In the real world, casinos entice gamblers with free booze and discounted rooms and shows. Online, the first legal internet gambling site in the U.S. is offering Apple users a free copy of Windows 7 and the VMFusion virtualization software.
Why the largess? ?We don?t have a Mac client,? admitted Chris Derossi, CTO of Las Vegas-based?Ultimate Poker.
Internet gambling became legal in Nevada last week, and?Ultimate Poker, the first company to jump into the game, has already dealt more than 500,000 hands and held its first tournament, with a payout of $10,000.?But Mac users were left out of the Texas hold ?em draw at the nation?s first state-sanctioned online gaming site, which doesn?t support Apple?s OS X.
Derossi was the lead architect of Apple?s ?System 7? operating system in the 1990s, and he acknowledges the irony. ?Windows has a higher market share than does the Macintosh,? said the 48-year-old Derossi, a keen?poker player and co-author of?Winning at Internet Poker for Dummies. (.pdf) More than nine of 10 computers are running a Windows-based operating system.
That?s where the financial dynamics of the lucrative gaming industry come in. Rather than let potential Mac gamers slip away, Ultimate Poker is offering to?reimburse?players for the cost of emulating Windows on a Mac, until the company can ship an OS X version of its gambling software. It?s an opportunity for Apple fans to lose their shirts like everyone else.
Of course, there?s no such thing as a free lunch, no matter how many trips you take down the free casino buffet line. That?s because UltimatePoker?s ?free? software comes with a hitch. You have to gamble enough first that the company has earned the amount of?reimbursement?from you.
Ultimate Poker?s rake is about 4 percent of wagering, and includes a host of caveats. At the 4 percent level, however, a gamer would have to wage at least $5,000 to get reimbursed the maximum $200 the online gaming company promises to return with a valid VMFusion and Windows sales receipt. The site only mentions VMFusion, and not Parallels, the main and more expensive competitor in the Windows virtualization space.
?We want to do everything we can to get them to play,? said Derossi, who described himself as ?a geek through and through.?
So far, he said, not a single Mac user has taken him up for reimbursement.
Legalized online gaming was authorized in February, when Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval signed legislation he said would ?usher in the next frontier of gaming in Nevada.?
New Jersey and Delaware have also passed online gaming legislation. Those states have yet to deal their first hands, however.
The states had been bearish on online gambling until two days before Christmas in 2011, when the Justice Department?s Office of Legal Counsel said the 1961 Wire Act did not prevent them from selling lottery tickets to adults over the internet. (.pdf) That decision has been interpreted to allow online gaming, except for internet sports wagering.
?Now that the department charged with enforcing the law has limited that statute to cross-border sports bets, there is literally no federal law standing in the way of a state authorizing intra-state online games, and even entering into compacts with other states and nations to pool players,? according to I. Nelson Rose, a Whittier Law School professor and one the country?s most noted gambling scholars.
Initial gaming is just Texas hold ?em, but more games are on the way, Derossi said.
The law, at least for now, requires online gamblers to be inside the four corners of the Silver State when playing. That could change, however, if Congress steps in or if Nevada signs gaming compacts with other states.
Until then, Derossi said the site initially checks an IP address of a gambler to see if it?s in Nevada, and also verifies that it is not a known proxy or VPN.
Players must be at least a verifiable 21 years of age and have a mobile phone. Gamblers, he said, agree to enroll in a location-tracking service, so Ultimate Poker can verify one?s whereabouts via their phones when they log in.
?We can locate your phone based on the cell tower that phone is talking to,? he said. ?There?s a few other things that we are not disclosing. We don?t want to create a roadmap.?
That location-tracking feature is critical, Rose said, because gaming regulators are watching UltimatePoker like a hawk.
?Making sure,? Rose said in a telephone interview, ?that it?s really, really difficult to play if your are in another state, if not done, is probably the most certain thing that would get them into trouble.?
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Homepage Photo: Maorix / Flickr
Source: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/politics/~3/bOICUt8kgaw/
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