America’s bad bet on sports gambling

https://compactmag.com/article/america-s-bad-bet-on-sports-gambling

by sharkweek • 4 years ago

83 158 4 years ago

jollyllama4• 4 years ago

I think the anti-gambling proponents who said gambling legalization would degrade society have to some extent been proven correct.

TV, billboard, and other ads for gambling are rampant around here. I find it exploitative.

mschuster91• 4 years ago

Better to have the demand served open and legally than forcing people underground. Alcohol prohibition should have made it abundantly clear decades ago that attempting to ban vices will only leas to criminal empires, and it's just the same with gambling, prostitution, porn and marijuana.

Regarding advertising you're spot on, although I'd go a step further and call for sweeping regulations in the entire advertising industry. Unless you move to a 21 souls settlement in Alaska and leave a hermit life, you literally can't spend five minutes without being bombarded by one or another ad.

jonah• 4 years ago

My area has banned billboards on the highway and otherwise. They also have strict rules about signage in general.

It's really wonderful and when I go somewhere else and am bombarded by those ads I am reminded again how assaulting they are.

majormajor2• 4 years ago

Better to have the demand served open and legally than forcing people underground. Alcohol prohibition should have made it abundantly clear decades ago that attempting to ban vices will only leas to criminal empires, and it's just the same with gambling, prostitution, porn and marijuana.

It's not obvious to me that all vices are created equal here. If forcing gambling underground creates a criminal empire or two but results in, say, 80% fewer gambling addicts who end up damaging their lives and those of their families, which is the larger harm? Fake numbers, obviously the benefits/harms would depend on several different factors, but I don't think a one size fits all approach makes sense because "illegal gambling gangs" didn't seem to cause the same sort of larger societal problems the last several decades that "illegal drug gangs" or prohibition-era alcohol gangs have. I would assume this is because the lack of a need for the same sort of supply chain that you could attempt to monopolize and dominate.

mynameishere• 4 years ago

Isn't the whole "prohibition was bad" pretty much a just-so story? Being the drinker I am, I don't want it to come back, of course. But does having a few seedy speakeasies run by the mob really amount to much compared to this sort of thing:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1088683/death-rate-rate-...

That's one disease. Booze causes all kinds of problems, and I wouldn't be surprised if (as another example) wife-beating sharply declined during prohibition.

(ED: Looking again at that graph, there's something a little dubious about it--but it was the first data I could find.)

Karellen• 4 years ago

If pervasive garish ads are criminalised, only criminals will see pervasive garish advertisements.

...and I'm fine with that.

whateveracct• 4 years ago

There's a difference between having it regulated and open and there being gambling ads during free throws.

throw0101c2• 4 years ago

Better to have the demand served open and legally than forcing people underground.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1275), "Whether it belongs to the human law to repress all vices?":

[…] Now possibility or faculty of action is due to an interior habit or disposition: since the same thing is not possible to one who has not a virtuous habit, as is possible to one who has. Thus the same is not possible to a child as to a full-grown man: for which reason the law for children is not the same as for adults, since many things are permitted to children, which in an adult are punished by law or at any rate are open to blame. In like manner many things are permissible to men not perfect in virtue, which would be intolerable in a virtuous man.
Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like.

* https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2096.htm#article2

nitwit005• 4 years ago

Articles from the past make it seem more like plenty of gambling was going on when it was illegal, just that it was criminally controlled: https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/26/archives/dimes-make-milli...

And people keep finding new ways to gamble, some of which are difficult to make illegal. It's fairly clear the stock market is an elaborate gambling system to some people.

MichaelCollins4• 4 years ago

If the mob keeps it where I don't have to see it, then it's not my problem. I'd rather live in a city with illegal gambling done in private than in a city where the street is lined with casinos and gambling propaganda. Keep that shit in Vegas where it's easy for me to avoid.

I wish they'd ban adverting of state lotteries too. Those ads are the worst, most insulting, most idiotic. A celebration of mindless materialism and short-term thinking. These ads celebrate the fact that most lottery winners blow it all on stupid shit then end up back at square one a few years later. It's flagrant exploitation of the dimwitted; the least they could do is not flaunt it on huge billboards all across town.

cykros4• 4 years ago

Markets in general, really. If you banned securities, people would still bet on commodities. Ban that and it's real estate. And in lieu of that? Currencies.

If you ask me, gambling isn't the problem here; advertising is. Sure, people will always find a way to engage in vices, but something about exploiting our monkey brains to make those vices seem like the be all and end all always seems to have some pretty bad effects on society. Tie all the ills of the 20th century psychology-infused advertising with modern targeted advertising and you have a real disaster on your hands -- just be glad Joe Camel never got to stroll around the social networks of the 21st century.

