The fact that ESPN itself has a sports betting app tells you all you need to know about the perversion of sports now that gambling is blessed by the government.
I think I can live with the legalization of sports betting if there are strong restrictions against marketing and advertising. If you want to ruin your life that's your decision, and you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market. But the way that advertising has its tentacles in our culture now... it's bad.
It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport. When you can bet a lot of money on how long a college players plays, or how many points they get in a particular game, what's to stop them from having a relative make a bet and they just fake a cramp?
The stock market is heavily regulated. I don't think you should ban sports betting, because like many vices it's easier to control if it is legal. According to Nate Silver, the more you let people make bets on obscure things the more opportunity their is for participants to cheat. So you should probably restrict betting to things no one participant can control (like the score). You also should try to make it difficult for a person to lose too much. You can't stop it, but you could probably make it harder. In the stock market there is a "qualified investor" that is allowed to take much bigger risks. You could make rules to punish betting sites that accept too many bets from destitute addicts. It wouldn't be perfect, but you can have liquor laws without having prohibition.
>It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport. When you can bet a lot of money on how long a college players plays, or how many points they get in a particular game, what's to stop them from having a relative make a bet and they just fake a cramp?
Or get assaulted or murdered, internet death pool style? All kinds of really fucked up incentives are created by these legalized betting apps.
Oddly enough, several professional sports gamblers were aware of a NBA referee manipulating game from their data analysis, well before the NBA became aware of it.
That was probably 10+ years ago and I suspect data analysis by the leagues is much stronger now. Still an insane line that needs to be walked between the leagues getting revenue from the sportsbooks and gambling not impacting that play.
NBA bans Jontay Porter after gambling probe shows he shared information, bet on games.
“Porter took himself out of that game after less than three minutes, claiming illness, none of his stats meeting the totals set in the parlay. The $80,000 bet was frozen and not paid out, the league said, and the NBA started an investigation not long afterward.”
Clearly, it's going to happen anyway at least some of the time, but the "what's to stop" is pretty obviously getting caught. It's already happened in at least three instances from the past year I can think of, though I don't remember the names because they were all pretty small-time players (Jontay Porter, who was already mentioned, is one of them). Anyone that is caught doing it gets instantly banned from the sport for life, which hopefully provides an even larger counterincentive compared to whatever incentive there is to attempt throwing a game.
It's not perfect, but the leagues don't have much of a choice. The US Supreme Court ruled that banning sports betting was unconstitutional, so until the court rolls over to new justices with new opinions on the matter in a few decades, it isn't going anywhere. It doesn't make any difference how much some fans on the Internet don't like it. Federal lawmakers can't ban it.
The BBC have a podcast called Sports Strangest Crimes. The most recent series was about Moses Sawbu who was match fixing in the lower leagues. Worth listening to it
It’s only “potential” insofar as bad behaviour may or may not be exposed sooner or later. I think it’s more useful to understand betting’s impact as a constant corrosive effect. Betting poisons the incentives
I'm surprised that people seem to just now realize that sports betting is a bad idea. As you said, the worst aspect is the large amount of marketing and advertising these platforms receive; I wouldn't care if they weren't pushed so heavily.
Before it was legal, most people's experiences with sports betting were small wagers between friends. Maybe a few large bets that they'll still talk about to this day. Gambling with friends or even just coworkers comes with natural limits: the size of one's bets is limited by others' aversions to risk, compulsive gambling is easily spotted, and the players' winnings/losings are zero sum.
Yes, there were illegal bookies before legalization, and they had all the problems of legalized gambling plus more. But the law-abiding (or at least casually law-breaking) majority of voters didn't think increasing the prevalence of sports gambling would hurt. Not too mention all the revenue promises (more benefits, cuts to other taxes). It's no surprise legalization was politically popular.
I lived in Australia for quite a while. It's a terrible example of what can happen. There was recently a very good BBC article on it and the connection between sports, gambling, and marketing: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2yg3k82y0o
Similar to many other toxic things, once the genie is out of the bottle and the government gets used to the revenue it generates, there is a large disincentive to tackling the problem.
Gambling is the only way for some of us to make Sportsball interesting, and attempt to fit in with the absurdist normie culture in which we live.
