I'm pretty Laissez-Faire about things, but a recent interaction with gambling is making me reconsider:
My friend got a lot of free credits from the major sports books and wrote some code that he felt could generate a profit. We all threw in a little bit of money and let the program do what it does. Within a month we started doing 1k a day in profit on 3k wagered. Right as we approached 30k in profit, every major book limited our maximum wagers to pennies on the dollar, effectively making the system worthless.
So this product exists when the customer loses money, but ceases to exist when the customer makes money. It's sort of an odd product in that regard.
This is a long read, but is really insightful on how the industry really works. If you're a consistently winning bettor, you're going to get blocked pretty quickly when you're betting against the house. Why would a casino want to play a game where they don't have odds in their favor when they can just ban the sharps and feast on the casuals? With parimutuel wagering (horse racing, exchanges like BetFair-- there aren't major exchanges in the US, not enough margin for gambling lobby to go for yet) where you're wagering against other players, you won't get banned, since you're not consistently taking money from the house.
I think that should be illegal. If we are going to allow casinos to operate at all, then we shouldn't allow them to discriminate against potential customers on the basis that said customers are better at the game. If that means their business model is no longer viable, then that is their problem.
This type of thing isn't exclusive to sports betting, either. Card counting isn't cheating, but is typically prohibited (when executed successfully) in most casinos due to the edge it gives players (which has been practically eliminated with shift to 7 decks, autoshufflers, etc.). When players figure out other edges, such as imperfections in the playing card printing process that gives them an edge in games like baccarat, they'll either get banned or not paid their winnings. It is very much a heads I win, tails you lose situation.
Most strip casinos don't care at all about individual counters. They will cool you though if they see you wonging or other evidence of team play. But an individual? They really don't care. I've counted playing two hands and swinging my bets by a factor of 8 at the Bellagio. I might has well have been wearing a hat that said "Make Counting Great Again" I was so obvious. And the pit boss only asked if I'd like something nicer to drink than the well stuff and my host took very good care of me on the back end. Incidentally I didn't really win much, but that's not why I play. I like the dopamine hit from the risk, I like the sociality of table games, and I like having my host pay for the entire trip thanks to my play. It would make a terrible career, but for a weekend's entertainment it nets out to being a pretty good deal.
Interestingly, if the player doesn't maintain a proper betting strategy, he will have a considerable risk of ruin even in a player advantaged game. In a game with a 10% player edge, 28% of players managed to go bust[1]. Given the large number of rounds of betting for blackjack, without a good betting strategy, even players that count their way to a 2-3% edge are probably still going to make the casino money.
The downtown Casinos are much more uptight about advantage play, but I think that's because a lot of the pit bosses are old school and they just hate the idea of a player supposedly putting one over on them.
I've heard it said that the casinos encourage bad card counters, because someone who has a "system" that doesn't really work for them is going to lose even _more_ money playing. It's only when you start really winning that they care. The fact that you were obvious about it just made it easier for them to identify you once you won anything significant.
The table limits prevent serious losses from card counting. Information has a cost. So long as the maximum bet isn't large enough (relative to the minimum bet), on average even a perfect card counter will lose money.
I've sat at $5 tables where an old dude was openly discussing the count with the dealer. I bet when he bet and made out okay.
Counting theory is really simple stuff. Everyone does it subconsciously. Almost everyone can learn the concept of sampling without substitution. Banning such basic math seems ridiculous, but highlights that the average player is not there to win. Gambling institutions are sad places.
I think almost any card game is going to have some element of card counting unless card counting is completely impossible. It's like trying to play poker while ignoring the psychological elements of the game.
This is exactly my point. I'm not against outlawing casinos (i think you should be able to do pretty much whatever the eff you want with your body and money).
BUT if we are going to allow them, should we allow them to only let people play when they lose?
The decision to let them exist is as arbitrary as the decision to allow them to only play when they when.
Found it amusing reading this thread, thinking of gambling companies paying their lawyers to argue that gambling is "skilled based". Then, after gambling is legalized, they'd ban all of the skilled players so we'd go back to "luck based" gambling that their lawyers just argued was skilled based.
You don't go back to luck based, you stay skilled based, but the only skilled player in the room is the house.
Baseball is a game of skill. So assume the Yankees could ban every skilled player who beat them. They make bank beating little-league rookies. It makes sense to keep the competition at that skill level.
Obviously we're referring to games like Blackjack here, not roulette, which are not purely random.
>([I] think you should be able to do pretty much whatever the eff you want with your body and money). ... The decision to let the exist is as arbitrary as the decision to allow them to only play when they [win].
How do you square that with giving people autonomy? You can do what you want with your money, but you can't play if you don't feel like you are gonna win... there is an inherent contradiction there.
> How do you square that with giving people autonomy?
The Libertarian Free Market answer is that both parties need to be fully informed. Casinos would be required to post maximum win rates and otherwise fully detail their "we throw out anyone that wins" policy up-front, in a clear and easily understood format. If the casino writes a bad, exploitable policy, they go bankrupt being exploited and this encourages future casinos to do better.
The maximum win rates part is normally clear by the game (for example, for Roulette or Blackjack you can see odds) or otherwise regulated by local/government laws (e.g. for games of pure chance like slot machines).
> and otherwise fully detail their "we throw out anyone that wins" policy up-front
They can just ask the gambler to leave the premises - I cannot imagine some 'libertarian free market' solution which would force casinos to allow anyone to enter the premises and gamble (provided it's not clear discrimination). Being able to count cards isn't some sort of protected class, right?
> The maximum win rates part is normally clear by the game (for example, for Roulette or Blackjack you can see odds)
That's the AVERAGE win rate.
The maximum win rate is "if you make more than $10,000 in profit, we'll throw you out", and I've never heard of that being made explicit.
The point is that if you're going to throw out people who win more than a certain amount, you're not actually offering a fair game. There are secret rules that you haven't been told, and they very clearly bias your overall odds. You certainly shouldn't be able to advertise "you could win big!" if your policies make that impossible.
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There's clearly precent in other industries, too: If a grocery store advertises a sale on milk, they have certain obligations to offer a rain check if they run out. "According to the Fair Business Practices Act, it is unfair or deceptive if a store advertises goods without intending to sell them or to provide reasonable amounts of the advertised products without providing notice that supplies are limited."
Casinos are advertising the chance to "win big" but have no intention of ever actually paying out.
The house edge of Blackjack, depending on the rules used, is negative with skillful play (counting cards). Casinos kick out card counters. The rate at which you can win before the casino kicks you out is not public.
I'm not familiar with libertarians who are uncomfortable with hidden information. In fact, the ones I know would consider requiring casinos to post such information to be government intrusion.
its the classic hn libertarian take. empowered teens with freedom technology, saying one thing (body autonomy, no regs!) but, actually with regulations they're just smarter regulations cause I'm smart
If you are a business open to the public, you can't discriminate based on gambling skill the same way you can't discriminate against other types of customers.
FTFY: If you are a business open to the public, you can discriminate based on gambling skill the same way you can discriminate against other types of customers, so long as the basis is not a legally protected class enumerated in public accommodations law (for most businesses), or the specific law applicable to your business (for businesses in industries with indistry-specific anti-discrimination law instead of being subject to general public accommodation law.)
I believe this is a naive comment, and I have a reason to point it out. That is, what is "illegal" and not is not as bright a line as many people are taught. A deep examination of gambling systems, all of the parts, will show that this legal-vs-illegal belief on the part of the gambler, is core to maintaining order over time. Yet, game operators and their allies, know very well, and in real life can, manipulate the odds of the outcomes of the process. (edit clarify) Once a neutral observer, say people here, actually learn that part, further inquiry can show that the predation of others for profit, the physical control of common spaces, and control of life-and-death level inputs, such as weapons and their use, are also known to, and are used, by the operators. There are dozens of corollaries to this game analysis. I hope that the reader of these words, will understand them.
Well, I think I mostly agree with you in theory. But I was just thinking about something else, let's say that algorithms giving secure wins and counting cards at blackjack are allowed, people starts winning and casino start losing, they have loss and let's say that it's not convenient anymore to have a casino, and they go out of business, country loses a revenue stream for taxes, people loses their jobs, and an industry doesn't exist anymore, or it goes black and doesn't pay taxes anymore, you need to invest money in police and investigations in order to catch unregulated games houses, betting people might be or not be paid, criminality gets its way, and everything can happen.. I am not sure but I think I agree with you in theory, in practice I think we would end up fighting another unfightable underground market at even a bigger cost to human life, it's just another human dependency that you can't fight starting from casinos or dealers, you need to start it at schools
Why would a legislator make that illegal if their constituents benefit from the taxes it raises? Making it illegal would represent an errosion of their revenues...
