The problem with this law (and with MANY similar regulations and restrictions on personal activity) is that it is very selectively enforced.
You can almost certainly do whatever you want among close friends in private—I know of many $10K or bigger prop bets made in California cardrooms, with no repercussions. I suspect if a politician or famous person who a prosecutor didn’t like did it, or if a set of wagers became too public to ignore, or if it were scaled up on a website, it’d be investigated and have consequences.
Taxes, likewise. Unless you file as a professional gambler and keep very detailed records, any winning bet is taxable as income, and losing bets are not deductible at all. This vig makes it infeasible to implement at scale, even if it were legal.
I think this applies to the suggested workaround of non-monetary stakes as well. The government is VERY good at assigning legal quantities to anything, when they feel like it. If you were being prosecuted, I guarantee they’d put a dollar value on your professional accounting services that you wagered.
The best answer is to leave the jurisdiction that’s restricting your freedoms in this way, or to stay under the radar and hope you don’t get caught.
The problem with this law (and with MANY similar regulations and restrictions on personal activity) is that it is very selectively enforced.
You can almost certainly do whatever you want among close friends in private—I know of many $10K or bigger prop bets made in California cardrooms, with no repercussions. I suspect if a politician or famous person who a prosecutor didn’t like did it, or if a set of wagers became too public to ignore, or if it were scaled up on a website, it’d be investigated and have consequences.
Taxes, likewise. Unless you file as a professional gambler and keep very detailed records, any winning bet is taxable as income, and losing bets are not deductible at all. This vig makes it infeasible to implement at scale, even if it were legal.
I think this applies to the suggested workaround of non-monetary stakes as well. The government is VERY good at assigning legal quantities to anything, when they feel like it. If you were being prosecuted, I guarantee they’d put a dollar value on your professional accounting services that you wagered.
The best answer is to leave the jurisdiction that’s restricting your freedoms in this way, or to stay under the radar and hope you don’t get caught.