Realistically, there's nothing particularly interesting about the Dallas Frackers versus the Washington Rentseekers. But if you have money on the outcome, watching a game (with a sufficient supply of alcohol) is actually bearable.
Edit: I'm explaining a real, actual reason for the value of sports betting for some people, but it seems that the Sportsball enthusiasts don't like desecration of their Holy Church. I apologize.
This. There’s plenty of things in society that are similarly bad, legal, but have restrictions on how you can sell them. There’s nothing inherently different about sports betting than options trading on a brokerage platform. But only one of them is advertised in every commercial break during a sports event.
People have known for years - that’s the really terrifying part. Heck, when I was in business school I wrote a paper on the dangers of sports betting. There were many resources available then…and heck, Gmail invites were a rare commodity when I was in school.
Edit - I just found a printed copy of the paper - I wrote it so long ago that the term 'sociopathic compulsive consumer' was being used. At the time, I found a lot of evidence of casinos using terms like 'instant gratification' in their marketing commmunications. This is over two decades ago. Heck, the actual paper is on a 3.5 inch floppy.
> you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market.
I can't tell if you are promoting the stock market as a better or worse alternative to gambling?
If you meant the latter, you couldn't be further from the truth. The stock market, as a whole, represents the combined productivity of all the publicly traded firms in the country. Day to day, the stock market is unpredictably volatile. But over the long term (decades), it trends upward and by a large amount. There is no safer investment with the same kinds of returns and there is lots of research to prove it.
But short-term speculation and individual stock picking is much more akin to gambling.
I meant more like stock picking, day trading, etc. I don't think there are too many gambling addicts that would choose a whole market Vanguard ETF over, say, TSLA. :)
Policy towards pathological gambling, along with drugs, is an interesting and deep philosophical hole: To what extent do those things represent a kind of biochemical slavery, and if one cares about freedom/autonomy, should that mean letting people enslave themselves, or does it mean blocking them in the name of more freedom/autonomy overall?
The gambling addicts who get their fix from the stock market are mostly not buying stocks. They're mostly buying puts and calls, which are much closer to bets (you win big or you lose it all), and much closer to zero-sum (either you or the guy you bought it from loses). If they are just buying straight stocks, it's either a meme stock like GME or multiple-leveraged.
As I said in the last discussion about this [1], I think outright banning just leads to worse outcomes, so you need to find a medium where you can minimize the abuse while still allowing people to get their hit enough to not go seek out unregulated forms.
I'm not fond of it either, but I don't have a better answer that doesn't seem like it's going to lead to worse outcomes.
It's worse than bad, I have seen betting ads and placement in content that regular advertisers would not touch with a 10 feet pole, e.g. in pirated broadcasts
Most gamblers are casuals. I spend $5-10 a week during football and usually am down like $10 at the end of the year. It provides a lot of entertainment, sucks that some people can’t control themselves but I shouldn’t be punished for that.
Agree that heavily regulating and perhaps banning advertising needs to be done.
> Most gamblers are casuals. I spend $5-10 a week during football and usually am down like $10 at the end of the year
An annual cap of $500 on bets per social security number seems reasonable. At the very least, 10% of state's median income (a whopping $4,222 nationally [1]).
Agreed. I've never been into sports and never watched more than a few minutes of any game. But for a few years I was in a small stakes weekly football pool and it made weekends really fun. Suddenly, I wanted to know if the Rams or the Dolphins won, and by how much. I was tracking the pool leader boards. I ended up being ahead about $20. That pool ended, and I never joined another one. But it was a mildly fun time.
1) I, a person who gambles neither casually nor as part of an addiction, will pay for gambling addicts; or
2) You will be punished in the form of your degeneracy becoming illegal.
I’m not sure why you should be the one to get the free pass here.
I went to a local team baseball game and it was frankly depressing.
To see someone being put on the big screen to make some guess in a future inning with a plug for a bet site at a baseball game; frankly at this point just allow steroids again if you're selling out that bad.
The challenge is defining gambling, no? I agree with you, it's easy to determine all of the nasty gambling now. But by the time you know it's gambling as in addiction versus gambling as in a flawed but interesting part of a game, it's too late.