> If we are going to allow casinos to operate at all, then we shouldn't allow them to discriminate against potential customers on the basis that said customers are better at the game
Casinos aren't common carriers. The rules should be fair, disclosed in advance and not ad hoc. But why one would force a casino to e.g. take the other side of a billionaire's bet is beyond me.
I believe the proposed rule is that you can not choose between players. That's different from allowing a maximum bet amount for all players. That is, the casino has to take the billionaires bet, but not more than the 10k limit they enforce on everyone.
A casino is entirely a creature of government. It's regulated into existence, like a bank. Why would any government entitle an entity to exist, that allows you to siphon an unlimited amount of money out of their locality?
> A casino is entirely a creature of government. It's regulated into existence,
Gambling establishments have existed in some of the places with the weakest governments around. They are not regulated into existence, and are often regulated out of existence.
It's true large casinos are often a consequence of both regulating them out of existence in neighboring areas and creating a high regulatory bar to opening one in the area in question, which minimizes competition. But that's not regulating casinos into existence, it's upregulating size by downregulating number.
Predatory tactics, facilitating addiction, not good. But what you’re saying feels to me like a rule that says you aren’t allowed to play betting games unless you take every single bet. What? Consider that for yourself. Every person on the street who walks up to you and says “I bet you that…”, you are required to take that bet? Or you’re never allowed to make a bet again? We as people pick and choose what bets we take.
True, but aren’t you allowed some discretion. Let’s say one person who walks up to you is well dressed and well respected, and the next person is an obvious crackhead with a history of defaulting on friendly bets. I’m not allowed discretion to take one of these bets and not the other? Who is making the bet matters to me, as it would to a casino. Legally I think we should be able to have discretion there. But I hate defending something like a casino. It’s shady behavior in some way.
the reader of those rules believes they are true. You are teaching others right now, that they are some kind of true, specifically in a statistical way. This thread is overflowing with examples that counter those game rules.
No. They're a list of bets you can make, and at what odds. If you think they're wrong, you can bet against the house. But you can't make up your own bets or odds, like the guy in the street from the example.
There was a period, maybe 15 years ago now, where I had my online accounts at pretty much every major UK bookmaker either closed or highly restricted. One new account had a profit of something like £350 in the first first week, and then it was heavily restricted. It wasn’t like I’d taken them for thousands! In the end, I was fortunate enough to have one contact in one bookmaker who flagged my account, allowing me to bet a decent amount for a good while (Thanks Corals!). Eventually I just shifted everything to Betfair.
In Australia bookmakers are obliged by law to stand a minimum bet size, based on the event and location (country vs metro horse racing for example). [1]
My totally inexpert understanding is that the bookie sets the line to attract bets such that he has equal exposure for both outcomes of the event and books guaranteed profits off the vig. Also there's the occasional jackpot (for the bookie) like, for example, the Canelo vs. GGG fight that ended in a split decision. In that case they got to keep the money from all the Canelo and GGG fans and only had to pay the curmudgeons who bet the coin would come up edge. For which, if I recall correctly, the odds were about 14 to 1.
Why can’t they switch to a user driven system where they don’t place bets at all but just receive bid/asks from users, like the prediction markets do? Then they don’t have to worry about bettors being better predictors than they are and can just take a cut of the flow.
Oh, then I’m not sure how the parents points (about “betting against the house”) are relevant, because sports betting (unlike casino games) doesn’t do that.
When sports betting, unless using a betting exchange such as Betfair mentioned above, or a totaliser agency, you'll likely use a bookmaker. The bookmaker is effectively the house. The bookmaker will set a market (make book) of prices on a certain event. You can choose to take the price offered and make a bet, or not. Essentially the bookmaker is pitting their skills and knowledge against yours.
The bookmaker will want all prices offered on the event to be in excess of 100%. The over round is where the bookmaker makes their profit. As an example, in a horse race, the percentage probabilities of all odds offered might add up to a total of 115%. That 15% is the bookmaker's margin.
Now, of course, the bookmaker doesn't necessarily profit in every race, but they should be trying to balance their book before the off, to insure that whatever the result they profit. They can do this by laying off liabilities with another bookmaker, shortening the odds on some runners, or just closing the book.
As a bettor, one should be trying to not just find the winner of races, but also prices which are wrong. If you assess the true odds of an event happening (let's say a horse winning) are better than the prices offered by the bookmaker, then it should be profitable to bet those prices in the long term. For example, if you think a horse has a 25% chance of winning the race, but the bookmaker is offering a price of 6/1 (7.0 or roughly 14%), then you have the odds in your favour and should make decent margin over time.
Some bookmakers (Pinnacle, Sbobet, ibcbet etc.) do just that and their odds are controlled by the amount of money being bet on either side of the handicap, but it's a completely different model and most bookmakers don't have the liquidity to do this.
Sports betting isn't exactly being against the house. In sports betting the house takes bets on both sides and then charges a percentage.
Oh wait, you seem to understand this. The op was talking about making sports bets but being against the house.
I worked as a trader for a UK based bookmaker and in reality it wasn't like that. You were betting against the house and it was very rare for us to make money on any outcome.
If anybody is further interested in this, a recent YouTube video by Spencer Cornelia went behind the scenes of a similar operation that is still running:
Arbitrage of the spread is definitely a pro bettor's goto. You don't need to care about or analyze the game at all.
Groups of them often would try to manipulate the spreads with individual bets and then go big on the arbitrage.
I remember an article where some guy thought he was getting an inside view of a pro sports bettor. I remember he sent him on a bunch of casinos to bet specific games. He didn't realize the bettor was using his budget for the story and him as a gofer to setup the arbitrage.
All the celebrity sports bettors on sports TV can't be trusted. They'll either give "mainstream" views, or are trying to manipulate the spreads in their favor. You really think they have critical insight into Southwest Regional Tech State vs University of Appalachian A&M&T women's basketball?
These numbers aren't believable. There's no way to consistently make $1k on every $3k wagered. Possibly for weeks, or even a couple of months. But there is no method of betting on professional sports that can do that over any significant time period.
If you got to the point of betting $30k a day, you were definitely going to get limited by the sports books. They also can and will arbitrarily limit the amount of money that you can withdraw. Sports books are really only designed to deal in that much money with a limited set of people who exhibit very clear patterns.
Yep, few friends gone through the same thing. Seems like a coder-finding-betting rite of passage, 'oh right i can automate this process and earn whilst I sleep!'
Nope, bookies only want to keep profitable customers, or provide some other upside to them. In the context of bookies they have limited other ways to make money but sometimes their are weird edges that pop-up, like legislated restrictions.
In Australia those running the licensed tote (totaliser) market pools on horse racing can't make the market themselves, they can't legally seed a pool, and since a tote win is a portion of the pool total customers are less inclined to bet on a low value pool, so the markets allow a few high value bettors to seed the pool for them (with generous rakebacks) which they make a net loss on, but has overall positive effect on their business.
Nah they generally make a loss on just the pool seeding bets (made by the nominated lucky few) and make it up from the rest. Generally the seeding bets end up as a small percentage of the overall pool.
I don’t get it you guys are smart enough to do this but not smart enough to bypass a simple ban? If your system is that good it should be simple to recruit proxy betters in mass to use their accounts to beat the system. Like there are whole discord communities of resellers that do that and sell their tools for really good money
It's hard to bypass a ban when you have to supply your banking information. Not to mention, going through intermediaries of proxy betters likely starts to venture into the realm of things that can land you in court.
With lots of money on the line you're probably not going to trust strangers with this, and the corporate bookmakers aggressively search for "duplicate" accounts (might vary in different jurisdictions but in Australia at least you need to provide full name, date of birth, address and government issued ID to play and withdraw - you can't fake that and you'll run out of trusted family members before too long).
Right you have to give intermediates a cut and yes they require social security numbers so hard to clone accounts but in age of discord proxy betters are readily available
Yeah. People are supposed to lose. They get cut off if they're too succesful.
Even worse is the addictive nature of it. Making money like this is like a dose of dopamine straight in the reward center of the brain. There are people who literally lose everything gambling. Even on the stock market people will make a good call on futures, get high on it and lose everything.
Beards/runners have been a thing in sports gambling for like decades. Laying bets is harder than actually picking the sides when you get to the top of the market. You should follow Spanky on Twitter and listen to his podcast.