MisterBastahrd• 4 years ago

What's far, far worse is all the gambling being done under the guise of "gaming" and focused directly at children. Not only is it as exploitative as normal gambling, in 99% of instances you will never receive something which you can then exchange for currency or anything else ever again: they have your money regardless.

thematrixturtle2• 4 years ago

Why not just ban all gambling ads? Many European countries do this.

Brian-Puccio• 4 years ago

As well as direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-to-consumer_advertising

jollyllama4• 4 years ago

Interesting, I never knew that. I guess you don't notice what isn't there. England must not be on the list, judging from EPL matches.

HideousKojima2• 4 years ago

When I watch bootleg streams of MMA matches they're usually being streamed by people in the UK, and the sheer quantity of gambling ads is kind of crazy to me.

tomohawk• 4 years ago

People have forgotten how harmful gambling is. It was once widely legal, but then made illegal in most places. During the time it was illegal in most places, Nevada led the nation in many categories such as: school drop outs, divorces, domestic abuse, ...

Government involvement in such activities really just shows where the priorities are.

ilaksh• 4 years ago

It's weird to me how sports gambling just seemed to start being accepted as a normal part of everyone's life, apparently, based on how common the ads are.

Gambling addiction is real. It affected my family.

It's like a tax on society, except that it often most negatively affects the people who can least afford to be taxed, and then it usually just goes to greedy people rather than funding public works. At least lotteries supposedly go towards public projects. But again, you are taking proportionately more from the most desperate and poor people in that case which is the opposite of how a tax should work.

thebigjewbowski2• 4 years ago

The state taxes casinos and sports books an insane amount on top of regular federal taxes and whatnot.

It’s not totally extractive but they are obviously still profitable.

The thing is, everyone gambled before legalization. You didn’t even need a bookie, every online casino has taken bets from US citizens and then pay no taxes to the state or country.

Bookies are even worse than online casinos because they offer a line of credit and later coerce you to give up your business, sell drugs, etc.

All in all it’s very similar to drugs. People are going to do it anyway, might as well make it legal.

You can contact any casino and request to be excluded from play indefinitely. You can set deposit limits and cannot lift them for a month at a time. There’s some “harm reduction” required by law.

Cupertino950146• 4 years ago

No, "everyone" did not gamble. Some people did, but others didn't want to enough to find a bookie or try an online casino.

"People are going to do it anyway" -- wrong, some people are going to do it. Many will not if it's illegal.

code_duck• 4 years ago

I'm still perplexed at how casinos are all over the US now. Growing up in the 80s, the story was 'gambling is bad and thus illegal everywhere, except horse tracks and for some reason Nevada'. Then of course casinos on reservations started opening all over, close to and even in the middle cities (Fond-du-Luth in Minnesota, for instance, is directly in downtown Duluth).

coding1232• 4 years ago

Welcome to the end of times. Same here, I remember a society that was fair, hard working and not filled with crazies.

jonathankoren2• 4 years ago

Growing up in the Midwest, we got riverboat gambling, and watched the inevitable slide to just casinos.

For those that aren’t aware, this was the basic history.

Casinos are bad. Ban them.

Casinos are bad, but maybe profitable. Let’s have a few, but we’ll put them on 19th century style paddlewheel riverboats, and make the boat go out into the river for an hour long cruise to limit access.

Okay, the boat can remained docked, but it will still “cruise” for an hour before people are allowed on and off.

Okay, so maybe the boat can actually be in an artificial pond, that’s only about a foot bigger than the boat, as long as that “boat in a moat” is within some small number of miles from an approved gambling river. These boats will also “go cruising”, and since they are boats, they will be regulated by the US Coast Guard, and be required to have enough life jackets for the maximum occupancy of the boat, even though if the boat were to “sink” it would only fall 12 inches to the bottom of the moat.

Okay, so maybe the boats don’t have to “cruise” and people can just come and go from the gambling floor whenever they want.

Okay. Let’s just have a regular casino in a regular building, nowhere near a river.

ifsothen2• 4 years ago

Native Americans are allowed to operate casinos on their land, state laws to the contrary be damned. So if there's an Indian reservation near your cities, banning gambling is a waste of time and just gives the Indians a monopoly. Might as well make some of the money yourself.

pessimizer4• 4 years ago

At least lotteries supposedly go towards public projects.

