46 ms·

Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake

• mewpmewp2 2y ago
  Maybe there could be some sort of identity based limit on how much anyone can gamble in a month? Couldn't fully read the article though. If betting wasn't allowed it would be significant income loss for sports teams as well. Maybe you might think that they don't need that much money, but that is subjective.
  • liquidpele 2y ago
    hell, make it opt-in even!
  • sickofparadox 2y ago
    I think the core of the issue is that, much like social media addiction or nicotine pouches, the source of addiction is instantly available at any time in your pocket. There is no barrier to initiate the activity, even with smoking/vaping at least you had to go outside to get your fix. When I was going to college I had multiple friends that would compulsively gamble whenever there was down time. They wouldn't have lost half the money they did if gambling only took place at Casinos, or at least at dedicated terminals.
    • supperrtadderr 2y ago
      I like nicotine pouches because its just plant fibre soaked/sprayed with nicotine. Its convenient like gum. That being said I only do the 4mg option and usually after work with a beer. I dont think I'm addicted to them because I dont do them compulsively. I know some people use nicotine to deal with anxiety or restlessness or something. I kind of like the buzz, since nicotine is a poison sourced from a plant. Sorry tangential rant lol
  • andrewla 2y ago
    How do sports teams derive income from this? Is it just in the sense of increased viewership and the possibility of sponsorships from the gambling companies? As far as I understand they do not get any money from sports gambling directly and are mostly not allowed (through internal ethics rules) to do any gambling themselves.
    • 5555624 2y ago
      "Miller says the NFL doesn’t get a cut of the amount wagered with these companies. But the NFL and its television rights holders, which pay the NFL more than $13 billion a year to broadcast games, have seen a boon from advertising by the legal gaming industry." (https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/business/nfl-super-bowl-sports-gambling/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/business/nfl-super-bowl-sport...)
      • andrewla 2y ago
        So we're talking about the indirect income from advertising. The article is poorly worded -- yes, advertisers spend a lot of money, but were those advertisers to disappear, other advertisers would buy those spots. So the question becomes, to what degree does the induced demand raise the marginal profit for advertising spots. And how that in turn affects how much networks are willing to pay the NFL for licensing, and that in turn affects how much the teams get in kickbacks from the NFL. So likely marginal at best. The flipside is also how much viewership increases because of sports gamblers watching that would otherwise not watch. Also difficult to confidently assert the value of.
        • mewpmewp2 2y ago
          Betting companies are willing to pay far more compared to other industries since they gain the most from this sponsorship as well. I am not from the US and NFL could probably handle it, but I am from a smaller country with smaller clubs. If betting companies sponsorship was banned many clubs, even in the top league, couldn't play on the pro or even the semi pro level. They gain the most, but in addition they benefit from the sport being popular so they are willing to help invest in making sure that would be the case.
• datadrivenangel 2y ago
  Gambling is a vice, and we should allow it but make it expensive and somewhat stigmatized. At the very least, ads should be banned or require nasty images like tobacco products.
  • changoplatanero 2y ago
    I would also suggest capping the amount that people can bet per week or month to prevent too many weak human minds from ruining their lives and worse than that ruining the lives of their wives and kids.
    • dgoldstein0 2y ago
      But his would those amounts be set? For some people $100/week would be a lot of money; for higher earners it'd be basically nothing.
      • micromacrofoot 2y ago
        that would be a good system, base it on income or wealth — you're limited to $100/week or whatever unless you can validate you can afford more let's means test the rich for once
        • dgoldstein0 2y ago
          100/week is 5200/year. That's probably the difference between making ends meet and being always in debt for a lot of households - the median us household income is about $50k and we're talking 10% of that. That's a huge difference for the median household, and likely pretty catastrophic for the bottom quartile. Which arguably is as much a problem with income inequality as anything else, but the point is, gambling exacerbates existing social problems.
  • pclmulqdq 2y ago
    I have participated in a few meetings of some lottery boards, and I have heard that there is a tension here between the illegal market and the pricing of the legal market. Some states charge the (relatively low) commissions that the illegal market charges because they would prefer to stamp out the illegal market, and others take your position but have a thriving black market for gambling. Those are basically the two options.
• pinko 2y ago
  Almost everyone involved knew it was a mistake, but was captured (directly or indirectly) by the profits to be made.
  • Clubber 2y ago
    Also it's hard to be against gambling if your state runs a lotto, which is gambling.