"perversion of sports" is a particularly American viewpoint, I think! The latent streak of puritanism, maybe. Yet, somehow, the NCAA (which is wage theft on a truly industrial scale) is morally okay. It's weird.
(The intersection with US ad culture – for existence, drug ads on TV – is maybe also unique.)
Sport has, as a business, always been random number generation for gambling purposes. Some, like horseracing, have basically no other point. Gambling is going to happen, and like weed, it's probably better that it's regulated and taxed than entirely underground. There's no more gambling content now than there was fantasy football content before, and fantasy football was gambling too.
If we're looking for a perversion of sports, though, how about the NCAA's industrial-scale wage theft? US professional sports should have junior systems which pay the players like the rest of the world...
The main problem is that addiction kind of goes around people's interests and their better judgement.
Normally I agree, we don't need to be making 'moral' decisions for people. If they want to do something 'sinful' - like gambling - have at it.
But the people who promote gambling have lots of money. And gambling is basically smoking. So, it gets hairy. They can lie, they can cheat, and they can manipulate people's minds, tricking them into doing something bad for them. And then the addiction does the rest.
Being compensated in kind with housing, food, and education (not to mention significant "grants" from boosters clubs and brand deals) is not the same as wage theft and it is verbal slight of hand to suggest otherwise.
> Sport has, as a business, always been random number generation for gambling purposes
I personally don't care about the business of sports. Most sports were just ways for children to get exercise and everything that came after it was a perversion. Fat men sitting on couches watching other grown men throw a football around isn't much better than those same men gambling on it.
> Yet, somehow, the NCAA (which is wage theft on a truly industrial scale) is morally okay. It's weird.
Outside of top men's basketball and football programs, there is no real wage theft occurring. These minor sports are avocations for student athletes, and not businesses for the universities.
The article appears to break gamblers into 3 groups.
1) casual players
2) problem players
3) professional gamblers.
so basically casual players gamble something like 50 bucks a year. Problem gamblers get money however they can (and although it's unstated and I have no evidence, I think this is where the actual money comes from). And finally, people that can snipe the mispriced bets, and make a lot of money.
Feels sort of submarine-ish. Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll. The pros eat up casino margins.
I dunno. Feels like a "I run a business, but I'm not really good at it so we need laws to force the pros out". Please don't regulate me, but regulate who can play.
Interesting that it's in Bloomberg. Interesting that the casinos are so bad at laying odd they lose. I have no sympathy for anyone but the addicts. Those folks are sick and need help.
> Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll.
The fact that the pros are simulating problem players because then the betting apps give you more leeway, e.g. by "send[ing] you bonus money" and raising your limits, paints the picture quite effectively in my book.
> Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll
To what degree is this true? Sure, a casino with a massive spend on free alcohol and structure needs a high profit margin to return its capital. But betting apps don't have those costs.
This is backwards. Casinos offer huge cross subsidization opportunities like getting people to spend lots of money in clubs and bars or gamble on games like slots that have a huge house edge while apps have near zero cross subsidization opportunities and massive overhead. An app running at draftkings scale costs a lot to operate.
I’ve believed for a long time and continue to that the math on these businesses just doesn’t work. Eventually they won’t exist because they aren’t profitable.
The aqusition costs are extremly high for online betting and online casinos. If you pay 1000 usd to aquire one customer it is not profitable if they gamble 50 usd / year.
In games against the house, the house usually ensures that even with mathematically perfect play, that they will still have a margin (though, admittedly, it's a tighter margin than when a bachelor party is drunk and playing blackjack and hitting on 19 because "I'm feeling lucky!").
Most pros play against the other players (i.e. poker, etc.), and the rake is the rake, regardless of that - the old adage, "If you look around the table and can't figure out who the chump is, you're the chump" stands, i.e. you don't have to beat the house, you just have to beat Bob who flew in from Iowa (not intended to insult anyone or anywhere, just more exaggerate the casual player).
No, advantage betting is pretty much only against the houses, not against other players. While people who know the sport and manage to bet misplaced lines can be winning over a season, advantage betting is the only way to reliantly have a positive EV. Casinos and now sport betting apps try to prevent professionals to use this, but with the number of shit you can now bet on, and since you don't have to tie an account to your real identity yet, it is becoming very difficult to catch that, especially if you muddy the water with dumb bets.