In the Web3 ecosystem (in this context that means Ethereum and Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible, popularized by a library called web3.js), people fork the current state of the blockchain to localhost, this allows you to test your transaction with many iterations to see if it can push the chain/contract to a subsequent valid state, if successful your code switches back to the main network (mainnet) and deploys the transaction
This is perfect for bets because you get to know in advance if the inefficiency you discovered will go through. Many contracts to interact with are black boxes that could have code to limit amounts, so you get to see a few split seconds in advance and can rapidly rule out that opportunity towards another one.
not sarcasm, eventually nuanced web3 related posts will be the frequent front page articles, instead of hot takes about the parts not fulfilling their purpose and pretending its an irreconcilable issue with the concept
for sports betting and prediction markets, the main limitation is the size of the bets possible, which is pretty boring after 5 figures
so even if your bookie was pointing their oracle (api results) to a blockchain to dictate payout conditions of a contract, its still about the size of the pool based on other participants, which would probably be limited, at least initially
How do you write a smart contract that knows the outcome of a game? Presumably this means reading the results from somewhere. What happens if the wrong outcome is published and then corrected later?
> which is pretty boring after 5 figures
Why? What is the limitation? Also, is that five figures of participants, wagers, or payout? Does that five figure limitation ever change?
A five figure limitation on payout dollars is too limiting today for sports betting. Definitely after a decade or two of inflation.
The smart contract gets its state updated by trusted external APIs, in that ecosystem they are called oracles. So they would use the same one they use in their web2 system, just write the results onchain instead of just in their database or just on a tv.
And yes the low side of the market is one of the reasons why people start trading in capital markets, other ways to make money with bets are too limiting even if you find an edge. There are usually a couple places around the world with higher amounts possible.
The problem I have with this scenario re: sports betting is that it decouples the trust of scoring games and paying out bets - which is not a "feature" for bettors.
If I'm using a reputable, "centralized" sports book, they have a reputation at stake. They have more of an incentive to accurately score games than a third party oracle. If they pay out in error, they are likely legally required to eat the loss and pay the true winners.
None of that is enhanced by web3 if sports betting is legal and regulated.
Check out chainlink ( https://chain.link/ ). Effectively, third parties are incentivized to run oracles which provide the data, and they all have to come to a quorum.
This won't work as the inefficency you found will be found & exploited by generalized frontrunners when you submit it to the mempool (or any transaction that unconditionally generates profit with the current chain state), running these strats now requires cooperating with/bribing miners (as they get to choose which frontrunner won this block).
Not OP, but if I had to guess, the coder just looked for the most favorable 'prop bets' that books use to get the casuals in the door and took advantage of those favorable odds.
Not really any other way to do it without fixing games.
They were probably taking advantage of the rush of companies into the US market. It's a common market penetration tactic to offer odds that are wildly favorable to the punters for the first few months.
Not available to Americans (at least the ones unwilling to use BTC and a VPN), but Pinnacle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinnacle_Sports) is happy to take sharp bettors. If you're just arbing major US books then yeah you will get banned quickly.
Isn't this how every major betting operation works? I'm not counting lotteries because although you could argue that you are "betting" on some numbers anyone with a 6th grade education that there is no difference in expected outcomes if you choose different numbers.
Why would bookmakers ever take bets from someone they don't expect to make money from?
> Why would bookmakers ever take bets from someone they don't expect to make money from?
Well, bookmakers like to minimize their risk. So, suppose Person X is going to bet on team A, but most people have already bet on team B. The bookmaker thinks team A is far more likely to win, but he still takes the bet. Then he goes from being a gambler to having a balanced book and making a known profit regardless of who wins.
Most sportsbooks do eventually limit the bets sizes for consistent winners. But if word gets out, all you do is ban winning bettors and take on losing bettors. No one would want to play with you, and your business suffers. So it's a balancing act.
This is why the popular sportsbooks still allow big bets for reputation's sake.
There is actually a difference in expected outcomes at lottery if you choose different numbers. Commonly played number will be shared among all winners, so your share will be less than with rare numbers.
The less used numbers still have a negative expected value, but you are correct in that numbers 1-12 and 13-31 do have lower payouts because people commonly bet on dates like birthdays.
Don't be so naive to even suggest that these businesses would allow you to earn money on them.
These only exist to earn money for their owner. That's it.
Just like any other establishment, you will be thrown out if you find a way to earn money on them rather than loose your own. Any casino that notices you are earning money regularly will do the same.
Wow, that's pretty amazing. Have you considered giving it a shot in-person in Vegas, assuming it's not super high frequency? Could potentially make a lot of cash before they ban you.
we've started spreading the bets across lots of different accounts. the issue is we don't know which leg of the bet is going to be the one that profits, so you run the risk of one account winning too frequently and getting flagged.
If we did that same thing in person we would need a lot of random ass poeple. But it's definitely something we've considered.
most likely this is betting arbitrage. check the odds on different bookmakers and try to find an opportunity where you can bet on both sides and win regardless.
No, you don't do it on random. Let's say you are looking at basketball game X vs. Y.
Bookmaker A is giving odds X win 2.5 and Y win 1.33
Bookmaker B is giving odds X win 1.55 and Y win 2.10
What you do is bet on X in A and on Y in B. Let's say that you invest $2000 ($1000 in each bookie). If X wins, you loose $1000 on Y, but you win $2500 from X. Total profit = $500. If Y wins, you loose $1000 on X, but you win $2100 on Y with net profit of $100.
Free credit: Most sportsbooks give you signup bonus/free money. The caveat is that you have to make enough bets to unlock the free money. Hence drawing customers to bet more.
3k wagered: They were betting 3 thousand dollars everyday.
Limited to pennies on the dollar: Most likely a hyperbole. Most sportsbooks will eventually limit your betsizes to say $40 maximum bet on said event.
Promotion of gambling should be likened to promotion of cigarettes. It should be illegal to advertise gambling, but I don't think it should be outlawed to gamble. People should be able to choose how they live their lives, but we should do all that we can to prevent mass manipulation through adverts in industries that are known to be harmful.
I also think that alcohol and e-cig advertising should be outlawed as well.
This has been my position for a while on so called "vices". Prohibition is ineffective and often does more harm than good, but allowing companies to advertise these products to young people and those who are susceptible to abuse is a net negative for society.
Worst of all are government run lotteries. A state run lottery may be preferable to one run by organized crime, but running millions of dollars worth of ads with product tie-ins (Harley Davidson, car companies, cruises, etc.) all while claiming to "support education" is outrageous.
State lotteries are a means to shift tax burden from the wealthy to the poor. Every time one is implemented to "support education", it is always followed by a tax break for the upper class, resulting in a net 0 increase in school budgets.
I can't speak for all of this, but my wife is a teacher and in the last decade she has seen pretty much no correlation between ballot initiatives with claims about giving schools money and meaningful improvements on campus. Usually nothing changes. Other times the money has so many strings attached that whatever changes didn't need to change, and is adjacent to something that obviously did.
People like to say this because it's a nice sound-bite that lets people feel like they themselves are not among the stupid.
It ignores the reality that poverty is a causative agent for lacking the appropriate math skill to recognize that playing the lottery is not a good financial choice, and self-perpetuates that poverty.
Yeah, they figure they're going to be broke by the end of the week anyway, so might as well spend some money on the lotto and at least have the dream that they might win. They don't see a downside, because they don't see a way out of their situation.
Most people buy lotto tickets so they can spend a few minutes in blissful daydream before they come crashing back down to their financial reality. It's like a very cheap drug. It makes them feel good, so it serves a purpose. Feeling good is good.
Having read horror stories of people winning the lottery, I can't even daydream about being rich. I would much rather be an average wage-earner than have my life be destroyed by money.
Can't you just do literally nothing with the money? I think my "being rich" dream is just having my current life but instead of working living off the interest.
Ordering a pizza I otherwise wouldn't have with the money would not be my current life. It's a question of degrees. If I win a 100M lottery and do literally nothing except hand it over to my financial advisor to invest at a modest 4% return and draw a generous 500k salary from that I would still be making 3.5 million compounded compounded per year.
This is more or less how retirement works so it's a pretty well-trodden path.
If that's the heuristic for defining stupid, we better revisit auto insurance, which also has a negative expected value.
On the other hand, maybe variance and skewness (to say nothing of kurtosis) have values (and costs) which a rational analysis needs to consider. Some people might be willing to pay to shed variance, while others might pay to take it on depending on the value of their assets and their time horizon.
I buy power ball or mega millions tickets somewhat often. Like one at a time. The 10 minutes thinking about it after I buy it before I get to my office is plenty worth the $2.