    • tivert 2y ago
      > Also it's hard to be against gambling if your state runs a lotto, which is gambling. How so? Different kinds of gambling have different characteristics that could make them more or less prone to problematic behavior. With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted or harder for addiction to become really problematic.
      • pclmulqdq 2y ago
        State lotteries also run games like Keno, which run every 5-15 minutes. They have also started to run apps which have instant-play games, which are roughly equivalent to turning your phone into a slot machine. Keno and instant-play games still feel like chance, though, and the apps often have warnings and usage limits that the sports betting sites don't have.
      • Clubber 2y ago
        >With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted Addictions don't reason. Win $10 and some people are hooked for life. > or harder for addiction to become really problematic. Example: a school teacher spending $200 a week on lotto tickets, not life devastating, but do we really want this in our society? This happens a lot. Lottos just trick the people with less money into paying more taxes on the hopes of "winning it big!" It's essentially a hope tax for the lower and middle class. I can think of better ways of collecting taxes.
• OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
  https://archive.is/FeAy9 https://archive.is/FeAy9
• AlgorithmicTime 2y ago
  [dead]
• wslh 2y ago
  In Argentina, they recently legalized internet gambling, and now there's a 'pandemic' of teenagers facing serious problems. It's ironic to see gambling ads during football games alongside state ads promoting support for gambling addicts.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• wood_spirit 2y ago
  Rest is Politics Leading recently had an interview with Frank Luntz who, as well as rebranding “global warming” as “climate change”, rebranded “gambling” to “gaming”. A really eye opening interview https://open.spotify.com/episode/5sSaRKxclEFwz80cH2FwJu?si=NP55KvpBSXW5tNSZ8F3vQw https://open.spotify.com/episode/5sSaRKxclEFwz80cH2FwJu?si=N...
  • nuancedquestion 2y ago
    Is climate change a sinister rebranding? Global warming suffers from "but it rained yesterday" and other misleading small scale variations making people disbelieve. "More fires, more hurricanes: Climate change" then rebrands it as scary: need to take seriously.
  • tasty_freeze 2y ago
    The term "climate change" was used in research even back in the 50s. It isn't some new invention.
  • djmips 2y ago
    Not doubting your Mr. Luntz's influence but it turns out gaming is an old term for gambling which still causes legal nightmares for anyone in my area trying to serve alcohol at a video game themed location. Ancient laws ban gaming and alcohol to be co-located.
    • robocat 2y ago
      Isn't that video sport? Sports and alcohol seem to have a long history together.
• atum47 2y ago
  It has become an epidemic in Brazil. Lots and lots of people in debt because of it. Celebrities, influencers, beautiful girls... Everyone pushing for it.
  • FMecha 2y ago
    Indonesia is also having an illegal online casino epidemic, too. That is in a country where gambling is currently illegal and will continue to be.
  • left-struck 2y ago
    “Beautiful girls” What. Why would they be affected any differently?
    • atum47 2y ago
      Those "companies" give them money so they can promote betting. They post fraudulent stories about how they are getting paid using the platform.
• locallost 2y ago
  I believe things would improve if we raised kids explaining them that the house always wins. It's a rigged game. Most people can't predict outcomes better than picking randomly and that way they are guaranteed to lose money because of the margins the bookies have. So if you know that you can play for fun from time to time, but not get in over your head. But then I remember that so many are counting on the fact that people will stay uneducated so they can rip them off.
  • andrewla 2y ago
    This is a good argument against lotteries but not as good an argument against sports gambling. If you are better at sports prediction than the bookmakers, you can make money. Nobody gambles as an "average person", they gamble as themselves, and convincing an individual that they personally are bad at predicting outcomes requires more than saying "most people can't do it". People see it as a game of skill where they win money from people who are worse at that skill than they are.
    • gensym 2y ago
      Except if you are actually better than the bookmakers, the platforms will kick you off as soon as they detect that.
    • locallost 2y ago
      You can't be better or beat the bookies because you don't play the same game. Their game is to get the money placed evenly on all outcomes so that their payout is the same no matter what happens. And people betting are in the business of predicting the future which is a fool's errand. You might think you're above average, but once you realize the game is setup so that the house always wins, you realize it's tough to get out of the hole.
  • fsckboy 2y ago
    addictions are not cured by teaching people that they can play for fun from time to time but not get in over their heads. do you think heroin addicts and cigarette smokers never heard that it was bad for them?
