March Madness starts today. Apparently, many people take the time to predict how the entire tournament will play out, in an age-old custom called "filling out a bracket." How strange! (Printable PDF here.) Anyhow, I'm told that some of these people will band together with others to form "pools," to which each participant contributes money. The person whose bracket most closely approximates the actual outcome of the tournament is declared the winner, and gets all the money that was contributed to the pool. Is this legal, you ask? Probably not. Under G.S. 14-292, "any person who . . . bets on . . . any game of chance at which any money . . . or other thing of value is bet . . . shall be guilty of a Class 2 misdemeanor." One might argue that basketball is a game of skill, not a game of chance, but that argument is unlikely to prevail under State v. Brown, 221 N.C. 301 (1942), which determined that betting on horse racing was gambling: "what is a game of skill to the participants might be only a game of chance to outsiders who bet on the result, since it is the skill of those engaged which decides the issue, and the person who lays the wager may have little information on that point." As an aside, some other jurisdictions define gambling in such a way as to exclude most NCAA pools. See, e.g., Leichliter v. State Liquor Licensing Authority, 9 P.3d 1153 (Colo. [...]
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