> and although it's unstated and I have no evidence, I think this is where the actual money comes from
The article links to a WSJ article that says this group of problem players provides more than 50% of revenue to the betting companies despite being just 3% of all bettors.
> Of the more than 700,000 people in the SMU panel, fewer than 5% withdrew more from their betting apps than they deposited... The next 80% of bettors made up for those operators’ losses. And the 3% of bettors who lost the most accounted for almost half of net revenue
> fewer than 5% withdrew more from their betting apps than they deposited... The next 80% of bettors made up for those operators’ losses. And the 3% of bettors who lost the most accounted for almost half of net revenue
That's a deliberately misleading representation - they offset the 80 against losses rather then the 3%. In terms of net revenue the 3% are less than half net revenue - not more.
Vegas is about entertainment because it brings people to the rows of slot machines. And ideally, from their perspective, traps a handful of whales from every cohort.
I highly, highly doubt that the share of people who consistently stay in category 1 year-over-year is more than a couple percentage points. Lots of people put $50 in to try the whole thing out, lose, then never return. Extremely few people will then return in 2025 and be like "lets do that again".
I cannot for the life of me understand why these apps can't make money off the pros, and instead need to ban them. Ignoring all the dumb promotions these apps do: Sports betting is zero sum, you're betting against the other players, not the house. The odds are set by who you're betting against. Literally, how does it not work out that the profit is just the money from the losers minus the house 30%-or-whatever cut? Is "pros" in this context people who also frequently abuse the (oftentimes wild) promotions these apps run?
But, if it did work like that, the problem is even more apparent: these apps are at best a direct wealth transfer from addicts and idiots to corporations and pros. Wait, I just described the stock market, we're talking about sports betting :)
Sports betting is zero sum, but the market is very inefficient. So you need market makers (the gambling sites) that will fill any order and that set the initial price.
The correct price is often not known for a short while, and that's when the pros bet. Immediately when the line (price) comes out, if they think the line is miss-priced, they will place large bets.
Eventually the house realizes the mispricing and they change the line, but by that point a pro might have placed a six figure bet.
So pros really are winning from the gambling sites, not from other gamblers.
In sports betting you are betting against the house. If the sportsbook sets a bad line, you can lock it in and make money off of it.
Horse racing is what you describe, parimutuel, where the house just takes a commission. But the odds shift even after you place your bet. Very different for traditional sports betting.
I worked at a quant sports betting trading company, on occasion it would send the employees to place annonymous few grand bets at physical shops because it's such a problem getting people to continue accepting your bets if you are any good.
And found out that the more you bet, the more percentage commission you pay to exchanges like Betfair, which is quite contraintuitive - commission goes up with volume, not down.
I also learned a few tricks of the industry - when you open an online account they look up your address on Google Maps to see what kind of place you live in.
My betfair commission was heavily discounted back in the day, but that was only on volumes of ~£50,000 a day, and a fair bit more on weekends. Nevertheless their commissions were outrageously high, but the scale of the liquidity they had available was amazing.
50k a day, was that money you were betting? Or were you managing a betting service and betfair was the underlying exchange? I know very little about that world
> it's such a problem getting people to continue accepting your bets if you are any good.
Why don't they just use those people to adjust their odds faster for everybody else ? Or do they limit the size you can bet rather than just banning you ?
> I also found out that the more you bet, the more percentage commission you pay to exchanges like Betfair, which is quite contraintuitive - commission goes up with volume, not down.
I guess they try to cream the most addicted people, seems quite intuitive to me.
> Why don't they just use those people to adjust their odds faster for everybody else ?
The logic of bookies is simple: Don't do business with people who win more than they lose.
It doesn't matter how the customer is getting an edge. A brilliant algorithm? A complex arbitrage system? Deep insight from years studying the sport? Cheating? Time travel? The bookies don't care.
The only thing that matters is, if you win more than you lose you've got some sort of edge. And if you've got any sort of edge, it's more profitable not to do business with you.