They don't, it's a scam. Other than that the fact that money is fungible (so sending lottery money to schools really doesn't mean anything), when you crack open the books (which is never done, and there are always contracts that include never doing it), they don't make money. In Illinois, which has always had a huge lottery, it never even broke even. Lotteries are just one of the many vehicles for politician self-dealing.

nl• 4 years ago

It seems hard for a lottery to actually make a loss!

I did some googling and then Illinois lottery did make a loss in 2015 due to increased advertising spend: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20150917/NEWS02/1509...

Apart from that I don't see any evidence for your claims. Do you have a link?

morcheeba• 4 years ago

My best friend's husband is always bringing home winning $20 or $50 lotto tickets. His family can't afford the $75 a week he spends on those, but every gas station sells them. Even not-out-of-control cases are harmful.

bergenty2• 4 years ago

Cardboard crack

flappyeagle• 4 years ago

Ban Magic

googlryas2• 4 years ago

Technically he's only spending $25-55/week!

I wonder if cases like this could be helped if he was introduced to those "savings-with-lottery-features" apps. I'll say longgame.co as an example(I've never used it and am not vouching for it, I know there are others out there as well)

It's really a shame. If he put that $50/week into a savings acct, that would be $2500 at the end of the year, which could pay for a nice week-long vacation for the family if they wanted to spend it on fun stuff and not reducing debt and other non-fun stuff.

njarboe• 4 years ago

Governments should run gambling at even odds. Then your gambling is a bit like saving. You put in money each week and every once in a while you get a big payoff, but you are net even.

Most current state lotteries have worse odds than the mafia numbers games they replaced.

poink2• 4 years ago

In Florida, if you go to any regional lottery office on payday, you will see people come in, cash their paycheck at the window, convert every dollar into scratch-off tickets, then see if they actually got paid that week.

That's a government office doing that.

pleb_nz• 4 years ago

You're speaking figuratively right when you say paycheck. People in the US don't actually still get a physical paycheck right?

chrisweekly• 4 years ago

They say "the lottery is a tax on people who can't do math". I'd vote for using lottery revenue to fund public STEM education.

ren_engineer• 4 years ago

bread and circus, same reason they are legalizing or decriminalizing drugs after resisting for decades. They want the masses sedated and distracted. 100K+ people die from opioids every year and that number is rising rapidly, yet no national emergency declaration or real action to try and stop it

MrGazzo• 4 years ago

no national emergency declaration

The former President of the United States declared it a national health emergency: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-declares-opioid-crisis...

jmclnx2• 4 years ago

But nothing was really done to stop it. But seems every US President will declare something and all it does is blow hot air to help warm the earth even faster :)

coding1232• 4 years ago

Biden did nothing except appoint a czar that did nothing.

frebord• 4 years ago

Just replace gambling with alcohol. The small minority of addicts shouldn't fuck it up for the rest of us.

I dove deeply into it this past year to extract some value out of promotions the books are running, and have continued to bet because it is fun trying to find lines that have positive expected value and it's been a nice stream of extra income.

strombofulous• 4 years ago

it is fun trying to find lines that have positive expected value

I've never gambled before, does this happen often? I would have assumed gambling companies wouldn't offer any bets like this, since it implies their EV is negative.

rileymat2• 4 years ago

Is this true if they are not the counter-party, but the facilitator?

throwaway_4ever• 4 years ago

The only exception is Blackjack, where you could learn positive EV play in a week, by "counting cards". That's why casino's kick people playing too well. They make a little money off 99% of players playing bad and try to kick the 1% that make money off the casino.

dottrap• 4 years ago

Look up Edward Thorp, the famous mathematician who was the first to use probability theory to beat blackjack and write a book about it (Beat the Dealer). Basically, as a deck uses up cards, the remaining in the deck may present a positive expected value. By counting cards and knowing expected values, you can adjust your bets to capitalize.

Since Thorp, Casinos have made it harder to beat them (e.g. larger decks), but they still tease the possibility you can beat them to entice people to try (and lose).