• nba456_ 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • micromacrofoot 2y ago
    Like all gambling it also has disproportionately negative effects on people who are already poor.
    • mock-possum 2y ago
      ‘Gambling is a tax on people who are bad at math’
      • JohnMakin 2y ago
        Not always in the case of sports betting - although there are definitely math "taxes" like parlays and point buys and heavy chalk. Plus all the predatory "promotion" stuff they will throw out. Sharp bettors do exist though, and do make quite a bit of money. They're less than 1% though.
        • johngladtj 2y ago
          Yes, always. There is nothing unique about sports gambling here.
          • JohnMakin 2y ago
            With all due respect, absolutely not? If a book puts out a line of +200 and you've determined there is a certain percentage chance of winning, your expectation easily can be positive. The "gambling is a tax for those bad at math" is a misconstrued quote that usually applies to completely negative expectation games, such as scratcher tickets, in which the more you play you will always lose in the long run. There are very precise mathematical terms for these things, and strictly, you are wrong. You can extend this to things like poker as well - is that a tax on people bad at math? Of course not, that'd be a stupid argument, because it's not a purely negative expectation game.
• thefaux 2y ago
  Gambling is also ruining professional sports for me because I find the frequent gambling promos during the games depressing and disruptive. Many years ago I worked at a company that had Ladbrokes in the UK as a customer. On my first visit to London, I noticed their storefronts and found them appalling. They were some of the sorriest, shabbiest public spaces I'd seen, clearly designed to extract resources from the least well off. I don't really buy any of the arguments in favor of widespread legalization (and I include state lotteries in this). I could be ok with legalization for a few big events like the NCAA tournament because clearly there is some demand that must be met, but we should not be enabling gambling as a widespread daily habit. Of course there will always be black market gambling and the state cannot protect its citizens from every evil, but nor should it actively enable them.
  • datadrivenangel 2y ago
    Walking through the UK really does not lead to a good view of sports betting. The store fronts do not look like places that a happy person would go to.
  • drcongo 2y ago
    The state of sports gambling in the UK is now such that Sky Sports (used to be a cable/satellite TV station catering purely to sports) is now basically just a series of gambling adverts with some sport thrown in to keep the punters hooked. They even launched a Sky Bet betting company which seems to have completely overtaken the TV channels - every sport is riddled with Sky Bet adverts and sponsorship. The biggest irony is that professional sportsmen (it's always men) keep getting bans for gambling on their own sport, and yet we somehow expect extremely rich young men in a "banter" culture to ignore the fact that every week they pull on a shirt with multiple gambling sponsors on it and then play in a stadium with endless gambling ads scrolling around the LED boards before being interviewed afterwards standing in front of a wall of gambling sponsors by a man with Sky Bet written on his microphone.
    • alexdunmow 2y ago
      It's the same in Australia. I've seen little kids who are into a particular sport parrot off the odds for the game. It's crazy.
• United857 2y ago
  Sports gambling should be regulated like we do day trading (basically another form of gambling) — require a some minimum threshold of money in the account to deter those without disposable income from gambling away their savings (for day trading it’s $25k).
  • nba456_ 2y ago
    Legalizing things only for rich people is truly awful government.
    • hugh-avherald 2y ago
      What about legalizing losing money?
      • CatWChainsaw 2y ago
        Only poor people can lose money, rich people get bailouts.
    • randomdata 2y ago
      Is it? The role of government is to clean up individuals who cause trouble for the population at large. Poor people who trade their grocery budget for gambling undeniably cause trouble for a population. Do rich people who trade their luxury handbag budget for gambling equally cause trouble for a population?
  • bormaj 2y ago
    I think it's reasonable to carryover retail investor protections to the gambling world. One market has much more history in taking advantage of the average Joe and as a result there are many sensible protections in place. If you can't withstand losing your entire investment, you probably shouldn't be able to place that bet in the first place. Unfortunately, since gambling is only recently more accessible/prevalent, I think it's going to take a few mishaps to produce similar regulations.
  • stouset 2y ago
• notepad0x90 2y ago
  I'm of the opinion that gambling as a whole should not be regulated.The only restriction should be on using other people's money instead of your own. It makes no sense, it is the person's money and life, and it is theirs to ruin as they wish. We are not properties of the state. If a person cannot be allowed to do what they wish with their own money, because they might harm themselves or others as a result, then how can you trust them with driving a vehicle, flying a plane, operating weapons in the military, or even owning a personal weapon? Every gun sold to a person is a gamble on whether they use it to cause harm on others (same with the things i listed above). This same logic applies to regulation of drugs in general as well in my opinion. Regulating other peoples lives is not the purpose of the government, especially when they're not harming others or being a nuisance to the public.