>Why don't they just use those people to adjust their odds faster for everybody else ? Or do they limit the size you can bet rather than just banning you ?
Some of them ban outright and some restrict your stake. When I worked for a bookmaker we had an account that had made several hundred thousand £s from us and was limited to betting relatively small amounts. He would always bet as soon as our odds would open and then we'd adjust them.
Top sports books do that already. Lesser sports books don't have enough liquidity to react in real-time. In fact a simple winning strategy is to check what odds Pinnacle gives and see if any bookie offers better odds (arbitrage betting). It will only work for 2-3 bets before you're rate-limited though.
I thought the point of bet exchanges was that you're betting against other users, so the exchange doesn't have to care how good you are or how much you're betting. Why would they add friction for high rollers? Old bookmaker habits, or they're more than just a platform provider and are participating in the markets?
Pinnacle (not sure it's 'Asian', I believe their main offices are in Toronto) takes a lot of action on major markets. For smaller markets such as player props, Pinnacle takes very little. If you were confident in beating major markets, such as EPL or NFL, Pinnacle will very regularly take $50k a click, with rebets possible. However, if you're betting major markets, even the 'softer' books such as DraftKings would probably be willing to take a lot as well.
The soft books usually kick out or limit players if they are beating smaller markets such as player props, team props, derivatives (for example, a 1Q team total, etc). A 'sharp' book such as Circa or Pinnacle might not explicitly limit an individual player, but in general they don't offer as many markets, so it's not an apples to apples comparison.
> Simulating addictive behavior, says Peabody, is an effective way to get online sportsbooks to send you bonus money and keep your accounts open. This isn’t necessarily because operators are targeting problem bettors, he says; they’re simply looking to identify and encourage customers who are likely to spend—and lose—the most. This just happens to be a good way to find and enable addicts, too.
It's not ML run amuck, casinos and bookies targeted addicts since the beginning of time. This is using ML as legal cover. "We aren't targeting addicts, it's just that the magical math black box that we completely control and trained just so happens to make addicts spend more money"
> Simulating addictive behavior, says Peabody, is an effective way to get dealers to send you free doses and keep your accounts open. This isn’t necessarily because drug dealers are targeting problem drug users, he says; they’re simply looking to identify and encourage customers who are likely to spend most. This just happens to be a good way to find and enable addicts, too.
Imagine justifying drug dealers with this line of reasoning
Fucking disgusting. They're trying to write algorithms that ruin people's lives. It's one thing when you're causing indirect or second/third order harm (like many of us likely do) but jesus christ
Agreed -- I will continue to shout it from every perch I can: politicians who are actively working to proliferate these apps should be (at least journalistically) investigated. I would bet on this being a well-above-random signal of either a personal gambling addiction or corruption.
That would be totalitarian and goes against how open societies work. So not banned, but constrained to sensible limits. Speculative investment markets should also be limited because they are also non-value-add activities.
could they regulate it in some manner? I like betting on sports but to the tune of $50/month or so, it just makes any event way more interesting when you have $20 on the line.
Maybe just put a limit on how much you can transfer to the app each month or something? Like $500?
So is alcohol - there are plenty of people who gamble responsibly and get enjoyment out of it. Taking away the entire thing rather than simply making sensible regulation and dealing with scumbag behavior by corporate bookies is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, not to mention extremely moralistic. And, in the end, prohibition never works - bookies still and always will exist.
> And, in the end, prohibition never works - bookies still and always will exist.
I don't think that's exactly true. Laws introduce varying degrees of friction for citizens to do something.
It's like entrepreneurship. If there are a bunch of laws in place making it hard to start a business, fewer people will start businesses. Some people will still create illegal businesses on the black market, but lots of law abiding citizens will just stop creating businesses because there's too much friction to bother.
What do you mean prohibition never works? Are you really going to claim legalizing sports betting a few years ago DIDNT increase gambling in the US? This doesn't strike me as a good faith comment just a platitude
Sure, but if people, for example, started to declare bankruptcy due to gambling addiction, doesn't that mean that taxpayers like you and I are effectively subsidizing these gambling institutions?
That goes beyond moralism; most people don't want to pay higher taxes. I think that it's good that we have a safety-net for people who get into impossible levels of debt, but that does mean that we have an interest in figuring out ways to minimize how often bankruptcy is actually invoked.