Edward Thorp later went on to write Beat the Market, where he tried to apply similar probability principles to the stock market. He independently invented the options formula, before Black-Scholes (which the latter won a Nobel Prize).

le-mark• 4 years ago

In sports positive EV can happen a lot based on real world circumstances. Hot streaks are real, injuries and line ups change before and even during games, players get arrested, etc. Often times opening lines move drastically because the books just don’t know the true odds. In practice the books move the line so they make a profit. Example everyone would bet on chiefs over lions by a touchdown all day long; a line might start there but move quickly. It’s quite amazing that final line is almost always 50/50 win probability.

noduerme• 4 years ago

Sportsbooks don't make money by betting against the gamblers. They make money by facilitating betting between gamblers on both sides of the game. Their goal isn't to win, it's to set a line that'll attract an even amount of money on both sides, and keep a percentage for the service. So lines (the final scores you're betting on) move over time as the public piles on one side or another of a bet, and that there's often value in going the other way if you know enough about what a line should be.

nine_k• 4 years ago

Health and behavioral implications of alcohol addiction can be more expensive to the families and the society at large.

umanwizard8• 4 years ago

The fraction of people who are problem gamblers compared to those who do it sparingly and safely for fun is way higher than for alcohol.

boomboomsubban• 4 years ago

Really? We're at the start of likely millions of fantasy football leagues with buy ins, the recent huge lottery jackpot had a tons of people buying a few tickets, and places like Vegas are always popular tourist spots.

I feel like there's less middle ground then drinking, fewer people are safely going to the casino a few times a month compared to people going to a bar. But a lot of people casually gamble.

jmclnx2• 4 years ago

Seems peat and repeat for the US these days in all environments.

People forgot why Sports Betting was first outlawed (Black Soxs). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal This will not end well.

In the 1930's, Finance Law were passed to reel in abuses, since the late 90s, these laws were whittled down and we had 2008. New, weaker laws passed and as of now most are gone.

So seems to prove, if people do not read and understand history, they are dommed to repeat the past mistakes.

danielmarkbruce8• 4 years ago

Maybe the cure was worse than the disease. Just because something was previously banned, doesn't mean it was the right call.

boplicity2• 4 years ago

After a recent bad experience around an alcoholic, I now understand, at least in part, why prohibition happened. Not that it was the right choice. However, it is very sad how much disease we allow, as a society, without much effort at addressing the root societal causes. These types of diseases kill people. Yet, much of society has normalized the causes. The question, isn't whether or not the some "call" was the right call. That is beside the point. The question should be "what now?" The answer shouldn't be "status quo."

HideousKojima2• 4 years ago

Prohibition actually permanently lowered the average alcohol consumption of the average American

baron8162• 4 years ago

I’ve thought it would be a good idea for states to issue “licenses” for many vices. Want to buy alcohol or go to a casino? You need to take a short course on the dangers of it and how to be safe. If you act irresponsibly by over drinking or driving drunk, then you can get your drinking license suspended.

For gambling, you could limit how long a person stays inside a casino over a period of time, limit how many bets they place over a period of time, or how much money they lose. Yeah, it’s a little nanny state-ish in the case of gambling, but there’s clearly some social harm going on there that states recognize by already controlling gambling.

bergenty2• 4 years ago

It’s not going to work for everything. Most (not an exaggeration) men have wanted to sleep with 13-14 year olds in pretty much every society in history. How do you propose we satisfy that need?

Cupertino950146• 4 years ago

We don't satisfy it. Lots of people want to kill their enemies, too. They seem to find the criminal penalties sufficiently deterring.

Cupertino950146• 4 years ago

This is actually not a terrible idea, but enforcing it might prove hard. I don't think your average casino right now keeps a young parent from gambling away the rent money. On the other hand, bars can and do refuse to give you any more alcohol.

baron8162• 4 years ago

I don’t think it would be that hard to enforce with pretty basic software. Casinos have to get a license to operate as is. They would scan people as they place bets. Casinos might even get behind it since they would get access to the data—they’d immediately know who the high rollers are, who the cheaters are, what games people like, etc.

dredmorbius• 4 years ago

Many casinos in the US operate on tribal land and are to a large extent independent of state, and in cases even national, regulation.

Primary regulatory authority lies with the US Department of Interior, under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (1988).

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Gaming_Regulatory_Act>

Test0129• 4 years ago

A little nanny-state-ish?

Proposing licensing for this is akin to proposing licensing for nearly anything else that requires a modicum of personal responsibility. I'm not here to defend the casinos but this proposition is crazy and I'd actively advocate against it.

Let's ignore the obvious non-starters like costs because the obvious deterrent is this: make it difficult to get started gambling by capitalizing on people's laziness. They wont go to the class, so they won't go gamble, right? They won't go to class to learn about the dangers of drinking so they won't drink, right?

