Hacker News Reader

Comment by jusben1369 | Hacker News Reader

To all the UK HN readers here. I grew up in Australia and live in the US. When I visit the UK I'm staggered by just how much you can bet on everything As I go home I've noticed it is more prevalent there now too then when I grew up there. Do people in the UK discuss how mad the UK are about betting? Or do they not think they are particularly? Is there any sort of active discussion in terms of how healthy it is? I'm not for outlawing gambling or drinking or prostitution but to think that there aren't a meaningful % of addicts for whom this easy access destroys their life is also naive. Does that come into play at all?

View on HN

It's pretty heavily regulated (you won't really see any evidence of black-market bookmakers in the UK although presumably they do exist), and most bookmakers are pretty keen on "social responsibility". At least for the online bookies, there are algorithms which attempt to spot "problem" gamblers and attempt to manage them (eg by limiting how much they can deposit or bet or even by excluding them altogether) and I don't think you'll find a regulated bookie who you can end up in debt with (you need to deposit the money with them before you can bet - that's not to stop you from borrowing the money from elsewhere but there's little which the bookies can do about that).

I think the social stigma around betting is lifting a little in the UK, particularly in terms of the casual "I'm going to watch the match anyway, it'll be a bit more exciting if there's a bet riding on it as well" gambler. Celebrity endorsements probably help with that, as does sports sponsorship. I don't really know anything about professional gamblers, though.

I don't think anyone here in the UK thinks that the UK in general is mad about betting, but I could be wrong.

This is all entirely my own opinion...

I agree that the UK being 'mad about betting' is a gross exaggeration, but bookmakers being 'keen on social responsibility' - other than as a figleaf - seems like an exaggeration in the opposite direction. In fact, betting shops appear to derive a lot of revenue basically from money-laundering: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/08/gambling-mach...

Money laundering potential is a particular problem for bookmakers, that's true. The big name ones really don't want bad press, though, which I imagine is where most of the social responsibility stuff comes in (as well as trying to protect problematic people from themselves).

Not sure about Australia but the US has a fairly puritanical culture. I always figured the UK was probably pretty normal for the size of the gambling industry in a first world country and the US was the outlier.

As someone who has family in the UK and Australia, I'd say the gambling system is worse in Australia (New South Wales). Pubs with wall to wall one armed bandits (pokies). The most you'd see in a pub in the UK is one.

But casino gambling--including slot machines--has almost nothing to do with chance. You are as certain as can be to lose if you play long enough.

With betting on things like the Scottish referendum there is a chance for an informed bettor to best the game, and people actually do this. There have been cases in Canada of people making a living on sports betting, to the extent that they got in trouble with Canada Revenue over whether their winnings were due to "chance" or "skill" (which are taxed differently.)

Bookies cannot be experts on everything, so particularly for a one-off like Scottish independence the odds of an informed bettor making money are not bad.

So the comparison of gambling behaviour depends very much on the kind of gambling being done. If it is conventional casino gambling it is simply losers paying to lose--the converse outcome is simply too low probability to be worth mentioning (for comparison: sure... it's possible to jump out of an aircraft without a parachute and survive, but it isn't an eventually anyone ever takes into account when faced with the practical choice, so it isn't clear why anyone takes into account the possibility of being a winner when faced with the choice of casino gambling.)

In sports betting and betting on odd-ball events, on the other hand, it is at least theoretically possible for a well-informed bettor to win (but realistically: you are probably not that bettor, so it pays to be very cautious and never, ever bet more than you can afford to lose, because you will sometimes lose.)

> But casino gambling--including slot machines--has almost nothing to do with chance.

Yes, it does.

> You are as certain as can be to lose if you play long enough.

That doesn't mean that the individual instances of gambling have nothing to do with chance -- its a product of the aggregation of the effects of chance. Given an infinite number of iterations of any random gambling scenario, you are eventually going to hit a losing streak sufficient to consume your entire bankroll (the size of the bankroll relative to the stake in any given iteration affects how many iterations it takes before you are more likely than not to have hit this point, but that's about it.)

But the existence of this effect (Gambler's Ruin) doesn't mean that the type of gambling has nothing to do with chance -- indeed, it only applies because gambling is about chance.

Indeed. There are more poker machines in New South Wales, than there are in Las Vegas.

I'm from the UK now also living in the US. Honestly I didn't really notice it until I left. Gambling has been a big part of British culture for a long time and you can bet on just about everything. This seems to be in stark contrast to the U.S. where the opportunities to gamble are far more limited.