The brain still has fun even knowing not going to win and just spent $2.
If you're poor as dirt, but have five bucks to spare, from a mathematical perspective, you'd be stupid to not put it down on ten-thousand-to-one odds to win 20 grand.
Five dollars won't make any difference in your situation, but twenty thousand would be a life-changing amount of money.
Unfortunately, on a meta level, it's likely that were you to win, you'd go from twenty thousand to zero sooner than you'd like.
>Every time one is implemented to "support education", it is always followed by a tax break for the upper class, resulting in a net 0 increase in school budgets.
My gut tells me tax breaks are the exception and more often than not increased revenues are simply paired with boondoggle spending because money is fungible.
Care to back up your assertion with a citation from a non-idealogue source?
PA just had a bridge fall down because the same pattern of funds redirection I described prevented their "fix the roads" gas tax hike from doing more than treading water. The pattern I described is very, very common. My own state had the same problem using cigarette taxes to fund the schools.
Wyoming used that money for a property tax repeal, and NC used that money to get rid of the educational component of corporate taxes. I don't have a good source, sorry.
Drug dealers are routinely executed in countries where the death penalty exist for drugs, it doesn't seem to stop them.
People were sentenced to 20years in prison for a joint in the US, that didn't stop most people from trying it.
And you really can't deny the "do more harm than good" part. "don't take a very small risk for your health or we will hang you" doesn't exactly seem like harm reduction.
Seems like it is much harder to get drugs in Singapore than in Seattle. Prohibition might not be absolute, but it seems effective at reducing the number of people using drugs. Is that a good or bad policy goal, and is it worth the costs? That a political question, but the answer to that is separate from whether prohibition works or not.
That's not political, it's science, statistics, facts.
Prohibition = more overdoses, more violence, more untreated addiction, younger users, richer criminals, more abuse from the police, more corruption, less incentive to educate yourself/learn a trade when you come from a poor area, more likely to be BORN addicted to drugs because your mom was terrified of getting help before/when she was pregnant, more likely to get aids, more likely to have your life completely and permanently ruined.
This whole debate can end in one word: Portugal. There is no debate really, only ignorance.
And btw it's not hard to get drugs in any city.
I don't know a place on earth where you can't get drugs in an hour or two, besides rural areas.
It's unclear that the numbers are in your favor. As far as I can tell, as of 2018, the US had 600 opiate users per 100k, Portugal had 250, and Singapore had 30.
So Portugal has twice as less addict than the US, even though drug users don't risk anything legally, while in the US using drugs once can mean decades in jail.
"Singapore has the world's highest percentage of millionaires, with one out of every six households having at least one million US dollars in disposable wealth."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore
Singapore is a 5 million people country.
Prohibition isn't the important factor here.
Dealers get shot on sight in Brazil or in The Philippines, that's not just prohibition, that's state-sponsored murder, at scale and that doesn't stop anyone.
It's not unclear if you're not looking at an extremely small subset of extremely rich and privileged people.
"Always" as in 1972 - after nearly a century of suffering the aftereffects of the opium wars. The Singapore Economic Development board predates the harshest drug laws by a decade and when the law came into effect, Singapore was already well into its economic miracle.
Singapore has only been independent since 1959. The date you gave is when the Misuse of Drugs Act was introduced. They still had harsh punishments prior to that through the legal system. Like I said earlier in the thread, whether the benefits are worth the costs is a political question, but prohibition appears to work in Singapore. By the way, since you brought up the Opium Wars, Mao also basically eliminated the production and use of opium by using harsh repressive measures as well. It's why most poppy production now takes place in the Golden Triangle. Just prior to 2001 the Taliban also basically eliminated poppy production in Afghanistan, but the US invasion led to the reversal of that.
Yet, Singapore had a death rate due to opioid overdoses of 0.16 per 100'000 inhabitants and Portugal 0.25 per 100'000. I'm sure if you'd include the draconian punishments in Singapore, then there is a clear winner in which country does the least harm to its citizens.
The harm we are reducing is decreasing the amount of drug users, and the attendant crime and degradation that comes with them, within the environment that non-drug users have to live in.
We'd be reducing the harm to them and in a subjective way, to the overall community. That some people's "harm" will increase is obvious but this is a price many are willing to pay to achieve a better society for themselves.
In summary, "we will hang you" isn't "harm" but justice, and the solution to the "harm" that needs to be decreased.
> it doesn't seem to stop them
Sure it does, it decreases overall drug use, where it is harsh enough.
>that didn't stop most people from trying it.
Did it decrease overall drug use vs when these laws were relaxed? Yes. Mostly though the penalty for drug dealers needs to be harsher. Additionally, there is a hierarchy of drugs, and in US the biggest problem is hard drugs / opiates. We should focus enforcement and punishment efforts at those, while also not enabling the addiction of users.
>In summary, "we will hang you" isn't "harm" but justice
Most of the harm coming from drug use is coming from prohibition.
Hanging drug users or drug dealers is not justice, it's a bigger crime than any type of drug deal.
>Additionally, there is a hierarchy of drugs, and in US the biggest problem is hard drugs / opiates. We should focus enforcement and punishment efforts at those, while also not enabling the addiction of users.
And this have absolutely nothing to do with drugs dealers.
This problem was created by the likes of Purdue Pharma. Jailing drug dealers does absolutely nothing to stop Americans from getting hooked on opiates
Hanging drug dealers isn't worse than the harm they cause to the community, and many individual lives.
>Purdue Pharma
Regulation against them and restrictions on opiates has helped to decrease that form of opiate use.
Obviously, Purdue Pharma executives should be harshly punished, much more than they have been. Why shouldn't they? They perpetrated a great crime and suffering, willingly lying and causing addiction, to so many people. That they should suffer for it and that there is a great need to deter other drug companies / doctors from doing the same is abundantly clear. It is not mutually exclusive from also targeting street drug dealers of fentanyl and other synthetic opiates which is the problem now though.
So, what, that guy that sold weed before legalization caused more harm from his actions than hanging him would cause, and yet we've legalized it and everyone is fine with it now?
Or perhaps It's all arbitrary and decided by laws and the actual harm doesn't necessarily map directly onto illegal activity. If that's the case, maybe we should be careful about statements that hanging a drug.dealer causes less harm than they cause to communities.
Direct sale of water could be regulated, making people that sell it without license criminals. You'll have a hard time convincing me that selling water provides harm, but there would be just as much reasoning behind a statement saying as much.
Let's deal with the immediate problem of opiates, meth and other hard drugs, the addiction of which is ravaging cities where drug users are a blight on society with their tent cities, needles, feces, crime, vandalism, assaults, robberies, etc.
You don't want to focus on that you want to misdirect to weed and.... water? What the hell does this dumb analogy have to do with anything in reality?
I point is that you say "drug dealer", when that's an arbitrary label that's dictated be laws and societal norms and acceptance, and then talk about it like there's well known harm from "drug dealers". The fact of the matter was that until a few years ago people selling weed were treated like those selling much harder drugs, and Federally they're still not in the clear. The fact that the label you're using is so loosely defined and applies to such a disparate set of people, and the crime they are saddled with is often so arbitrarily decided should give you pause when using it in a general statement about reducing harms.
Saying "drug dealers" and "drug users" without quantifying which drugs and how harmful they are is just an easy way to ignore real aspects of the problem so it can be reduced to a simplistic model that is easy to make statements about, even though we all know that to actually follow through on the suggestions is folly, because the real people and real specifics of their problems make that untenable. So why bother with the simplistic arguments that we all, even you, know are bullshit and can't be followed through on?
Not OP, and not advocating it, but I suspect with respect to drugs the problem isn't the amount of punishment. It's the liklihood of punishment. Imagine a dystopia where everyone takes a drug test every day, and if someone fails they go to jail. It seems likely drug use would plummet due to enforcement (and special ways to get around it would spring up for the select few).
Well, yes I am. But is that relevant to the question at hand: if the punishments were more severe, would they decrease drug selling/use?
How about if we banned Narcan, do you think that would affect the total number of opiate addicts long term?
What if we cut off the hands of drug dealers? Or applied the death penalty to drug dealers?
What if we rounded up all the addicts that commit so many crimes in cities today, and degrade the quality of life with tent cities strewn everywhere, and threw them all into the ocean...do you think that would decrease drug use?
Of course it would. What I'm pushing back against is the absurd claim that the problem is intractable in terms of "decreasing some behavior through disincentivization", which isn't true.