The first counterpoint is arguably the simplest. In both cases, gambling and alcohol, doing it "under the table" is simple. There is arguably no difference between buying/making a set of dice, setting up a wood box in your house (or a cardboard box on the street) and playing craps. In fact, the odds are better doing this so you'll likely gain more customers. Benefit? It's easy to pack up, move, and keep secret. Nevada has an entire wing of the police dedicated to finding people gambling in their homes and it nets what I can only imagine is a grand average of 0 arrests per year. For alcohol, it's absolutely trivial to make swill. If you really want it, you're a yeast packet and fruit juice away from it. You can even make it with bread. Alcoholics don't care about flavor. If they do, you can distill your swill further and flavor it for less than $100 more. Is the goal then to require a license to buy copper pipes? Torches? How many licenses do I need before I need a separate bag for them? How many regulations will be propose on businesses before doing something like gambling or drinking alcohol require a NICS background check and re-taking a class every 2 years?

For things that are successfully licensed a few things need to happen.

1. It must be non-trivial for a person to start doing. Making pharmaceuticals is an example of this. Even trivial street drugs like heroin and cocaine are not room temperature IQ simple to manufacture. Many drugs require a full blown BSc/MSc in chemistry to even begin to understand.

2. The ability to acquire the components to do the thing must be reduced to the point it becomes impossible for a non-licensed person to get it. Again, manufacturing drugs is an example of this.

With these two in place you can successfully regulate something. Otherwise, the regulation will fail at the start.

At some point we must accept personal responsibility for our own vices. People attending GA or AA have done this. If you are predisposed to blowing 8x your net worth at a casino it's YOUR responsibility to not gamble. The casino can't be responsible for your own problems. Now, it's true the casinos do very little to stop someone from taking out a credit line at the cage, nor do they do anything to actively stop an obvious problem gambler. This is an avenue for change. Liquor stores often stop "regulars" from buying another liter of popov. But to propose licensing? Insane.

throwaway675309• 4 years ago

Why stop at gambling?

Excessive gaming can also lead to social harm so obviously we're going to want to make sure that we have consoles that turn off after a certain duration of time allowing for a daily maximal quota.

I'm all for advocation in terms of education but that's the line, it's not the states responsibility nor anywhere in their purview to impose regulations on how a person chooses to spend their time. It's deeply frightening how easily people advocate for these things without realizing that establishing precedent can quickly lead to the infringement of civil liberties.

cmeacham982• 4 years ago

This is like saying "Why stop at motor vehicle licenses? People can harm (even rarely kill!) themselves and others on bikes, we should have bike licenses too!"

The likelihood and potency of gambling to ruin your life is orders of magnitude above gaming.

googlryas2• 4 years ago

You can get yourself permanently blacklisted at any casino by just asking - even inveterate gambling addicts have brief moments of clarity.

You don't even need to run naked down the slot aisles and belly flop onto the craps table.

Cupertino950146• 4 years ago

We can replace the X in "X should be legal because criminalizing it will just drive X underground" with (heroin / crack / glue sniffing / child porn / whatever).

Not all of those substitutions work. It seems to be a difficult thing to process, for some people, that outlawing things does reduce their usage, and some of those things are really harmful.

Conversely, at least some of the people who are now gambling on sports really would not have done so, when they still had to know a bookie. No, they wouldn't fuel the Mafia instead; they just wouldn't gamble.

aaplok• 4 years ago

Legalisation is a very broad notion. What to legalise? Usage/consumption? Small business re-selling? Large private industry?

Arguments for it cover an equally large range. The argument about legalising consumption for public health reasons probably focuses more on reducing harmful consumption rather than all consumption. The article cites several strategies used by the sports gambling industry (eg QR codes) that encourage addiction, and harm. You don't need to make all gambling illegal to crack down on that kind of stuff.

Ultimately the question is one of control. Complete market deregulation is arguably the worse possibility here. With illegal activity the government can control through repression, and via a public monopoly they control the quality of the product and the chain of distribution.

danielmarkbruce8• 4 years ago

It would be nice if they added to the relevant legislation that no bet can be more than negative 1% EV. There is some nuance to figuring that (and perhaps you'd have to regulate the total winnings / total wagered instead) but a decent part of the problem is that folks are making really crappy bets in most cases. Making a lot of $20 bets at -1% EV is very different than the same thing at -15% EV.

umanwizard8• 4 years ago

This would amount to banning essentially all casino games except blackjack and video poker, and would remove all decision-making from those games, forcing everyone to play perfect basic strategy or close to it.

I think gambling should be illegal, so I’d be happy for such a suggestion to be implemented, but it’s basically a more complicated and indirect way to just ban casinos outright.

pessimizer4• 4 years ago

I don't think gambling should be illegal, but I think casino games and lotteries should be illegal. The expected value is the only reason for me. When the expected value is negative, it's not really gambling.