I got out of ad-tech partially because our company was promoting some of the worst sports betting apps on the web. We knew how bad it was, but we had to make numbers, so everybody just pretended we weren't screwing up peoples' lives by using addictive algorithms to promote addictive products.
A lot of other comments are along similar lines, talking about how bad sports betting is. I agree with all that, but what I like is that pro bettors are using the same algorithms to make bank off of these predators. Maybe it'll create an arms race between gambling apps and professional gamblers, but I still hope that enough people follow this behavior and eventually break the model that gambling apps are using.
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I think I can live with the legalization of sports betting if there are strong restrictions against marketing and advertising. If you want to ruin your life that's your decision, and you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market. But the way that advertising has its tentacles in our culture now... it's bad.
The stock market is heavily regulated. I don't think you should ban sports betting, because like many vices it's easier to control if it is legal. According to Nate Silver, the more you let people make bets on obscure things the more opportunity their is for participants to cheat. So you should probably restrict betting to things no one participant can control (like the score). You also should try to make it difficult for a person to lose too much. You can't stop it, but you could probably make it harder. In the stock market there is a "qualified investor" that is allowed to take much bigger risks. You could make rules to punish betting sites that accept too many bets from destitute addicts. It wouldn't be perfect, but you can have liquor laws without having prohibition.
Or get assaulted or murdered, internet death pool style? All kinds of really fucked up incentives are created by these legalized betting apps.
That was probably 10+ years ago and I suspect data analysis by the leagues is much stronger now. Still an insane line that needs to be walked between the leagues getting revenue from the sportsbooks and gambling not impacting that play.
“Porter took himself out of that game after less than three minutes, claiming illness, none of his stats meeting the totals set in the parlay. The $80,000 bet was frozen and not paid out, the league said, and the NBA started an investigation not long afterward.”
https://apnews.com/article/nba-jontay-porter-banned-265ad5cb...
It's not perfect, but the leagues don't have much of a choice. The US Supreme Court ruled that banning sports betting was unconstitutional, so until the court rolls over to new justices with new opinions on the matter in a few decades, it isn't going anywhere. It doesn't make any difference how much some fans on the Internet don't like it. Federal lawmakers can't ban it.
That ship sailed a looping time ago. Sports teams in the US are franchises. Like McDonalds. They exist to make profit. Lots of it.
It has nothing to do with sport.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0jv3zvy
Yes, there were illegal bookies before legalization, and they had all the problems of legalized gambling plus more. But the law-abiding (or at least casually law-breaking) majority of voters didn't think increasing the prevalence of sports gambling would hurt. Not too mention all the revenue promises (more benefits, cuts to other taxes). It's no surprise legalization was politically popular.
Similar to many other toxic things, once the genie is out of the bottle and the government gets used to the revenue it generates, there is a large disincentive to tackling the problem.
Realistically, there's nothing particularly interesting about the Dallas Frackers versus the Washington Rentseekers. But if you have money on the outcome, watching a game (with a sufficient supply of alcohol) is actually bearable.
Edit: I'm explaining a real, actual reason for the value of sports betting for some people, but it seems that the Sportsball enthusiasts don't like desecration of their Holy Church. I apologize.
Those who do learn from history learn that we never learn from history.
Edit - I just found a printed copy of the paper - I wrote it so long ago that the term 'sociopathic compulsive consumer' was being used. At the time, I found a lot of evidence of casinos using terms like 'instant gratification' in their marketing commmunications. This is over two decades ago. Heck, the actual paper is on a 3.5 inch floppy.
I can't tell if you are promoting the stock market as a better or worse alternative to gambling?
If you meant the latter, you couldn't be further from the truth. The stock market, as a whole, represents the combined productivity of all the publicly traded firms in the country. Day to day, the stock market is unpredictably volatile. But over the long term (decades), it trends upward and by a large amount. There is no safer investment with the same kinds of returns and there is lots of research to prove it.
But short-term speculation and individual stock picking is much more akin to gambling.
There's a big difference between betting on sports (zero sum) and buying stocks (ownership in a company), even if the latter can be silly at times.
