44 ms·

The rising human cost of sports betting

198 points by jbegley 5y ago

jpthurman 5y ago
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
- mistrial9 5y ago
  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.
- Guest42 5y ago
  I agree but also wish that a similar sentiment was applied to modern investment strategies.
  - cactus2093 5y ago
    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.
    - deleted 5y ago
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    - deleted 5y ago
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    - michaelt 5y ago
      Well, there are various other modern trends: * 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?
      - jacobsenscott 5y ago
        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.
        asdff 5y ago
        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.
      - asdff 5y ago
        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.
- sxg 5y ago
  This is interesting because legalized gambling is the perfect example of the discrepancy between individual autonomy in theory versus practice.
- paxys 5y ago
  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.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/9uRHi https://archive.is/9uRHi http://web.archive.org/web/20220131144657/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/sports/football/super-bowl-sports-betting.html http://web.archive.org/web/20220131144657/https://www.nytime...
Austin_Conlon 5y ago
The messages tennis players receive after losses from gamblers are vile.
mdoms 5y ago
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). https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-26/widow-of-addict-who-took-his-own-life-demands-gambling-reform/12481020 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-inside-the-reality-of-pokies-addiction-20190222-p50zl0.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/i-wanted-to-be-caught-in...
- mateo411 5y ago
  I think the human interest story is sadder than you realize. In addition to being a gambling addict, Delany is also a Jets fan.
  - tamaharbor 5y ago
    I am sure only Jets fans truly appreciate your humor.
- patorjk 5y ago
  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.
- allturtles 5y ago
  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.
animal_spirits 5y ago
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.
- shipman05 5y ago
  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.
  - PKop 5y ago
    >Prohibition is ineffective and often does more harm than good 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.
    - thebean11 5y ago
      > Effectiveness of prohibition is determined in large part on severity of punishments. 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?
      - lacksconfidence 5y ago
        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).
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Gambling is like drug use, some people are clearly addicted to it and will ruin their lives over it. How does society respond to this fact? War on drugs, war on gambling, etc. Hmmmmm
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  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.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  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.
- 323 5y ago
  No, we just legalize gambling, just like we should legalize drug use. People should be free to use drugs, drink alchool, or gamble.
  - lancesells 5y ago
    For the most part agreed but should companies be able to use psychological tricks and techniques to get people using drugs, alcohol, and gamble?
    - dylan604 5y ago
      You just described Facebook
  - 5y ago
mharty 5y ago
Meanwhile, > 6% of people in the US have alcohol use disorder, yet advertisements for alcohol are literally everywhere.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  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.
  - slap_shot 5y ago
    > 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. Very interesting. Do you have sources for these?
    - hannasanarion 5y ago
      Google exists, bro. > 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/#dossierKeyfigures https://www.statista.com/topics/1368/gambling/#dossierKeyfig... > and just 2% of gamblers produce 50% of industry revenue. https://www.promisesbehavioralhealth.com/addiction-recovery-blog/casinos-thrive-on-backs-of-addicts/ https://www.promisesbehavioralhealth.com/addiction-recovery-...
rkk3 5y ago
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.
newaccount2021 5y ago
ben7799 5y ago
I think it's just a matter of time before we see a Super Bowl or World Series thrown due to the legalization of Sport betting... 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.
- webkike 5y ago
  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
  - MengerSponge 5y ago
    Exactly. It's happened in our lifetimes too in the NBA: https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/25980368/how-former-ref-tim-donaghy-conspired-fix-nba-games https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/25980368/how-former-ref-...
  - asdff 5y ago
    Thrown with the astros recently too. Can't believe heads didn't roll for that scandal.
- philwelch 5y ago
  Sports betting has been legal in Europe for a very long time and we have yet to see a UEFA Champions League thrown.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    That you know of. How does anyone know? 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?
cletus 5y ago
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. [1]: https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/problem-gamblers-have-highest-suicide-rate-of-any-addiction-disorder-studies-show https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/problem-gambl...
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  >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
  - capital_guy 5y ago
gexla 5y ago
[flagged]
paganel 5y ago
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.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I thought it was a European thing but it's worldwide.. sadly.
- 323 5y ago
  I don't think the it's all because of betting. 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.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Name a famous footballer that cannot play. The comparisons to the Kardashians is quite a stretch.
    - majani 5y ago
      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
bluedino 5y ago
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?
- bondarchuk 5y ago
  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).
- jrockway 5y ago
  I think the timing is unrelated. There was a supreme court ruling in 2018 that paved the way.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    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.
wolverine876 5y ago
> 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).
- jaywalk 5y ago
  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.
  - allturtles 5y ago
    But with ease of use and advertisements, you can dramatically grow the set of people who want to gamble. 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.
    - lapetitejort 5y ago
      > and now they want to try gambling That sounds wretched. I can imagine parents trying to keep their kids away from smoking and drinking feeling the same way fifty years ago.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    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.
- 5y ago
slap_shot 5y ago
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.
- from 5y ago
  Not available to Americans (at least the ones unwilling to use BTC and a VPN), but Pinnacle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinnacle_Sports 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.
- financetechbro 5y ago
  Odd or have they adopted the same practices that casinos have in order to ensure that the house always wins
  - slap_shot 5y ago
    casino and sports books are the same thing and are the unusual product I am describing
- thebean11 5y ago
  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.
  - slap_shot 5y ago
    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.
mavhc 5y ago
sport, it's so interesting that no one ever thought of betting on the result or taking drugs while watching it
dosethree 5y ago
If your interesting in more about this check out the recent HBO Real Sports episode
wolverine876 5y ago
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?
- asdff 5y ago
  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.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    I meant, why has gambling recently become legal in much of the country, not why did it become legal in Las Vegas.
    - asdff 5y ago
      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.
ratsmack 5y ago
>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.
diskzero 5y ago
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.
- mikeodds 5y ago
  Can you give any examples of how the data was used to increase losses? Quite interested.
  - diskzero 5y ago
    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.
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      Ah so a cryptocurrency exchange then.
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lucas_membrane 5y ago
Where else can the poor buy hope?
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Community college?
estaseuropano 5y ago
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.
- throwyawayyyy 5y ago
  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.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Honestly, the gambling in Europe is so much sadder than the gambling in the US. I recognize it's a marketing thing, but European companies don't seem to even try to make it look like anything but degeneracy.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  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.
NoPicklez 5y ago
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.
- prawn 5y ago
  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.
gbronner 5y ago
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.
gbronner 5y ago
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.
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4e530344963049 5y ago
https://trimread.org/articles/36638 https://trimread.org/articles/36638 Removed paywall; reduced page load from original size of 4.42 MB to 181 kB.
slaymaker1907 5y ago
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.
candyman 5y ago
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!