Expected value from gambling should be zero, going slightly negative because the table and the room needs to be paid for. People making money from gambling should be making money from providing services to gamblers, not taxing the pot with a rake or a vig.

danielmarkbruce8• 4 years ago

I should have been more specific - I meant for sports betting.

That being said - there are many casino games which would work fine and leave decisions - roulette could be -1% EV with a single zero which was smaller than the other numbers. Several craps bets are close to 1% and minor adjustments could be made to payoffs.

Blackjack would be practically impossible to make work.

tqi• 4 years ago

It's weird to me that media outlets like the NYT will criticize apps like Robinhood or Duolingo for being addictive then turn around and happily take advertising money from BetMGM or FanDuel...

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/technology/robinhood-risk... 2. https://www.thecut.com/2019/04/why-breaking-a-streak-feels-s...

majormajor2• 4 years ago

The NYT will also criticize those apps, a whole lot you can find here: https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/sports-betting-daily-fant... That collection (with the not-so-sunny title "The Dark World of Fantasy Sports and Online Gambling") has various news about the industry plus features with titles like "How the Daily Fantasy Industry Turns Fans Into Suckers."

One could argue that they should accept fewer advertisers in general, but otherwise seems like nothing to see here re: RobinHood vs FanDuel or whoever. Unless there's a specific case of "RobinHood ads were rejected while FanDuel ones weren't or such" that would be more interesting...

Personally I don't really agree with the idea that a publication should be expected to have a monolithic, religious-level fervor or single-voice to their editorial positions. I would sooner want to crack down on advertising-funded publications in general.

jonathankoren2• 4 years ago

The dueling commercials for California propositions about sports gambling are such a farce. Neither prop 26 nor 27, actually talk about sports betting all, and unless you pay attention to who is paying for them, or actually read the text you wouldn’t know.

For example, https://yestoprop27.com/ does not mention online sports betting at all. It’s so deceptive.

whartung2• 4 years ago

Both are large gambling expansions. 27 is "worse" as it enables online sports betting, but all they talk up is homelessness and impoverished native tribes.

26 expands the native casinos to roulette and dice games.

It's also fair to note, that folks can vote "No" on both of them, and neither would take place. It's not "one wins if the other loses". I dunno what happens if they both "win", perhaps "biggest winner" wins.

The concern is that since sports gambling is getting more legalized, then the tribes can get their permission from the Federal Government rather than from the State, but I don't really understand the mechanics of that other than simply the State losing some aspect of control.

ec109685• 4 years ago

It’s inane. Prop 27 will provide less than 500M of state revenue / year, which is < .2% of the state budget, yet the proponents make it seem like this is a huge amount of funding.

I really wish News sources were better at putting big numbers into context.

klinskyc• 4 years ago

This article makes some inane points.

1) The SuperDome has had a corporate sponsor (Mercedes Benz) since 2011. It's not like Caesars caused them to sell out.

2) No legal Pennsylvania sportsbook is advertising (or even offering options to bet on) B league Argentinian soccer. It's very likely the gambler in the article was on a grey-area offshore sports book (e.g Bovada), and legalizing sports betting helps combat those.

3) Sportsbooks paying $18 in total on two $10 bets is known as the "hold" and it's basically a transaction cost. You could make the same argument about poker (with the rake) or stock trading commissions. If there's a cost per transaction in an otherwise zero-sum game then money is being continuously removed from the total sum.

4) When you are betting in a non-exchange context (the case for all U.S based books), the sports book is taking the other side of the bet. They may try to balance the book, or lay off bets, but they often do end up taking risk on one side. This is advantageous for the book when done correctly.

5) Sports Betting is the only gambling option where you are betting against the house in a situation where the true odds are not known pre-facto. This is very different than blackjack or roulette where the odds are known beforehand, and the house can ensure the odds are always in their favor.

6) This means that sportsbetting is hypothetically (and often in practice) uniquely winnable in the long term. If you are better at determining the true odds for an outcome than the sportsbook, then you can have positive expected value.

7) If the above wasn't true, then sportsbooks would not have to limit winning players (which frequently happens). Sports betting is basically the only gambling option where the house does not always encourage/want more betting volume from players.

umanwizard8• 4 years ago

Slight correction: blackjack is also possible to play with positive value for the player[1], and casinos routinely ban blackjack players for being too skilled. It’s also much easier to play blackjack with positive EV than to bet on sports, but it’s also trivial to detect if surveillance is paying attention, so the real game is avoiding surveillance in various ways, e.g. by never staying at the same casino for long.