Yes I think cutting off arms would discourage drug use to some extent, but I think the price is too high. At some point a policy like that creates more suffering than it prevents. From your example on throwing people into the ocean, it sounds like you agree that a tradeoff exist here. Unless you actually think killing drug users is a good solution to reduce drug use?
The question was never whether it was possible to curb drug use with the legal system (that seems like a straw man), but whether the cure is worse than the disease, or whether an alternative cure might be better.
Not true and there are many in this thread and elsewhere for years on the internet saying exactly this.
Thank you for conceding my point against the ridiculous argument that "prohibition is ineffective"... that no it is, it's only a matter of degree of punishment, which is what I said.
>more suffering than it prevents
This only matters in some utilitarian conception where all net suffering or utility or whatever is created equal.
No, I think drug dealers suffering is not the same as suffering of normal people wanting to live their lives in a productive and healthy way for their community. But this is what politics is for, conflict over interests, values, worldviews, and societal preferences.
It's also what all of criminal law deals with: justice for crimes isn't viewed the same as suffering of law abiding people or victims.
>a tradeoff exist here
Like the tradeoff exists for the death penalty of murders in that justice for that crime requires "harm" to be inflicted on the perpetrator, yes. But this isn't that profound of a concept.
> Thank you for conceding my point against the ridiculous argument that "prohibition is ineffective"
It depends what you mean by effective and ineffective. Nuking San Fransisco would prevent tons of drug use, but is not an effective way of solving society's ills.
> This only matters in some utilitarian conception where all net suffering or utility or whatever is created equal.
Drug laws not only hurt drug users, but further criminalize nonviolent users who commit more crimes, fund organized crime (here and especially in other countries), cost billions of dollars to society in court systems, prisons, police officers, and lost productivity.
If your solution to that is literally kill people without a trial for drug use then some of those clearly wouldn't apply, but that's honestly a pretty sick worldview. I'm not sure if you're younger or maybe lived a more sheltered life and weren't exposed to drug users or similar groups of people, but you might change your tune if you knew someone affected by it (whether they were a user or the parent/child/spouse/friend).
I wonder what you think of other countries which have much lower rates of drug abuse yet don't impose punishments as harsh as the US?
> I wonder what you think of other countries which have much lower rates of drug abuse yet don't impose punishments as harsh as the US?
It’s because their currencies aren’t as powerful. Drugs are a commodity sold in USD like oil. The USA has the easiest access to USD so drugs come here as the product-market fit is optimal for both distributors and users.
Are you sure? To me it seems like USA has the highest rate of drug abuse and the higher rate of drug deaths and drug abuse disorders in the world. It is possible more people use drugs in other countries, but in that case they use it more responsibly, or their overdose deaths aren't properly registered, either way there is no evidence that other countries have a bigger drug problem than USA.
Look at the map in that link you posted, Greenland, Canada, Russia etc are all high. It's a long page, what exactly are you referring to to disagree with me?
That data probably isn't super relevant to this argument though, since it includes alcohol. I don't think alcohol is more easily available in the US than those other countries because of the USD.
You're describing the 'toddler having a meltdown in the grocery store because they want candy' course of action which I'll admit may have some sort of positive results in some situations but is more than likely to have massively unexpected consequences for the initiator.
We'd all like to feel like it was as simple as expressing our dislike at a situation to fix it, that solving problems is as simple as applying a linear amount of force that is proportional to the size of the problem but the world isn't like that.
Drug addiction, Organized Crime, racism, sexism, global climate change are all examples of Wicked Problems[0] and no amount of force behind a whimsical edict is going to solve them.
Prohibition aides and cultivates an underworld which operates outside the bounds of legality.
Rather put a high tax, like tobacco products, do the state can make a boatload of money from vices rather than enriching the criminal underworld and indirectly funding illegal guns, sex trade, rackets etc...
Anecdotally, my own country banned alcohol and cigarette sales during the first lockdown. The black market rose from nowhere and made a filthy amount of money. You can guess whether or not the violent crime rate has increased of decreased.
I spent some time in Montana and was shocked to see how many businesses have "casinos" attached to them. I never got to look inside but I think these are basically a small room with a few slot machines. They were everywhere. For example, I ate at a chinese restaurant and there was a side room advertising poker and keno.
I came away feeling like there was a web that would catch every single person in the state who had a predilection for gambling addiction.
The weirdest sign I saw was attached to a gas station casino: "Weekly grand prize jackpot: $50." That was hard to parse coming from tech salaries that a $50 grand prize would motivate anyone.
Growing up in Las Vegas, it was common for me to see a slot machine room in grocery stores and gas stations. Most movie theaters, bowling alleys, restaurants, etc were in the casinos. I've known a few people with gambling addictions, and it's definitely not easy with slot machines every where you go. But the casinos pay the State's bills, so it's easy to see why regulation is hard to come by.
Cook county IL (the county that encompasses Chicago) legalized some forms of gambling (not in Chicago). Gas stations, bars & even hair salons now have game rooms in them.
I find it pretty sad as there is no glamor at all in dunking dollars into bad slot machines at a shell station. But I didn’t find the scratch off tickets they sold at the counter glamorous either.
These are interesting reads regarding slot parlors in Illinois. It gets repeated in every locale that legalizes slots. Big promises of increased tax revenues, then the actuals are 10%-30% of the forecasts, but by then the horse is already out of the barn. I've looked at a few state level gaming commission data sets and backed out the math, and even in backwoods areas, penny slot machines generate $20/hr average ($240/day) in gross income (even though they're called penny slots, you can easily lose $20 in under 60 seconds based on speed of play, number of lines and bet sizing-- all of which are heavily optimized to trigger reward centers in the brain), so even with expensive $5-10k machines, the recovery time is pretty low, so they'll just metastasize as much as legally allowed.
I was just visiting Louisiana this weekend and it was insane to me that they have so many ads (and news piece advertising) for online sports betting on broadcast television.
"You know how they advertise a casino, they always show a guy winning money, but that’s false advertising. Because that’s what happens the least. Perhaps when they advertise a hamburger they could show a guy choking. This is what happened once."
I honestly agree with you, but am worried about the precedent it would set. If you start banning stuff because of addiction, does it apply to things like soda or fast food? Would it apply to things like baseball cards or other collectables?
This is a really tricky problem, as there is clear evidence that these things hurt society as a whole, but it's hard to draw the line who is making deliberate choices about their gambling/smoking/drinking, and who is hooked.
Is there a politician somewhere that will try to ban Facebook because of the 'addiction' potential? I'm usually not much of a slippery slope guy, but it does seem weird, especially since a lot of this would be done by regulation, not legislation.
Idk people say its hard to draw the line but it doesn't seem like it would be. Here's the line: no advertising for cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, e-cigs. Why this line? these are pretty obviously unhealthy for people. Why not some other line? Well lets take a poll and see what we are willing to do. And then if people think it is important to ban other types of advertising then that can be a new line drawn later.
E-cigs? If you don't use shady THC oil juice from overseas, there is absolutely no proof that they are more dangerous than, say, smoking weed or even obesity. The lung injury incidents that made the news 2 years ago were due to illegally imported juice that was contaminated with vitamin E IIRC.
Many middle schoolers are becoming addicted to nicotine because they think smoking a juul is "cool" because of the sleek Apple-like advertising they have put out over the past 5 years. That is why I think they should be banned from advertising. It is the exact same thing as what happened with cigarettes in the 60s and 70s.
We don't have to make a blanket statement that covers all cases. I don't see how this is a slippery slope when there is so much friction to get even one of these industries banned from advertising. Do you really think politicians will ban CAR advertisements? Let's be reasonable about this
EDIT - Okay I think I see a concrete reason why gambling advertising should be illegal. The gambling industry makes money by negatively affecting people i.e. gambling wins if you lose. That's literally it. The gambling industry does not make money when their users win. They are specifically advertising so that more users lose. The car industry makes money by providing you a utility. The car industry is not advertising so that more people die in car crashes. But gambling on the other hand _is_ advertising to get more people to lose.
I think that our society is sleeping on the effects advertising has on people and we should take a really hard look at how we permit corporations to attempt to change people's behaviors, in particular for products that are known to contribute seriously to massive society-wide problems like obesity.
* Should I be allowed to ruin my health with cigarettes?
* Should I be allowed to make money selling cigarettes?
Tobacco companies prefer that you ask the first question, but it's really the second question which is interesting. We may, if we wish, say yes to the first and still say hell no to the second.