198 points by jbegley 5y ago

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

mistrial9 5y ago
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.
Guest42 5y ago
I agree but also wish that a similar sentiment was applied to modern investment strategies.
- cactus2093 5y ago
  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.
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  - michaelt 5y ago
    Well, there are various other modern trends: * 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?
    - jacobsenscott 5y ago
      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.
      - asdff 5y ago
        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.
    - asdff 5y ago
      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.
sxg 5y ago
This is interesting because legalized gambling is the perfect example of the discrepancy between individual autonomy in theory versus practice.
paxys 5y ago
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.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/9uRHi https://archive.is/9uRHi http://web.archive.org/web/20220131144657/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/sports/football/super-bowl-sports-betting.html http://web.archive.org/web/20220131144657/https://www.nytime...

Austin_Conlon 5y ago

The messages tennis players receive after losses from gamblers are vile.

mdoms 5y ago

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). https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-26/widow-of-addict-who-took-his-own-life-demands-gambling-reform/12481020 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-inside-the-reality-of-pokies-addiction-20190222-p50zl0.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/i-wanted-to-be-caught-in...

mateo411 5y ago
I think the human interest story is sadder than you realize. In addition to being a gambling addict, Delany is also a Jets fan.
- tamaharbor 5y ago
  I am sure only Jets fans truly appreciate your humor.
patorjk 5y ago
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.
allturtles 5y ago
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.

animal_spirits 5y ago

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.

shipman05 5y ago
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.
- PKop 5y ago
  >Prohibition is ineffective and often does more harm than good 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.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    > Effectiveness of prohibition is determined in large part on severity of punishments. 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?
    - lacksconfidence 5y ago
      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).