1: technically this depends on the exact rules, most notably (1) how much is paid out for a blackjack (3:2 is ok, 6:5 is unplayable) and (2) “penetration”, i.e. how many cards are dealt from a shoe before a reshuffle. But it’s still very easy to find blackjack games with beatable rules.

pessimizer4• 4 years ago

blackjack is also possible to play with positive value for the player[1]

Unless you're talking about card-counting (it's fair if you are) it's not possible to "play" with a positive value for the player; doing what you have to do to get that 2% or whatever means you have to strictly run an algorithm and not fuck it up. Screw up once and that 2% is gone.

selimthegrim• 4 years ago

Side bets like insurance exist to derail this.

MonkeyMalarky• 4 years ago

Until reading the replies in this topic, I had no idea that gambling was still so controversial in the USA. From outside the country, the media portrayal makes it seem like it is broadly accepted. Is it religious morality issue? Telling people they cannot play with their money seems awfully paternalistic for a country whose image revolves around personal liberties.

syntheweave• 4 years ago

Throughout most of the US, if you turn on the radio and flick through the stations, you will hear evangelical Christian messaging.

The two faces of the country are religious Puritans and scheming confidence men. In gambling, you can find combinations of both(church lottery) and also negations(atheists against gambling). But the most common norm would be to gamble in secret and keep quiet about it for the sake of appearances.

zibby8• 4 years ago

I have no moral qualms about gambling. I just hate that every single advertisement (in the NHL at least) is for sports betting. It’s just nauseating to see so many ads for the same topic, especially when I have no interest in sports betting

As an aside, I’m surprised book makers exist in the age of betting exchanges. Why pay the book maker a cut when you can place a bet with a counter party directly?

czhu124• 4 years ago

An article like this can be written about almost every vice we have in our society.

Social media, student loans for example. What about fast food or alcohol?

Payday loans, corporate advertising, video game addictions, pornography addictions.

Does the government need to play a larger role in all these areas? It’s probably not hard to put together a compelling piece on the damage of bad parenting, perhaps the government should also have a larger role there? I argue it’s deeply irresponsible and even immoral to buy a flashy car if you can’t adequately provide for your kids, should we legislate that?

It’s not clear to me that gambling is any more dangerous than anything listed above.

It seems every week an article like this comes out and the immediate reaction is to legislate it out of existence, it’s terrifying to see how quickly people (especially a more educated audience on HN) are willing to legislate things they don’t like.

cbsmith• 4 years ago

Addiction is certainly a universal challenge.

However, there's a peculiar thing with gambling where it exploits the difficult economic realities underlying the rest of America's infrastructure.

djmips• 4 years ago

Is it really terrifying? If you are old enough you already lived through this stuff being illegal and you know what - it wasn't so bad. Having it come back inch by inch is not something I think is all that great. I actually wish for the days when society didn't want gambling.

thematrixturtle2• 4 years ago

It is quite difficult to end up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt by eating too much fast food or watching too much porn.

czhu124• 4 years ago

What percentage of people who participate in some form of gambling go on to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars? I'd argue it's also very difficult to end up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt gambling.

hahamaster• 4 years ago

Eating too much fast food can result in diseases that can cost serious money to fix.

lostdog2• 4 years ago

Yes, I do think we can come up with reasonable limits for some of these things at least.

The government already does limit bad parenting. Probably not the level you're talking about, but social services will step in if they believe kids are being abused. Personally, I think the government should do more to ensure kids have more options for peer and adult social contact outside of their cloistered nuclear family, and ditto for new mothers, and that that would help with bad parenting a great deal.

Payday loans are a big problem. People should be able to declare bankruptcy to remove predatory loans.

Fast food is causing real dietary problems. I do think we should do more to ensure people understand how what they're eating affects them. Putting nutrition information on food was a good step, and maybe we can come up with more improvements.

For sports gambling and gambling in general, I believe that anyone behind on their child support should be banned from gambling. I also believe that people should be able to put themselves on a "banned" list with a 1 month waiting period to be able to take themselves off.

Legislation gave us clean air and water, buildings that fall down much less, a monetary system that evaporates peoples' savings much less, food that isn't poisonous, schools that spread less disease, safer cars that use less gas, more power efficient homes, and on and on and on. So yes, the educated audience on HN does want to solve problems with rules and incentives.

czhu124• 4 years ago

But by this logic, why not just make it entirely illegal to gamble? Regardless of child support?

seibelj• 4 years ago

HN is paternalistic to the extreme. An entire community of people who were one of the smartest growing up, and now think they should dictate how everyone else lives their lives, using guns (I mean the government). The tut-tutting that is rampant in comments is par for the course.

