Starting later this year, popular family entertainment restaurant chain Dave & Busterâs will offer its customers (who are 18 years or older) the ability to place âfriendly wagersâ on various games using the companyâs app.
Has this ever happened to you? While you were at Dave & Busterâs, slamming down some flatbread and chugging overpriced booze, your friend suggested they could set a new high score in skee ball. You laugh and respond with a playful âOh Iâd bet $20 you canât do that!â and then they scoff and try anyway. But they fail, and you realize that if you had stopped to place a wager on this interaction you could have made some money. Well, donât worry, because soon, youâll be able to do just that at your local Dave & Busterâs establishment.
On April 30, as reported by NBC, Dave & Busterâs announced its plans to soon start offering its five million loyalty members an option to place bets on its various games using the companyâs app. The entertainment chain, with over 200 locations in North America, will add the wager functionality to its loyalty app in the next few months. Itâs partnering with Lucraâa gambling software companyâto power its new friendly wager system.
The idea is that while you are at Dave & Busterâs, you and your friends can place bets on how well youâll do at different games. The app will manage all of these bets and payouts. Now if I bet $5 on my friend failing at an arcade game, most people would call that gambling. However, Lucraâs chief operating officer disagrees.
According to NBC, Lucra says âskill-based gamesâ are not subject to the same rules and regulations as slot machines or other types of gambling. The company is careful to not use specific terms like âbetâ or âwagerâ when talking about its software and how it will work with places like Dave & Busterâs.
âWe use real-money contests or challenges,â Madding told NBC.
Call it whatever you want, this news is just another example of gambling being shoved into more of our lives. At this point, I canât go more than an hour without a gambling ad showing up in an app, website, TV channel, or email. Weâve seen gambling infest online gaming and streaming, too. And as more states legalize online sports betting, itâs likely that more places will jump on the bandwagon and let adults place bets on everything. I canât wait for my grocery store to start letting me participate in âreal-money contestsâ during checkout while I guess the total price.
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