It doesn't even have to mean national monopolies. We can allow microbreweries and cigar makers and cannabis greenhouses and what have you to flourish, but just aggressively restrict their rate of profit. So that if you get into those things, we know you're not doing it to get rich off others' suffering, because you accept that you'll only make a basic living off it (at best).
I for one would be totally OK with that, and I think that if the profit motive was successfully removed, things like alcohol consumption would drop like a stone, even if alcohol was cheap.
No system is perfect. Laws are made to protect the majority, not the minority. It takes a lot of effort individually to find out what is ethical, and education seldom teach these.
Freedom of religion and separation of church and state helps create a collective conscience to enact laws, but at the end it comes down to each individual's responsibility to search for the truth - an effort that advertising can easily tamper with. We could use more stringent laws for advertising.
Note that the gaming and crypto industries have parallels with gambling, both targeting the younger population (least able to control addictions)
Disney (a media conglomerate) was initially opposed to sports betting, but once covid hit their bottom line, they turned to this opportunity once it was legal.
Every movie, series or other thing where people grab the bottle to handle their heartache, happiness or socializing is an advertisement that you should drink.
It's going to need a huge transformation in society to change those advertising channels. Just like the movie cig industry was a long term process.
So you’re saying artists should be regulated on their expression of the human condition? Are people so dumb that they see a movie and think “oh I should drink to handle stress”? Or is it because it works short term?
I agree, though clearly some forms of advertising is fairly natural and nearly impossible to eliminate completely. Basic business signage is advertising, but it provides reasonable value at low cost to society (assuming the signage is reasonable, not giant McDonalds arches). The most harmful advertising seems to be third party advertising where one party is paid to show advertising to someone else.
I've noticed they go hand in hand. Fast food or junk food ads showing amazing looking food that doesn't actually look that way, insurance ads to make sure you're a little worried, and then medication to solve many of the ills from eating junk food.
I’m glad to see a report on this - I hate to see the NFL actively promoting gambling with their biggest stars lining up for the commercials. I’m sure in their eyes it will “promote” the game but it will ruin the lives of many. My grandfather had a gambling problem and was an easy mark in his latter years - something like this would have been a dark pit of cyclical losses and broken relationships
agree - I suspect that people who have not seen a full, social gambling disease to its real extent, do not appreciate the depth of its impacts on everyone involved.
The biggest problem IMO is that it is impossible for the sports industry to go all-in into betting while also remaining neutral as far as the games themselves go.
What do you mean by modern? My understanding is that the rise of index funds has been the biggest trend in this space over the past 20-30 years. Riskier bets like individual stock picking, or "experts" that con others with dubious ways of predicting the future, have been around forever.
* All stock market stuff feels modern, because 15-year-olds don't talk about it but 25-year-olds do. So it feels like something that wasn't really around/popular when you were young.
* Some would say retailer investors who want to buy individual stocks should be holding them for the long term - and that a mobile app, letting you trade on the go, is an anti-feature.
* The rise of Reddit's Wall Street Bets, who glorify moves that seem really dumb.
* The rise of Cryptocurrencies, and/or their marketing to unsophisticated investors. If I put my entire life's savings into Dogecoin, does that mark me as someone so dumb you should save me from myself?
Apps like robinhood encourage and even gamify frequent trading at the expense of naive investors and because that's where brokers make money. Coinbase and their ilk do the same in the crypto market. Frequently trading stocks, and doing anything in crypto is just as much gambling as betting on a sports game, appeals to the same demographic, and is just as destructive.
Yes, stock picking and penny stock scams have been around forever, but it has never been so easy.
Coinbase exposes an api that lets you do some pretty interesting and powerful strategies. Let's see a bank do that. No, seriously, I'd sign up tomorrow for a bank like that.
Mobile apps have made it easier for people to do sensible strategies like dollar cost averaging. Fractional shares, recurring buys, and no fees were not something easily accessible to your average retail investor before mobile apps began introducing these features.
One of the greatest professional shames of my life was being part of a fantasy sports for profit startup. We received tens of millions of funding from a company that is one of the major sport book operators in Las Vegas. What I first thought would be a fun way for friends to play with a little more "skin in the game" exposed me to some very bleak and dystopian ways that technology could be used to extract resources from those who could least afford it.
I suppose it is no surprise to anyone semi-aware of how casinos operate that the house will always win. Would it be a surprise to learn that the data being generated by fantasy sports app customers were being used to actively create situations where they would lose, or at least reduce, the amount of their winnings? It shouldn't be.
I feel as if I comment with too much detail, I may be contacted by the Attorneys General of various states. In the early days, things were totally unregulated. Odds, statistics and other variables could be adjusted or manipulated. Automated accounts could hedge against, or join with, elite players. All trades, team compositions, trends and statistics were visible internally. Think of all the ways that one could abuse high frequency trading and apply them to sport betting. It could be very ugly.
I travel a lot on Europe (at least pre covid) and one of the worst social trends has been the spread of betting agencies, especially the aptly named Ladbrokes but a number of others too. They shoele up mostly in the poorer parts of big cities and suck the money out of poor people hoping for a break. I saw them largely first in England, then Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and noe pretty much everywhere.
They even look sad, just a bunch of screens showing sport, with machines to punch in your order. Often bars on the windows, or at minimum lots of cover so you can't see who is inside. Floors covered in dirt and betting slips, and mostly young to middle aged guys hanging around and looking absolutely always absolutely miserable.
Good public policy bans these places or at minimum taxes them so hard (and closes all the loopholes) that it isnf profitable anymore to fleece the poor addicted fools.
Shame on anyone perpetuating these businesses, buying stock in these companies, allowing them to rent their shop front, etc. At least national lotteries fund culture or other worthy causes, but nothing good at all comes from these places. Just miserable bankrupt families and heartbreak.
I moved from the UK quite a number of years ago, and whenever I return to my home town, there are steadily more shops like this -- often multiple agencies on the same street. More affluent areas get coffee shops and estate agents. Less affluent: betting shops, and lots of them.
Are you kidding wrt lottery? People will spend their whole paycheck on scratch offs. What culture do they fund? There is no tangible difference between a casino and a lottery except that you tend to get better odds in a casino.
> Wagering on sports is “endemic and acceptable and so mainstream that it is now a major pillar of American entertainment,” said Timothy Fong, one of the directors of the gambling studies program at U.C.L.A.
A rhetorical technique: Make the problem seem inevitable, make any opposition seem powerless. Then make the question about the rest of society adapting to it - everyone has to adapt so the gambling industry can make money. It's becoming the same thing with climate change and the fossil fuel industry (and related vested interests).
I mean, would you say the "we've lost the drug war" falls into that rhetorical technique? Is that just saying "everyone has to adapt so the pot industry can make money?"
Or "pandemics are inevitable, we can't contain them, so everyone has to adapt so the pharma industry can make money?"
Seems like calling out that form as a "rhetorical technique" is not useful in determining the quality of the argument.
Do you think sports gambling is not inevitable? Because until relatively recently, it was illegal in the US outside of Vegas and it still very much happened. Whether it was a local bookie or offshore betting websites, anybody that wanted to gamble already was. The only difference is that none of it was taxed.
Are you saying the volume of gambling hasn't and won't increase? My impression is quite the opposite, but I could be wrong.
I don't think it's inevitable at all. We could make it illegal again; it was that way for a long time, until very recently, and the change was due not to politics but a court decision.
I can confirm that sports betting is also slowly eating away at what is left of the game of football (soccer, for US HN-ers) over here in Europe.
We’ve got the English Premier League and the Champions League that are (maybe) still free of this cancer, as in (maybe) their results and general play are as close to 100%-fair as one can get, but outside of that it’s the Wild West.
The second leagues in most of Central and Eastern Europe (I used to go to such matches before the pandemic) are pretty much a fantasy league for betting, there’s almost no sporting merits anymore when it comes to the game itself. The situation persists if one goes higher up the chain and further West, maybe not as dramatic and especially not as visible but if you know where to look and how to look at things it all becomes clear(er). In other words the game is pretty much gone, to paraphrase a famous /r/soccer meme.
And I didn’t go into the incredibly high psychical toll this phenomenon has on the people who are actually addicted to this s*it (pardon my French). I saw a close friend of mine going through it relatively recently and is hell, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, not even on my biggest enemies.
Celebrity culture is another major factor. Players are now becoming famous for being famous soccer players, like the Kardashians. It's irrelevant if they can play or not.
How many followers you have on Instagram is now more important than how many goals you score.
