The rising human cost of sports betting
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Blackjack_Team
https://www.betstrat.com/betstrat-articles/the-phil-ivey-edg...
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.
[1] https://neilhacker.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/kelly-criteri...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
[1] https://www.championbets.com.au/bookmakers/minimum-bet-limit...
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N05vGcw_tI
They are betting the spread between different books and most of their operation involves keeping accounts live and with placement capacity
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?
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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://theconversation.com/designed-to-deceive-how-gambling...
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.
Brownie is a good library for this.
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
> 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.
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.
Caring about that reality is below my line
But with bribery you can skip the mempool these days
Not really any other way to do it without fixing games.
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.
This is why the popular sportsbooks still allow big bets for reputation's sake.
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.
Unless it's from other players, like in poker.
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.
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.
Did they stop you from betting completely? Introduce a really low dollar limit per bet? Gub your accounts?
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.
I also think that alcohol and e-cig advertising should be outlawed as well.
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.
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.
Probability is like...a Grade 5-6 concept.
Ergo, it can go straight to hell and does not belong in a civilized society.
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.
The brain still has fun even knowing not going to win and just spent $2.
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.
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.
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.
I don't believe this is true, though it is often parroted as so.
Effectiveness of prohibition is determined in large part on severity of punishments.
It is imperfect, and will always be. But it can absolutely work to minimize the behavior being targeted.
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.
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.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/singapore-is-winning...
"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.
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.
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
>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.
The punishments for drugs are pretty severe in much of the US (multiple years in prison). Are you advocating for even harsher punishments than that?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
https://www.propublica.org/article/illinois-video-gambling-w...
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.
"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."
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.
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.
Or do you just think that making it illegal would probably show some benefit to the average person's health?
* 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.
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.
That's not what the US Constitution says.
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.
E-Sports has a terrible problem with this, and many organizations are solely supported by gambling site sponsors.
Kudos to Riot for outlawing the practice with League of Legends. I wish Valve would do the same.
* 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?
Yes, stock picking and penny stock scams have been around forever, but it has never been so easy.
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.
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 recognize it's a marketing thing, but European companies don't seem to even try to make it look like anything but degeneracy.
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).
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.
I watch football with my kids, and now they want to try gambling, after seeing thousands of sports book ads. I find it really depressing.
That sounds wretched. I can imagine parents trying to keep their kids away from smoking and drinking feeling the same way fifty years ago.
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.
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.
The comparisons to the Kardashians is quite a stretch.
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)
[1] https://liga2.prosport.ro/cupa-romaniei/se-va-sesiza-comisia...
oh muh gawd! i've done that very thing myself. i didn't know i could make money doing it.
The bookmakers cut guarantees you will lose over the long run.
[1] https://www.legalsportsbetting.com/famous-sports-bettors/ton...
We have been here before and seen all of this before and it's really hard to believe history won't repeat itself.
It's stupid all the way down.
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.
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!
Also, not all gambling is legal.
1. One player can significantly affect the outcome
2. The players are being paid peanuts
3. shaving points can be very lucrative to the fixers without actually affecting the outcome of the game.
A 5 figure payout just to win a game by less than expected can look like a great deal to a college athlete
This will happen again.
Edits:
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?
Perhaps the League would even suspend him and make him retire for a few years before he could come back.
But they would keep it very quiet.
https://lastwordonsports.com/basketball/2019/11/29/michael-j...
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".
> Should we just close our eyes to the threat?
Only if you want to miss the entertainment.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_of_Arbitration_for_Sport
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.
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?
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.
[1]: https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/problem-gambl...
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
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.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30136436/
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.
> Only 25% of Americans regularly gamble
> and just 2% of gamblers produce 50% of industry revenue.
Very interesting. Do you have sources for these?
> 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.
> Only 25% of Americans regularly gamble
https://www.statista.com/topics/1368/gambling/#dossierKeyfig...
> and just 2% of gamblers produce 50% of industry revenue.
https://www.promisesbehavioralhealth.com/addiction-recovery-...
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.
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.
How does society respond to this fact? War on drugs, war on gambling, etc.
Hmmmmm
People should be free to use drugs, drink alchool, or gamble.
everyone's a winner, baby!
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.
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.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/7-biggest-vegas-payouts-time-...
You’d think the state would embrace virtual scratch offs to better understand the amount of addiction they’re causing…
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.
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.
I think Montana limits stakes to small amounts for this reason.
Removed paywall; reduced page load from original size of 4.42 MB to 181 kB.
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).
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-26/widow-of-addict-who-t...
Or this SMH article of various peoples' stories
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/i-wanted-to-be-caught-in...
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.