As if gambling weren’t easy enough

Right now, as the situation stands, if you want to have a gamble in Las Vegas on the slot machines you are going to have to use money, coins, cold hard cash. Things could however have been different but for the fact that this week the Nevada Gaming Commission blocked a plan to equip slot machines with the ability to accept debit cards. State Legislature in 1995 saw to it that credit and debit cards could not be used to gamble. Quite right too. I love the feeling of watching my money being exchanged for chips or tokens and then I just don’t feel so bad when I watch all my tokens disappear inside a twelve foot novelty sized slot machine.

I feel that the gaming commission is acting on moral grounds here and feeding money directly from your account to a slot machine can only be a bad thing, can only make gambling that much easier, that much more easily addictive. Major casinos haven’t been pushing for credit card access for a number of reasons. For one, there are enough ATMs in casinos anyway and secondly, most credit or debit cards will only let you spend $1000 a day anyway. If you think about it and you were serious about gambling, you could save up and have way more than $1000 in ready to spend cash for a trip to your nearest casino. And when you run out? Just dash off to an ATM. But remember, the most you can usually draw out is that $1000. Whilst at the ATM please observe the Nevada Council on Problem Gambling advertisement for their education and treatment referral centre. If, when drawing out your money, you think that these notices are aimed at you then please stop.


I guess that credit card gambling would only be a problem to anyone who had unlimited credit on any one card. Here are people who could stick a card in a machine and just keep going. But I’m not going to waste time worrying about gamblers with unlimited credit.


It is strange that it should cause any debate when you consider that so many people are betting online using credit cards to do so in the first place. Online gambling, whether it be through online casinos or online bookmakers is all about making betting that much easier. The question is: How easy do we want to make it? And how much does it really matter if we can use plastic to bet? The immediate knee jerk reaction seems to be that taking money straight from anyone’s bank account and feeding it to a slot machine is wrong. Is it really? One way or another your money gets into the slots. It doesn’t really matter if you can use your plastic to gamble but for now, when you run out of cash, you’ll have to go to an ATM and keep drawing out more.