Yeah, I can only remember Rashford and Lingard trying that approach earlier in their careers but they quickly stopped it once their performance quality dipped
It's not like either of them have been well managed the past few seasons. They were skilled enough to catch the attention that brought them to where they are. Maybe they focused too much on the attention and less to what got the attention in the first place. That's unfortunately part of the gaffer's job to manage the players off the field as much as the tactics on the field.
Are you saying that players are throwing games due to sports betting? Can you give an example? I'm not doubting you, I have never followed football so I have no idea, I'm just curious. Especially about your statement "...if you know where to look and how to look at things it all becomes clear(er)".
It's in Romanian, because this is the league I follow, but something like this [1], maybe Google Translate can help, basically a player (incidentally, playing for the team I follow) letting in a goal just because (the goal on YT in here [2]). Maybe that was still because of a genuine mistake, but searching for "pariuri site:https://liga2.prosport.ro/" returns many other articles related to suspected betting in the Romanian second league.
Also, at a (much) higher level club owners like Napoli's De Laurentiis might be crazy enough (I do personally see him capable of that) to be directly involved in this sort of stuff.
There was a very suspect thing happening at the end of last season in Italy, basically Napoli needed a (relatively easy) home win in the last stage against a smaller opponent which had nothing to gain anymore, but they didn't, the match ended 1-1 [3], so Juventus (one of Napoli's biggest rivals) got their CL place instead. As a Juventus fan I saw that as very, very suspicious, especially as I could have sort of guessed beforehand that that sort of thing would happen.
And before anyones says: "no Serie A club owner would do such a highly illegal thing!" a couple of months ago Sampdoria's (now former) club owner got arrested because of some other illegal shenanigans (afaik not betting-related)
Matter of time? The World Series has already been thrown, it was called the black Sox scandal and as far as I know it didn’t even require sports betting to be legal
Legal sports betting makes it less likely to have the game thrown. The Athlete salaries far outpace the potential gains of an individual bettor so you need bookmaker involvement but the legal books are so large that they don't won't one-sided games or any particular outcome. They are able to balance their books and make money like never before by keeping an even line.
It's only when the house is constrained in their ability to balance that fixing matches make sense. Even 10 years ago my local bookmaker use to fly to Panama on big weekends with a suitcase of cash to lay off, now he just uses a few apps on his phone.
Something small might get corrupted but I doubt the rate for major events would be any higher.
> Legal sports betting makes it less likely to have the game thrown.
Wow, that is Orwellian.
> The Athlete salaries far outpace the potential gains
That's only true for a few top athletes, and ignores others (referees, coaches, etc.), and the fact that careers are short. For example, in American football, you only have to buy a kicker or long snapper, who can easily change the game (as long as it's reasonably close). NFL referees aren't even full-time employees.
> you need bookmaker involvement but the legal books are so large that they don't won't one-sided games or any particular outcome
After seeing all the brazen fraud and deceit in American (and other) business, costing lives, tanking the global economy, causing climate change, fixing LIBOR, pushing crypto scams, etc. etc., we should believe that bookmakers would never take that risk? They must be an especially risk-averse, honest group!
Referees in all the top leagues still get paid average salaries yet they are the most powerful person on the field. They are the point of failure in modern sports
Maybe other leagues pay less, but mean NFL referee salary is about $200k. I suspect it wouldn't be cheap to pay one of them off, since getting caught risks prison time, damages, and millions in future income lost.
City councilmembers in my city are paid about as much and the price for them is apparently only like 20-50k cash for quid pro quo that could land them prison time, according to the FBI investigations from the ones who got caught at least. That's nothing compared to what could be gained.
You have to look at it relatively. Fine the ref is getting paid $200k, but the owners in the box seats are worth billions, the gamblers in the front row seats are worth hundreds of millions, and the players are worth tens of millions. Any of those guys can slip the ref a life-changing amount of money if they really wanted to.
Imagine the NFL learns that yesterday's NFC Championship game was fixed. What would they do? Make it public and destroy their entire enterprise? My guess is that many would hide it if they could, and the people involved certainly wouldn't want to talk about it.
And imagine if they learn about it in 6 months, long after the Super Bowl. Just in terms of on-field results, how do they fix the problem? Take back the trophy from a team and city that thought they won it six months ago? Replay the game in August?
You can see what happens in an already dying sport that has its largest event tainted by a cheater (KY Derby & Bob Baffert). The cheater sues the company that issued a temporary ban due to his cheating. The fans are in the wind, the horse is now deceased (probably attributable) and the offender will probably end up with a shorter ban/wrist slap. He, and others, have been caught numerous times for the same types of offenses, but it normally gets swept under the rug until it boils over and hurts the sport even more by occurring on the largest stage of the year.
How many of those skied shots, sliced shots, etc were bad skill or skillfully done to ensure the line was what was needed/required?
It's a pandora's box to start looking at everything a professional athlete/ref/manager does through that lens. It's even worse if you've never done it yourself to see how easy it is to do the wrong thing that causes one to look amateurish.
Did I just get a promotion to CAS[0]? Time to update my CV. I feel special. Time for me to start accepting bribes.
It's sport. It's humans. There is no solve. People want to do it, they will find a way to do it. There are other people that will take advantage. To the point that those in charge of $sportingEvent (FIFA, Olympics, Cycling) all "fall victim".
People say that about a lot of things, but we humans have moved out of caves, created science, machines, governments, freedom, etc etc. We can do something about our condition.
You're right, maybe it's all rigged. Maybe the 2020 election was rigged too, and 9/11 was an elaborate case of insurance fraud. Maybe birds aren't real. But unless there is evidence for these types of claims, there's no reason for anyone to take them seriously.
This is hilarious because when this exact scenario played out with the MLB with the astros and the red socks not too long ago this is pretty much what happened. It certainly soured a lot of fans on the integrity of the league.
One of the best ways of knowing is by analyzing a large number of bets made punters from multiple sports books - it's easier to spot irregular betting patterns in this regard.
Interesting and it seems powerful, but there is plenty of fraud in the securities markets and they are much higher stakes and more closely regulated than gambling.
At the highest level there is so much money involved in playing the game straight that it's probably not worth it.
Look at the comments here on lower levels and College sport in the US. Where people are not getting paid much then even small bribes (say $5K) can work easily.
In the Premier League and what preceded it there was a betting scandal about people betting on the first thrown in of a game.
FWIW drugs at the highest level soccer is quite probably a thing. Quite a number of the drug doctors from the Tour De France wound up at top European Clubs (particularly Spanish ones). Modern pressing uses heaps of running and fitness.
I think it’s unlikely a game that high profile would be the target of a betting scheme. Much more likely some everyday regular season games, or even specific portion of a game are manipulated. You can bet on things that are way more in your control to win if you have that kind of influence such as a single players performance over a game, one quarter/inning, one hole of golf, etc
Since covid started, it seems like every other commercial these days is for either sports betting (FanDuel, DraftKings) or online casinos (all of the big casino companies have an 'online' counterpart)
They all advertise some sort of $100 risk-free bets or something of that nature.
Was this some sort of concession to physical casinos since their customers weren't able to come on-site and gamble?
Yep, it's unrelated. In Michigan, in-person sports betting became legal the very same day the NBA paused their season due to Covid. Online was always going to come after that, and took about 10 more months before it opened up. There wasn't any particular rush.
All I know is that here in the Netherlands, online gambling used to be illegal but it was legalized somewhere last year. Now advertisements for this stuff are also allowed, because "people need to be made aware of the legal offerings" (in contrast to the illegal ones).
History will I believe judge the Roberts court harshly for all the negative effects and misery it has caused in the 2010s. The gutting of campaign finance reform means politicians are effectively owned by PACs and corporations now. Gutting the Civil Rights Act because "we don't need Federal preclearance anymore" (followed quickly by 20+ states quickly enacting the kinds of voting restrictions the Civil Rights Act was intended to curb). And of course the accessibility of gambling in the form of sports betting.
It should be clear that gambling is really bad for some people. Gambling addicts have the highest rate of suicide of any addicts [1].
Most people either don't gamble or can gamble responsibly. What kept this system in check was that gambling was relatively inaccessible in our daily lives. That provided a useful barrier to entry. It's simply too convenient for people who can gamble on their phones while waiting for their Starbucks.
This became an issue on Twitch last year with the rise of gambling (ie slots) streams. Some streamers defended it as entertainment (never mind that they're getting paid millions of dollars). But we restrict access (or at least convenient access) to many activities that can become more problematic if they're too convenient. Liquor licensing, age restrictions, locations of venues, that sort of thing.