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Gambling is like drug use, some people are clearly addicted to it and will ruin their lives over it. How does society respond to this fact? War on drugs, war on gambling, etc. Hmmmmm

hannasanarion 5y ago
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.
systemvoltage 5y ago
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.
323 5y ago
No, we just legalize gambling, just like we should legalize drug use. People should be free to use drugs, drink alchool, or gamble.
- lancesells 5y ago
  For the most part agreed but should companies be able to use psychological tricks and techniques to get people using drugs, alcohol, and gamble?
  - dylan604 5y ago
    You just described Facebook
- 5y ago

mharty 5y ago

Meanwhile, > 6% of people in the US have alcohol use disorder, yet advertisements for alcohol are literally everywhere.

hannasanarion 5y ago
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.
- slap_shot 5y ago
  > 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. Very interesting. Do you have sources for these?
  - hannasanarion 5y ago
    Google exists, bro. > 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/#dossierKeyfigures https://www.statista.com/topics/1368/gambling/#dossierKeyfig... > and just 2% of gamblers produce 50% of industry revenue. https://www.promisesbehavioralhealth.com/addiction-recovery-blog/casinos-thrive-on-backs-of-addicts/ https://www.promisesbehavioralhealth.com/addiction-recovery-...

rkk3 5y ago

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.

newaccount2021 5y ago

ben7799 5y ago

I think it's just a matter of time before we see a Super Bowl or World Series thrown due to the legalization of Sport betting... 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.

webkike 5y ago
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
- MengerSponge 5y ago
  Exactly. It's happened in our lifetimes too in the NBA: https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/25980368/how-former-ref-tim-donaghy-conspired-fix-nba-games https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/25980368/how-former-ref-...
- asdff 5y ago
  Thrown with the astros recently too. Can't believe heads didn't roll for that scandal.
philwelch 5y ago
Sports betting has been legal in Europe for a very long time and we have yet to see a UEFA Champions League thrown.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  That you know of. How does anyone know? 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?

cletus 5y ago

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. [1]: https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/problem-gamblers-have-highest-suicide-rate-of-any-addiction-disorder-studies-show https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/problem-gambl...

HideousKojima 5y ago
>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
- capital_guy 5y ago

gexla 5y ago

[flagged]

paganel 5y ago

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.

agumonkey 5y ago
I thought it was a European thing but it's worldwide.. sadly.
323 5y ago
I don't think the it's all because of betting. 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.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Name a famous footballer that cannot play. The comparisons to the Kardashians is quite a stretch.
  - majani 5y ago
    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

bluedino 5y ago

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?

bondarchuk 5y ago
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).
jrockway 5y ago
I think the timing is unrelated. There was a supreme court ruling in 2018 that paved the way.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  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.

wolverine876 5y ago

> 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).

jaywalk 5y ago
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.
- allturtles 5y ago
  But with ease of use and advertisements, you can dramatically grow the set of people who want to gamble. 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.
  - lapetitejort 5y ago
    > and now they want to try gambling That sounds wretched. I can imagine parents trying to keep their kids away from smoking and drinking feeling the same way fifty years ago.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  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.
5y ago

slap_shot 5y ago

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.

from 5y ago
Not available to Americans (at least the ones unwilling to use BTC and a VPN), but Pinnacle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinnacle_Sports 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.
financetechbro 5y ago
Odd or have they adopted the same practices that casinos have in order to ensure that the house always wins
- slap_shot 5y ago
  casino and sports books are the same thing and are the unusual product I am describing
thebean11 5y ago
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.
- slap_shot 5y ago
  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.

mavhc 5y ago

sport, it's so interesting that no one ever thought of betting on the result or taking drugs while watching it

dosethree 5y ago

If your interesting in more about this check out the recent HBO Real Sports episode

wolverine876 5y ago

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?

asdff 5y ago
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.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  I meant, why has gambling recently become legal in much of the country, not why did it become legal in Las Vegas.
  - asdff 5y ago
    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.

ratsmack 5y ago

>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.

diskzero 5y ago

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.

mikeodds 5y ago
Can you give any examples of how the data was used to increase losses? Quite interested.
- diskzero 5y ago
  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.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Ah so a cryptocurrency exchange then.

deleted 5y ago

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lucas_membrane 5y ago

Where else can the poor buy hope?

missedthecue 5y ago
Community college?

estaseuropano 5y ago

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.

throwyawayyyy 5y ago
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.
TameAntelope 5y ago
Honestly, the gambling in Europe is so much sadder than the gambling in the US. I recognize it's a marketing thing, but European companies don't seem to even try to make it look like anything but degeneracy.
chrisco255 5y ago
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.

NoPicklez 5y ago

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.

prawn 5y ago
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.

gbronner 5y ago

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.

gbronner 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago

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4e530344963049 5y ago

https://trimread.org/articles/36638 https://trimread.org/articles/36638 Removed paywall; reduced page load from original size of 4.42 MB to 181 kB.

slaymaker1907 5y ago

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.

candyman 5y ago

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!