As an example, bets on whether it will snow on Christmas Day are popular. Unusual bets are often written about in the news, e.g., http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/beds/bucks/herts/...

Yes this! I suspect it's a "frog boiling in water problem" One thing that struck me was the ticker tape of betting related activities that runs along the bottom of news/sports TV.

I've got 5 quid on Kate having a ginger baby (bet against my friends, not a betting shop).

That's as far as it's ok to go if you ask me. The betting shops, gambling outfits and lottery prey on people's desire to be "better off". It's another form of servitude if you ask me. There are responsible gambling campaigns but daytime TV is all about betting and online bingo and stuff so it's about the same as saying not to smoke whilst giving away the first 10 cigarettes for free.

If you've got 25 minutes to spare, this takes a comedy twist on it but the underlying story shows how much it affects our culture here in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAXFHRdeLqw

(Black Books - A Little Flutter)

Like everything in the UK, it's a class issue. My dad's friends bet, but I don't think anyone in my social circle would. My impression was that sports betting is more popular in e.g. the U.S.; for all that betting shops have ads for football I don't think that many people would actually bet on it. Horse racing exists as a thing that people bet on, but I think it's slowly dying out, like greyhound racing did before it.

It's not seen as a big social problem IME; I've heard far more fears expressed about our pub culture than our betting culture.

As an American living in London, I have to say the betting shops come off as much more unsavory than the pub culture. Generally the pub culture seems to be enjoyed in good fun by everyone across class and age boundaries, and yeah there is the ugly side of people passed out drunk on the pavement after 11pm or young women projectile vomiting into their friends handbags on a crowded tube platform, but given the number of people out drinking it seems like more a statistical rounding error of a few people just having a bit too much fun.

The betting shops on the other hand seem disproportionately full of deadbeat layabouts night and day. Just walking down the street the front of the William Hill is the most likely place you'll see someone who appears to belong to a Dickensian London.

Anyway, that's just my first impression as a puritanical yank.

Seems pretty accurate.

Saying that, take a trip to A&E (ER) on a weekend and see if you still think it's too much fun.

The number of people gambling in the US and the UK are fairly similar, both somewhere between 60 and 70 percent. Government lotteries are the most popular form in both countries.

This is the one thing that always amused me.

I live in Minnesota and they've gone to great lengths to minimize gambling. Any kind of initiative is met with derision and all kinds of attacks that "gambling brings in bad elements and gambling is bad, it destroys families". Meanwhile, I can go into any supermarket, gas station or convenience store and play a myriad of state lottery games.

The irony is incredible.

Isn't gambling extremely limited in most of the US? If you take away lotteries (which I personally wouldn't consider gambling) I wonder what the figures are.

Why do you consider lotteries not to be gambling? In a literal sense they are clearly gambling.

True but they are very different to betting on sports, events etc. For the lottery you hand over some money, get some random numbers and you might win (same idea with scratch cards). If you bet on say, the result of a football game, you are given odds, you can look at the statistics of both teams, and you can get a better idea of the risk. You can actually use your brain a little. Also, I think while a lot of kids would be told that gambling is bad/dangerous, and they shouldn't do it, their parents likely play the lottery and let the kids pick the numbers.

The odds are so long on lotteries that it's not really the same experience and can't result in some of the same problems.

People don't borrow $10,000 to buy Powerball tickets so they can chase their losses, but they do for types of gambling where there's a good chance of winning in one night, like poker or sports betting. Even the terminology is different: you 'buy lottery tickets' instead of 'wagering on the lottery', reflecting the feeling that the money is spent and you don't expect a return.

And winnings are tax free unlike some places. The high street betting shops are upsetting many. Until recently the government even owned it's own bookmaker.

And winnings are tax free unlike some places.

Gambling winnings should be tax-free, unless gambling losses are tax-deductible. Taxes should apply to the production or consumption of utility, not to its random shuffling around.

> Taxes should apply to the production or consumption of utility, not to its random shuffling around.

The Random shuffling part made me smile. Though, that's only looking at individual cases. When you look at the global picture, it's no more random shuffling and the lottery is the tax in its own existence.

Sure, and winnings by people who are in the business of gambling (either professional poker players who are gambling on themselves, or casinos who are implicitly gambling against their customers) should be taxed, because at that point it isn't merely random shuffling.

>>Taxes should apply to the production or consumption of utility

Then why do we have inheritance tax? It's a tax on something that already had tax paid on, nothing is produced and nothing is consumed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com