We've seen this in Australia with poker machines ("pokies" aka slot machines). In the Eastern States social clubs, pubs and the likes can have them. And they make a fortune. This creates huge gambling problems and has for decades. By comparison, Western Australia does not have pokies and is better off for it.
Sports betting is gambling really no different to slot machines. It's slightly better because there's not the immediate feedback loop and there is some skill but it is gambling and easy access to it is bad for many people.
>The gutting of campaign finance reform means politicians are effectively owned by PACs and corporations now.
Whoah now, you're saying that documentaries critical of Hillary Clinton shouldn't be able to be legally distributed? Because that was the origin of Citizens United
It’s a non-sequitur to lead from the cause of the case to the decision handed down. The Court always has the ability to moderate its opinions. One can simultaneously believe that a documentary should be able to be distributed within range of an election and also that money is not a form of speech, or that corporations do not have the same speech rights as people.
Pace people who believe oral arguments don’t make any diffence because justices just read the brief (ahem Thomas), Paul Clement’s terrible performance in the oral argument for the government pretty much sealed the fate of Citizens United.
What is the rising human cost? The only real data they presented was that sports betting is now legal in 30 states when it used to only be legal in Nevada. Gambling and other addictions have always had a societal cost.
It's not a 1:1 comparison. For one thing, the regulations are different. There are few if any restrictions on online gambling advertising, whereas alcohol ads are disallowed from using imagery that might appeal to children, can only be run in places where at least 70% of viewers are adult, etc.
But more importantly, the nature of the product and the intent of the creators is different. Alcohol vendors for the most part don't want people to get addicted to alcohol, and most of their revenue doesn't come from addicts (90% of American adults drink at least socially).
Gambling, and gambling advertisements, are deliberately designed to hook people to it as an addiction. Only 25% of Americans regularly gamble, and just 2% of gamblers produce 50% of industry revenue.
While the statistics for alcohol consumption may not be as drastic as gambling, a large percentage (>20%) of alcohol revenue comes from heavy drinking. Here's a study from the UK.
Also, what makes you think alcohol vendors don't want addicts? My impression is that while they don't actively promote alcoholism, they mostly don't care.
> Gambling, and gambling advertisements, are deliberately designed to hook people to it as an addiction.
What do you think all the $500-1000 "free cash starts" that the NFL is constantly advertising are supposed to do? There's a reason that free loosies were banned in the Tobacco Control Act of 96. For-profit companies don't give stuff away for free unless they think they'll get way more than that back from a portion of freebie recipients.
Here in Australia we have some very aggressive sporting companies, which very much to try to play it into the culture of our sports.
Watching our biggest sporting event last year the AFL Grand Final, during each ad break there was a live update of the betting odds. In addition, to the sponsorship of the betting companies around the stadium.
It's sadly quite normalised here. Melbourne Cup. Betting odds broadcast alongside sport. Retired athletes spruiking. Pokies as an adjacent issue.
I know a 40ish yo mother who won't watch an AFL game without a bet on. I'm guessing she does it to make the games more interesting. Rarely seems to bet on the game result, but on quicker/earlier exotics like first goal.
Always felt like fantasy sports comps were a positive way to build on games. I've had fantasy comps with friends or randoms where they've created great conversations and community. However, it seems like those are increasingly trending to draw money and payouts rather than glory or a voucher from a sponsor.
People smoke cigarettes, they drink alcohol, they bet. All are losing propositions in multiple ways. There is no scenario where you can stop any of it. You can make it harder and more costly but they will do it anyway. Some gamblers have discovered the stock market (especially call options) as a way to bet. The nice thing about that is your downside can be limited and nobody is going to "shut you down" like a casino if you win too much. I'm not a big casino gambler but I know how to play blackjack (not counting) and have won enough to be shadowed and proofed every 5 minutes in a casino to bother me when I was young. They send a clear message - your loses are unlimited but your gains are capped!
Or, instead of declaring war on it, you can regulate it like we do with legal drugs. Ban advertising in most venues, print a disclosure of the dangers on every ad and over the door of every establishment, treat it like the danger it is.
That is because high return games trigger gambling addiction. It is even illegal to run lotteries with too high returns in many places for this reason, casinos doesn't have high returns to be nice to you but because it ultimately nets them a lot more money.
With low return games it is really easy to see that it is a bad investment, while the higher the returns the easier it is for people to think they can make money gambling. You might say those are dumb, but the effect of making high pay-out gambling legal is that you ruin their lives, and in my opinion their lives are worth more than your fun.
This is a case of the trolley problem. You think it is fine to ruin their lives since you didn't do it directly, but since you could save their lives by banning it the effect is that you are ruining their lives by keeping this legal.
>casinos doesn't have high returns to be nice to you but because it ultimately nets them a lot more money.
As far as I can see casinos do have jackpots in the millions for slot machines, and those are legal. Overall those slot machines also offer you better odds per bet than lotteries.
In this scenario, I’m proposing that you rig it. Hire some of the best loot box designers from the gaming industry to replicate their addictive mechanics, but for the welfare state.
You’d think the state would embrace virtual scratch offs to better understand the amount of addiction they’re causing…
There was a huge push for banning violent video games in the 90’s - the book “Masters of Doom” covers it. John Carmack and John Romero actively fought for it. Before that, people wanted to ban violent movies in the 60’s.
The more I think about government policies pushed by the likes of NYT, it seems indistinguishable from Chinese Communist Party’s clamp on their population. Banning things for the greater “good” of the society. NZ just banned Tobacco/Cigs. This stance of prohibition from progressives is very unamerican and troubling in the context of US’s core values.
I don't really have much problem with gambling, but I am well aware of how difficult it is to cut back on video games when they are just a click or tap away. There is a fine balance between banning all vices and having an everything goes policy regardless of the toll on society. Leave sports betting to casinos and off of phones to help recovering addicts.
Pointsbet has a bet that pays a linear dollar amount * (winner -loser)^2 - some specified number. And yes, this can be negative and severely so.
E.g. $10* (winning margin squared - 225).
This is not a bet that needs to exist. Nobody is likely to have the data necessary to have a reasonable opinion on this, or to be able to calculate the risk and reward accurately in their head.
The problem is that the politicians do not regulate the speed at which people can lose money. Gambling is exciting, but the level of excitement is relatively independent of the amount wagered.
I think Montana limits stakes to small amounts for this reason.
An interesting question (to me) is how legalization of gambling happened politically? For a long time, there was a strong political consenses against it. Where is the religious right, for example?
It happened simply because the rich wanted to gamble. Vegas was built into what we knew it because organized illegal gambling was pushed from the city of LA to the unincorporated sunset strip in what is currently west hollywood, and then out of california entirely. The very people that were prosecuted for gambling in LA found politicians in Nevada who had water and electricity from the hoover dam, but no people or industry, and welcomed their casino developments with open arms and made them into kings. What was criminal became legal, regulations penned by the regulatees, and Las Vegas became what it is today.
Because the millennial generation had been making online sports bets illegally in the years before hand, there was a large market, and investors pressured regulators to legalize it for them.
What an oddly written article. So Delany, the flagship character in the narrative, bet a bit of money and then his wife caught him so he stopped. Is he the best example they could have found? Sports betting and gambling in general is incredibly destructive and unbelievably difficult to kick for full-on addicts. Gambling addiction is no joke.
For some far more compelling journalism on the terrible consequences of gambling addiction I recommend this ABC Australia article on Australian pokies (that's "slot machines" if you're American, "fruit machines" if you're British).
They probably used him as an example because he runs a podcast on gambling addiction. It says he was gambling away his 401k, which sounds pretty serious. They may have also used him as an example to make it easier for gamblers who come across the article to find help.
Where do you get "bet a bit of money"? The article says "he was gambling away the family 401(k) on his phone." It also says "I started doing it compulsively. I would win $5,000 and say, ‘Now I know what I am doing.’" So he was making individual bets of thousands of dollars. Since he as doing it "compulsively" that probably means more than one such bet per day. Doesn't sound like a "bit of money" unless this guy was extremely wealthy.
>The rising human cost of <put_your_favorite_thing_here>
There are many, many vices that people struggle from such as drinking, drugs, obsessions like food, and just obsessive spending in general. There are just a lot of people that cannot control some aspect of their life, but they generally make up a relatively small minority. These types of articles are an attempt to guilt-trip the vast majority of people that generally excel at life, because they use good judgement and rational thinking.
There are always going to be people that fall by the wayside, so I'm not going to feel guilty enjoying a little entertainment every now and again that a very small minority of people struggle with.
http://web.archive.org/web/20220131144657/https://www.nytime...