Starting this year, popular family entertainment restaurant chain Dave & Buster’s is offering its customers (who are 18 years old or older) the opportunity to place “friendly bets” on various games through the company’s app.
Has this ever happened to you? While you were at Dave & Buster’s eating pita bread and drinking overpriced alcohol, your friend suggested that they could set a new record in skeeball. You laugh and respond with a playful “Oh, I bet $20 you can’t do that!” and then they scoff and try anyway. But they fail and you realize that you could have made some money if you had stopped to bet on that interaction. Don’t worry, because you’ll soon be able to do just that at your local Dave & Buster’s restaurant.
On April 30, as reported by NBC, Dave & Buster’s announced its plans to soon offer its five million loyalty members the ability to place bets on its various games through the company’s app. The entertainment chain, which has over 200 locations in North America, will add betting functionality to its loyalty app in the next few months. It is a partnership with Lucra –a gambling software company– to push its new friendly betting system.
The idea is that while you’re at Dave & Buster’s, you and your friends can place bets on how well you’ll do at various games. The app manages all of these bets and payouts. Now, if I bet $5 that my friend will fail at an arcade game, most people would consider that gambling. However, Lucra’s chief operating officer disagrees.
Accordingly NBCAccording to Lucra, “games of skill” are not subject to the same rules and regulations as slot machines or other types of gambling. The company is careful not to use specific terms like “bet” or “bet” when talking about its software and its collaboration with providers like Dave & Buster.
“We use competitions or challenges with real money,” Madding said NBC.
Call it what you will, this news is just another example of how gambling is increasingly invading our lives. At this point, it may take no more than an hour for a gambling ad to appear in an app, website, TV channel or email. We saw gambling affect online gaming and streaming, to. And as more and more states legalize it online sports betting, It’s likely that more places will jump on the bandwagon and give adults the opportunity to bet on anything. I can’t wait for my grocery store to let me enter “real money contests” at checkout while I estimate the total price.
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