It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport. When you can bet a lot of money on how long a college players plays, or how many points they get in a particular game, what's to stop them from having a relative make a bet and they just fake a cramp?
The stock market is heavily regulated. I don't think you should ban sports betting, because like many vices it's easier to control if it is legal. According to Nate Silver, the more you let people make bets on obscure things the more opportunity their is for participants to cheat. So you should probably restrict betting to things no one participant can control (like the score). You also should try to make it difficult for a person to lose too much. You can't stop it, but you could probably make it harder. In the stock market there is a "qualified investor" that is allowed to take much bigger risks. You could make rules to punish betting sites that accept too many bets from destitute addicts. It wouldn't be perfect, but you can have liquor laws without having prohibition.
>It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport. When you can bet a lot of money on how long a college players plays, or how many points they get in a particular game, what's to stop them from having a relative make a bet and they just fake a cramp?
Or get assaulted or murdered, internet death pool style? All kinds of really fucked up incentives are created by these legalized betting apps.
I wonder how many people out there would take an assault charge to win a bet. Since there’s a market you could even get investors. Get $10million together, bet
it with high odds, take 25% cut, spend 10 years in jail, live out the rest of
your life in comfort.
Is any of that illegal besides the assault itself?
Very much so. Even planning it, without carrying it out, would be subject to criminal conspiracy charges. Recruiting people to the scheme (even the investors) would be soliciting a crime. It's illegal to interfere in the outcome of the game once the bet is placed. Finally, once it was proven you rigged it, you'd probably be forced to return the winnings anyway.
I'm sure an actual attorney could come up with even more reasons this is illegal.
Who’s taking the other side of the bet though? No smart bookie will dig themselves in such a hole, it would obviously be fraud and they’d stop accepting bets
A predicate action must be taken in order for this to stick. However, this can be literally anything to move down the proposed path of conspiracy. So if you made the plan then downloaded the app, that's criminal conspiracy
You're right. As david_shi also points out, there's so many other less bothersome ways it makes little sense to recourse to violence on online bets.
Looking into it, the vast majority of incidents are the player themselves betting against their team or losing on purpose, the same of ways matches have been fixed since the dawn of betting. Paying someone is just so much easier than fighting them.
While the opportunity for this isn't zero, the reality is that there are safer and more lucrative ways for criminals to make money, especially for those who have the aptitude to pull something like this off.
Oddly enough, several professional sports gamblers were aware of a NBA referee manipulating game from their data analysis, well before the NBA became aware of it.
That was probably 10+ years ago and I suspect data analysis by the leagues is much stronger now. Still an insane line that needs to be walked between the leagues getting revenue from the sportsbooks and gambling not impacting that play.
I don’t know how much cheating by referees has got to with it. But many years ago I found the NBA to be a foul shooting contest and gave up on it. It is unwatchable.
NBA bans Jontay Porter after gambling probe shows he shared information, bet on games.
“Porter took himself out of that game after less than three minutes, claiming illness, none of his stats meeting the totals set in the parlay. The $80,000 bet was frozen and not paid out, the league said, and the NBA started an investigation not long afterward.”
Clearly, it's going to happen anyway at least some of the time, but the "what's to stop" is pretty obviously getting caught. It's already happened in at least three instances from the past year I can think of, though I don't remember the names because they were all pretty small-time players (Jontay Porter, who was already mentioned, is one of them). Anyone that is caught doing it gets instantly banned from the sport for life, which hopefully provides an even larger counterincentive compared to whatever incentive there is to attempt throwing a game.
It's not perfect, but the leagues don't have much of a choice. The US Supreme Court ruled that banning sports betting was unconstitutional, so until the court rolls over to new justices with new opinions on the matter in a few decades, it isn't going anywhere. It doesn't make any difference how much some fans on the Internet don't like it. Federal lawmakers can't ban it.
I think one of the uglier examples was an NFL team local to me.
They had one of if not the 'worst' season in the last 15 years or so and really didn't care. But a huge part of that was because the way all of the season tickets, merchandise deals, etc etc, didn't matter if the team was any good. Semi-Ironically the economics were explained by a huge fan of them; he appreciated the business savvy.
The BBC have a podcast called Sports Strangest Crimes. The most recent series was about Moses Sawbu who was match fixing in the lower leagues. Worth listening to it
It’s only “potential” insofar as bad behaviour may or may not be exposed sooner or later. I think it’s more useful to understand betting’s impact as a constant corrosive effect. Betting poisons the incentives
The stock market is heavily regulated. I don't think you should ban sports betting, because like many vices it's easier to control if it is legal. According to Nate Silver, the more you let people make bets on obscure things the more opportunity their is for participants to cheat. So you should probably restrict betting to things no one participant can control (like the score). You also should try to make it difficult for a person to lose too much. You can't stop it, but you could probably make it harder. In the stock market there is a "qualified investor" that is allowed to take much bigger risks. You could make rules to punish betting sites that accept too many bets from destitute addicts. It wouldn't be perfect, but you can have liquor laws without having prohibition.