I'm not fond of it either, but I don't have a better answer that doesn't seem like it's going to lead to worse outcomes.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41667521
Agree that heavily regulating and perhaps banning advertising needs to be done.
An annual cap of $500 on bets per social security number seems reasonable. At the very least, 10% of state's median income (a whopping $4,222 nationally [1]).
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
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1) I, a person who gambles neither casually nor as part of an addiction, will pay for gambling addicts; or 2) You will be punished in the form of your degeneracy becoming illegal.
I’m not sure why you should be the one to get the free pass here.
To see someone being put on the big screen to make some guess in a future inning with a plug for a bet site at a baseball game; frankly at this point just allow steroids again if you're selling out that bad.
As I understand, they basically do. HGH, TRT, and other stuff is used for quicker recovery and to slow effects of aging.
Yes. But half of HN works in the advertising industry.
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(The intersection with US ad culture – for existence, drug ads on TV – is maybe also unique.)
Sport has, as a business, always been random number generation for gambling purposes. Some, like horseracing, have basically no other point. Gambling is going to happen, and like weed, it's probably better that it's regulated and taxed than entirely underground. There's no more gambling content now than there was fantasy football content before, and fantasy football was gambling too.
If we're looking for a perversion of sports, though, how about the NCAA's industrial-scale wage theft? US professional sports should have junior systems which pay the players like the rest of the world...
The main problem is that addiction kind of goes around people's interests and their better judgement.
Normally I agree, we don't need to be making 'moral' decisions for people. If they want to do something 'sinful' - like gambling - have at it.
But the people who promote gambling have lots of money. And gambling is basically smoking. So, it gets hairy. They can lie, they can cheat, and they can manipulate people's minds, tricking them into doing something bad for them. And then the addiction does the rest.
I personally don't care about the business of sports. Most sports were just ways for children to get exercise and everything that came after it was a perversion. Fat men sitting on couches watching other grown men throw a football around isn't much better than those same men gambling on it.
Outside of top men's basketball and football programs, there is no real wage theft occurring. These minor sports are avocations for student athletes, and not businesses for the universities.
1) casual players
2) problem players
3) professional gamblers.
so basically casual players gamble something like 50 bucks a year. Problem gamblers get money however they can (and although it's unstated and I have no evidence, I think this is where the actual money comes from). And finally, people that can snipe the mispriced bets, and make a lot of money.
Feels sort of submarine-ish. Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll. The pros eat up casino margins.
I dunno. Feels like a "I run a business, but I'm not really good at it so we need laws to force the pros out". Please don't regulate me, but regulate who can play.
Interesting that it's in Bloomberg. Interesting that the casinos are so bad at laying odd they lose. I have no sympathy for anyone but the addicts. Those folks are sick and need help.
The fact that the pros are simulating problem players because then the betting apps give you more leeway, e.g. by "send[ing] you bonus money" and raising your limits, paints the picture quite effectively in my book.
> Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll
To what degree is this true? Sure, a casino with a massive spend on free alcohol and structure needs a high profit margin to return its capital. But betting apps don't have those costs.
I’ve believed for a long time and continue to that the math on these businesses just doesn’t work. Eventually they won’t exist because they aren’t profitable.
Pro gamblers simulate problem gamblers, so they can bet more.
I said, "Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll"
> To what degree is this true?
I don't know the ROI. It's hyperbolic, I'll freely admit that.
But I think there is an important point. We let problem gamblers gamble more, and it's not fair pros take advantage of that dark pattern.
In games against the house, the house usually ensures that even with mathematically perfect play, that they will still have a margin (though, admittedly, it's a tighter margin than when a bachelor party is drunk and playing blackjack and hitting on 19 because "I'm feeling lucky!").
Most pros play against the other players (i.e. poker, etc.), and the rake is the rake, regardless of that - the old adage, "If you look around the table and can't figure out who the chump is, you're the chump" stands, i.e. you don't have to beat the house, you just have to beat Bob who flew in from Iowa (not intended to insult anyone or anywhere, just more exaggerate the casual player).
The article links to a WSJ article that says this group of problem players provides more than 50% of revenue to the betting companies despite being just 3% of all bettors.
