Unfollow each other and make both of your profiles as private as possible. If the online casinos, even the regulated ones, suspect that something is up…then they will probably Google (or search social media) for the players involved to see if they can establish any connection between the two.

It’s Not Risk-Free!!!

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Other Bonus Terms and Conditions

With that, we will take a look at Unibet online casino, which is an online casino in Pennsylvania where I have recently played a deposit match promotion and failed to profit. It was a pretty marginal promotion to begin with, but I wasn’t finding much new stuff in the state (or online) and my recurring offers had been kind of slow from both in-state and offshore casinos lately, so I decided to give it a try.

The Unibet promotion, as of the time of this writing, is a straightforward 100% Deposit Match promotion on $500 deposited. If you want to see the Terms and Conditions for yourself, then you can find them here:

Some of these will be quoted as I go on, but this is a very marginal promotion. As of the time fo this writing, there are two casinos in PA that are offering a 100% deposit match with only 1x playthrough, and one of them (PlaySugarhouse) even allows for Video Poker to be played to meet the playthrough requirements. If you live here or are ever in the state, then I would get on those in a serious hurry because, as long as you are happy to bet low enough amounts to, “Grind it Out,” even on the one with a 100% deposit match of $400 that is slots only, it is almost impossible to fail to profit if you pick the right games…even the slot one has a bunch of somewhat low variance options available.

Anyway, this promotion has more than a 1x playthrough requirement, unfortunately, and is the type of bonus that I will expect most in-state online casinos to be doing in the future…so you really should hop on those 1x playthrough ones while they last! The way that this Bonus worked, here are the relevant terms:

Casino New Player Offers – New players can claim a free $10 casino bonus and a 100% deposit bonus (max bonus of $500) when registering by selecting the “CASINO | $10 Free Bonus Money & 100% Deposit Bonus” when creating a new account.

The player must be opening a new account and select ““CASINO | $10 Free Bonus Money & 100% Deposit Bonus” during the registration process. Failing to select this option on the registration process, will result in the bonuses not being added to the account.

The first thing that we notice is that the player must select these options upon registering the account, or may otherwise make a deposit and forfeit his or her right to the bonus. Other promotions as this casino also involve going to a player’s own, “My Bonuses,” page and making deposits through the bonus link…which is the same thing at other online casinos, such as Wind Creek.

It’s honestly better to have to do it this way (especially if chat will give you a bonus if you accidentally forgot to click through the bonus link, though I cannot promise they will, and then you will have to do a 1x playthrough to even cash out your deposit) because some casinos will lock you into promotions that you have to specifically decline and for which the playthrough requirements and Bonus Terms are so ridiculous that you have no expectation of profit anyway.

What I am saying is that, even if players have to take a somewhat specific action, I think it is better that they should have to, “Opt into,” a bonus rather than being required to, “Opt Out,” of a bonus that they do not want.

For the 100% deposit bonus players must wager the deposit and bonus amount (the “Wagering Requirement”) 10x on casino games or 10X on the sportsbook. Sportsbook players have a wagering requirement of odds -300 or greater (i.e -200, +100). Players have 30 days to satisfy the Wagering Requirements from the day the bonus funds are awarded. Failing to do so will result in the expiration and any remaining bonus amount.

Example: If you deposit $50 using the 100% Deposit Bonus Offer, you will receive $50 in bonus money along with the $50 you deposited. You would have to wager a total amount of $100 either 10X ($1000) for casino games or 10X ($1000) for Sportsbook events.

Sportsbook bets must be wagered at odds of -300 or higher (e.g. -200, +100) to contribute towards any bonus wagering. Odds that are enhanced via either a Profit Boost or Odds Boost token will only contribute to any bonus wagering at their original price. All table games will only contribute 10% towards bonus wagering. Video Poker is considered a table game and will also contribute 10% towards bonus wagering. For example, $100 wagered on Blackjack will only contribute $10 towards your bonus wagering.

This has recently been updated and Video Poker was not stated to have a separate wagering requirement, at one point in time.

When it comes to this bonus, players who do the full deposit of $500 will essentially have to play through $10,000 in total on casino games (which basically just means slots), make $10,000 in total sports bets, or make $100,000 in total bets on either Video Poker or Table Games.

When it comes to this promotion, it would take a paytable of 99.5%, or better, on Video Poker for players to be expected to finish with a profit. They do have a few such paytables, but this is not a promotion where a player can easily, “Grind,” his way to profits. Even if there was a way to reliably grind it out, the wagering would take forever because of how low that players would have to bet. Basically, this deposit bonus with the new Video Poker addendum is not THAT much better than decent deposit bonuses at offshore casinos.

Conclusion

In short, my conclusion is that I do not think that there is much that would increase player protection when it comes to the Rules and Regulations that in-state online casinos must follow as compared to offshore casinos.