Non-Profit Casino

You could have a great night in which you win hundreds or thousands of dollars, but even if you lose, they know that your losses are helping to dramatically better the world. 

A cynic reads this as "you could have a great night in which you deprive a few hundred people of malaria nets, but at least in the long run they and also random unrelated and typically obnoxious corporations might stand to benefit from the gambling addiction this has instilled in you....". Possibly the first part of the proposition is slightly less icky if the house is simply taking a rake from a competitors in a game of skill, but still.

Maybe I just know too many people broken by gambling.

Hi Brad,

There is already Great.com, "the world’s first casino affiliate that donates 100% of its profits to charity", which was started by Erik Bergman. Founders Pledge has a profile on Eric, and this interview also seems relevant.

Re #1 - the customers in OPs contemplation would have already committed the funds to be donated and prospective wins would inure to the benefit of charities. So it isn't clear to me that the same typical harm applies (if you buy the premise that gamblers are net harmed by gambling). There wouldn't be the circumstance where the gambler feels they need to win it back - because they've already lost the money when they committed it to the DAF.

Re #2 - this could produce a good experience for customers - donating money to charities while playing games. And with how OP set it up, they know what they are losing (unlike with a typical casino there's that hope of winning it big).

Re #3 - for the reasons discussed above, the predatory and deceptive implications are less significant here. Unlike when someone takes money to a slot machine in a typical casino, when they put the money in the DAF they no longer have a chance of "getting it back"

Re #4 - yeah there might be some bad pr. But if people liked this and substituted it for normal gambling, it probably would be less morally problematic for the reasons discussed above.

Re #5 - I'm not really sure that this business is as morally corrosive as you suggest... It's potentially disadvantaging the gambler's preferred charity to the casino's, but not by much, and not without the gambler's knowledge.

Re #6 - the gamblers could choose the charities that are the beneficiaries of their DAF. And I don't know that enjoying gambling means that you wouldn't like to see kids saved from malaria and such.

I think your criticisms would better apply to a straight Profit for Good casino (normal casino with charities as shareholder). The concerns you bring up are some reasons I think a PFG casino, though an interesting idea, would not be a place I'd be looking to do as an early, strategic PFG (also big capital requirements).

OP's proposal is much more wholesome and actually addresses a lot more of the ethical concerns. I just think people may not be interested in gambling as much if there was not the prospect of winning money for themselves.

At least in the US, charity bingo, raffles, etc. are a fairly common thing in some segments of society. I don't think these are generally seen as controversial or problematic, although I also get the impression that they don't raise huge amounts of money per individual event. So I don't think all of the downsides you describe are inherent to the charity-gambling mashup. Whether there is some middle path that brings in significantly more money than bingo at a VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) post without bringing in the pathologies of for-profit gambling is an interesting question. My guess is that the relatively low stakes and occasional nature of extant charity bingo & raffles go a long way to explaining why those efforts seem unobjectionable.

I appreciate your take @Ozzie Gooen. 

I agree that casinos are an evil business, and I would be extremely wary of making people worse off in a hope to "make it up" by charitable contributions. 

 @Brad West🔸 have already answered point by point, so I'll just add that I believe it's better to think of my proposal as a charity, that also provides games to it's customers, rather than casino that donates it's profits. 

I'd argue that regular casinos are net positive for people without a gambling addiction, who treat is as an evening entertainment with an almost guaranteed loss. The industry preys on people who lost more then they could afford and are trying to get even, and it is not possible case. 

I struggle to imagine someone, who would donate more to their DAF that they feel comfortable with because they felt devastated that money went to the charity of not their choice. 

Thanks for your proposal. I have actually thought a Profit for Good casino would be a good idea (high capital requirements, but I think it could provide a  competitive edge in the Vegas strip, for instance). I find your take on it pretty interesting

I think a casino that did not limit the funds that could be gambled to charitable accounts of some sort would have a much larger market than one that did. There is a lot of friction in requiring the set up of charitable accounts even for people who were interested in charitable giving and enjoyed gambling. I also think that you are going into a narrower subset of prospective clients that have these overlapping qualities. In the meantime, there are millions of people who consistently demonstrate demand for gambling at casinos.
 

I think a lot of people would feel fine about playing at the casino and winning, because they know that there are winners and losers in casinos, but the house (in the end) always wins. Winners and losers would both be participating in a process that would be helping dramatically better the world. 

Could you explain the legal advantage of your proposal vis-a-vis a normal casino either owned by a charitable foundation or being a nonprofit itself (Humanitix, for instance is a ticketing company that is structured as a nonprofit itself)? Is it that people's chips would essentially be tax-deductible (because contributing to their DAF is tax-deductible)? 

Thank you for sharing this. I was not aware of this Profit for Good casino.

TBH, this idea got me thinking. A while back, a friend got really into https://rizzy.com/ — not in a reckless way, but he loved the thrill. He told me it helped him unwind after work. If there had been a way for that money to go toward a good cause instead of just disappearing into some company's pockets, he would've jumped on it. 

Oh, cool, interesting. This is however the for-profit casino affiliate business, that donates it's commission to charity. Closer to what @Brad West🔸 described