> Of the more than 700,000 people in the SMU panel, fewer than 5% withdrew more from their betting apps than they deposited... The next 80% of bettors made up for those operators’ losses. And the 3% of bettors who lost the most accounted for almost half of net revenue
That's a deliberately misleading representation - they offset the 80 against losses rather then the 3%. In terms of net revenue the 3% are less than half net revenue - not more.
I cannot for the life of me understand why these apps can't make money off the pros, and instead need to ban them. Ignoring all the dumb promotions these apps do: Sports betting is zero sum, you're betting against the other players, not the house. The odds are set by who you're betting against. Literally, how does it not work out that the profit is just the money from the losers minus the house 30%-or-whatever cut? Is "pros" in this context people who also frequently abuse the (oftentimes wild) promotions these apps run?
But, if it did work like that, the problem is even more apparent: these apps are at best a direct wealth transfer from addicts and idiots to corporations and pros. Wait, I just described the stock market, we're talking about sports betting :)
The correct price is often not known for a short while, and that's when the pros bet. Immediately when the line (price) comes out, if they think the line is miss-priced, they will place large bets.
Eventually the house realizes the mispricing and they change the line, but by that point a pro might have placed a six figure bet.
So pros really are winning from the gambling sites, not from other gamblers.
Horse racing is what you describe, parimutuel, where the house just takes a commission. But the odds shift even after you place your bet. Very different for traditional sports betting.
And found out that the more you bet, the more percentage commission you pay to exchanges like Betfair, which is quite contraintuitive - commission goes up with volume, not down.
I also learned a few tricks of the industry - when you open an online account they look up your address on Google Maps to see what kind of place you live in.
Why don't they just use those people to adjust their odds faster for everybody else ? Or do they limit the size you can bet rather than just banning you ?
> I also found out that the more you bet, the more percentage commission you pay to exchanges like Betfair, which is quite contraintuitive - commission goes up with volume, not down.
I guess they try to cream the most addicted people, seems quite intuitive to me.
The logic of bookies is simple: Don't do business with people who win more than they lose.
It doesn't matter how the customer is getting an edge. A brilliant algorithm? A complex arbitrage system? Deep insight from years studying the sport? Cheating? Time travel? The bookies don't care.
The only thing that matters is, if you win more than you lose you've got some sort of edge. And if you've got any sort of edge, it's more profitable not to do business with you.
Volumes are not huge like in finance, you will lose more on the bet that you will make back in your marginally improved odds.
> I guess they try to cream the most addicted people, seems quite intuitive to me.
The professionals, not the addicted. The addicted expire quickly and they typically don't use exchanges anyway.
Some of them ban outright and some restrict your stake. When I worked for a bookmaker we had an account that had made several hundred thousand £s from us and was limited to betting relatively small amounts. He would always bet as soon as our odds would open and then we'd adjust them.
The soft books usually kick out or limit players if they are beating smaller markets such as player props, team props, derivatives (for example, a 1Q team total, etc). A 'sharp' book such as Circa or Pinnacle might not explicitly limit an individual player, but in general they don't offer as many markets, so it's not an apples to apples comparison.
ML run amuck
Imagine justifying drug dealers with this line of reasoning
Maybe just put a limit on how much you can transfer to the app each month or something? Like $500?
I don't think that's exactly true. Laws introduce varying degrees of friction for citizens to do something.
It's like entrepreneurship. If there are a bunch of laws in place making it hard to start a business, fewer people will start businesses. Some people will still create illegal businesses on the black market, but lots of law abiding citizens will just stop creating businesses because there's too much friction to bother.
That goes beyond moralism; most people don't want to pay higher taxes. I think that it's good that we have a safety-net for people who get into impossible levels of debt, but that does mean that we have an interest in figuring out ways to minimize how often bankruptcy is actually invoked.
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Stock options can be used as a tool to hedge against risk.
A lot of other comments are along similar lines, talking about how bad sports betting is. I agree with all that, but what I like is that pro bettors are using the same algorithms to make bank off of these predators. Maybe it'll create an arms race between gambling apps and professional gamblers, but I still hope that enough people follow this behavior and eventually break the model that gambling apps are using.