Individual liberty and responsibility has always been a tough sell, but it’s still worth encouraging. Taken to its logical conclusion, no one would even be able to raise their kids given the risks to the children from a bad parent - much safer to give all children straight to the government to raise safely. After all, if even a single child is abused by a terrible parent, isn’t that too many?

cykros4• 4 years ago

I'm generally with you, particularly on the basis of non-aggression principles of libertarianism. That said, I'm not 100% sure that I actually think of all advertising as non-aggressive. There's room for a whole deep dive here on whether or not the coercion in toying with what we've learned about human psychology in the last century or so amounts to something that should be guarded against as much as physical assault, and I'm not so much weighing in one way or another but definitely looking at holding the door open for more discussion and analysis.

As far as the gambling, drugs, porn, excess shopping, and other bad habits go though, yes, any attempt to rein these in usually results in a treatment that is worse than the disease.

StanislavPetrov2• 4 years ago

Does the government need to play a larger role in all these areas? It’s probably not hard to put together a compelling piece on the damage of bad parenting, perhaps the government should also have a larger role there?

Forgive me if I don't want a government that spends a trillion+ dollars a year on endless war to be the moral arbiter of what behaviors adults are allowed to engage in.

pg_bot• 4 years ago

I think that everyone who has kids should teach them about gambling at a young age. Teach them how to play blackjack, poker, craps, roulette, sports gambling, etc. You can sneak in math lessons in a way that can be entertaining, but the greater lesson should be that the house always has an edge on the player.

While gambling can be addicting, I don't think the correct response is to make it illegal. Perhaps there should be more regulation regarding the amount you can wager within a year, but keeping things underground is IMO worse for society.

buscoquadnary• 4 years ago

That's the same reason I taught my 4 year old DND great way to learn basic mathematics

cykros4• 4 years ago

Teach your kids about gambling, AND investing (and the absolute sorcery that is compound interest).

There's no house edge when it comes to investing (especially in the days of $0 commissions), and if you're talking securities rather than derivative contracts, usually, if you lose, you don't lose your entire bet. And meanwhile, closely tracking your companies to see what's worth buying is bound to be more educational than tracking stats for an athlete, as it turns out, learning the ins and outs of how companies work can teach you about jobs that exist that you never knew about.

You almost need to be taught a good amount about gambling to see just how different thoughtful investing is from actual gambling (particularly when hearing folks less educated equate the two).

ecolonsmak• 4 years ago

Gaming should be regulated in such a way that disincentives big business conglomerates from being involved. Upwards of 70% of gaming revenues is depending on the less than 10% of problem gamblers. Should be taxed and managed to ensure the house barely breaks even. Should be organized under the tax code in its own section similar to a 501.c3 -

jccalhoun• 4 years ago

Back in 1999-20000, I worked at a casino as a cashier in the midwest. I was shocked at how many people who worked in the casino and saw first hand how the house always wins would still regularly spend their days off going to the casino down the road and gambling or spend a break on the phone to a bookie.

mod• 4 years ago

For years now, anyone who watches sports on TV or the internet has been bombarded with advertisements that insist you aren’t really enjoying the game unless you are betting money on it
How could any fan possibly have enjoyed the Patriots’ 25-point fourth-quarter comeback against the Falcons if he didn’t have “skin in the game”?

I've only bet a couple superbowls, betting on the game does, in fact, make it a lot more interesting. I'm not a pro/college sports fan, though, maybe that's relevant. (I like playing sports, not spectating)

e63f67dd-065b• 4 years ago

I’m confused why we have casinos running books for sports betting. Wouldn’t the market be much more well served by a prediction market? Buying a contract that pays out $1 at the market price seems like a much better idea than betting with a casino.

StanislavPetrov2• 4 years ago

I don't want to live in a society where the government decides what I'm allowed to do with other consenting adults because "they know better". A free society is one that allows adults to make their own decisions, even ones that are possibly self-destructive. I happen to live in New York, where I am bombarded by ads from every angle to play the state-run lottery, which is perhaps the lowest return of any popular form of gambling. These ads include pushing an app for your phone that lets you play lotto at the touch of a button. At the same time, New York State has decided it is illegal for me to play poker - a game of skill. This is the government we are supposed to trust to determine what activities and behaviors we are allowed to engage in as adults?

America’s bad bet on sports gambling

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