Professional Gamblers In Nevada Are Trying To Collect Unemployment And It Looks Like They Have a Real Shot
Like many states, Nevada closed nonessential businesses statewide to help curb the spread of the coronavirus. People who gamble for a living normally would not be able to collect unemployment, but the statewide shutdown of casinos due to the coronavirus may change that.
Rosa Mendez, a spokeswoman for the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation, told the Las Vegas Review Journal that gamblers are self-employed and may qualify as independent contractors “during this unprecedented time and under the CARES Act.”
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act was signed by President Trump on March 27. One aspect of the bill extended unemployment benefits to self-employed individuals.
The US unemployment rate has soared with the coronavirus plague and is now upwards of 20 million Americans are without jobs. It's brutal out there and there's a group of people not getting the sympathy they deserve. The gamblers! There are people out there who make most of their income from legal gambling and right now they've got nothing to gamble on. We call them professional gamblers. Jeopardy James, before he made his historic run on the game show, was a professional gambler out in Vegas. I've had moments in Vegas where I believed I was a professional gambler. We all have.
So what are these professional gamblers doing right now with no sports to bet on and casinos closed all over the country? They're going to try and collect unemployment. Call 'em crazy, but they've got a shot from what it looks like.
*Everyone in the country Googles how to become labeled a professional gambler*
If they can prove that their primary earnings come from legal gambling then there's a shot because of something called the CARES Act which extends unemployment to self-employed individuals.
“If they can show their primary method of earning cannot be made up through teleworking, playing online, I think they will be pretty successful,” Reed told MarketWatch. “This is what the Cares act is designed to do, to catch all these people who would not have been caught with traditional unemployment insurance.”
I fucking love this country.
While we're here is there a way amateur legal gamblers can get a little cut too? It's basically our second job. We clock out of our day jobs and put on our hard hats ready to go from 7:00pm until sometimes 1:00am. Right now we're technically unemployed from our second jobs. I don't know if we have a case, but might be worth a shot to find out!