  • csomar 2y ago
    > how can you trust them with driving a vehicle, flying a plane, operating weapons in the military, or even owning a personal weapon? Comparing Oranges to Potatoes. People involved in gambling are not stupid. They are either 1. Not quite smart or mathematically smart, so they don't understand the odds or 2. Addicted to gambling in the same way someone is addicted to Tobacco. Of course, there is 3. Having a little fun with a little money; but this is not the audience that's making money for gaming.
    • notepad0x90 2y ago
      > People involved in gambling are not stupid. I agree. > Addicted to gambling in the same way someone is addicted to Tobacco Addicted people are still responsible for their actions. case in point: drunken driving. I agree with punishing gamblers that cause harm. but gambling itself should not be regulated. Tobacco, alcohol, hard drugs,etc.. they should all be allowed. But to balance that, punishment for crime needs to be severe when you're an addict.
      • AlexandrB 2y ago
        > I agree with punishing gamblers that cause harm. The first people gamblers harm is their own family - long before any formal crime has been committed.
• xnorswap 2y ago
  Legalising is fine, failing to regulate is not. I strongly believe it is better to have something legal and well regulated than illegal and left to illegal operators. This is true for a number of vices. With legalisation should come strong regulation, including advertising bans. The UK made this mistake when they strongly de-regulated gambling in the early 2000s, it seems the US did not learn from that when legalising.
  • andrewla 2y ago
    I think this is a misapprehension -- there is a ton of regulation around sports gambling. They may not have put the specific regulation that you think is necessary (in this case, banning advertising) but there are pretty huge barriers to entry to get into the sports bookmaking business, including a number of background checks and interviews in an attempt to prevent organized crime from getting a foothold. This is why every time you see an add for gambling there's a note on the ad saying "if you have a problem with gambling call this help line".
• fwip 2y ago
  Article is correct. We should probably also ban government-run gambling (lotteries).
  • AlexandrB 2y ago
    Yes. Lotteries always seemed like the thin side of a wedge that made other gambling seem less bad. It's also kind of evil for a government to prey on its own citizens' innumeracy.
    • fsckboy 2y ago
      if you accept that people are going to gamble no matter what the government does, a state run lottery may not be considered predatory if it siphons money off of organized crime numbers games. the predatory part is the siphoning money off from the lottery to pay for "shools,etc." but if there is inelastic demand for lottery gambling, that also makes rational sense.
• ssharp 2y ago
  There were tons of red flags that were completely set aside. The largest are probably mobile betting and allowing for instant credit card deposits. There is also the fantasy of being able to win money but the reality that if you actually win money in a consistent fashion, you will be either kicked-off or your action will be severely crippled. I'd like to think the emerging prediction markets, like Polymarket, are much fairer systems, especially for winning players, and would be much better than sports books like DraftKings, FanDuel, etc.
  • greyface- 2y ago
    Polymarket works on mobile and allows instant USDC deposits. Are these somehow red flags elsewhere, but not here? Not to mention the Pandora's box that prediction markets open, when the order book can begin to influence real life events - from match fixing, to assassination markets.
    • parodysbird 2y ago
      Polymarket isn't legal in the US
      • greyface- 2y ago
        Polymarket is based in New York, and all but tells prospective US users to use a VPN.
      • chillydawg 2y ago
        And yet the biggest markets on there are consistently us centric.
    • the8472 2y ago
      It's not like that box has been firmly closed until now. Every time someone stands to profit from one outcome over another they already have an incentive to influence the outcome, prediction market existing or not. And stock markets already act as a sort of prediction basket about future events that will influence the trajectory of a company (e.g. the outcome of trade negotiations, wars, court decisions, elections, the health of their CEO etc. etc.) The upside of prediction markets is that it incentives people with information to make their honest estimates legible to society. E.g. an opinion piece in a newspaper has little skin in the game, other than the author's reputation.
• Workaccount2 2y ago
  Here is a wild idea: Reshape the entire industry to be a decentralized/house-edge-free form, where any one player has a net 0% gain/loss outcome over time. Regulate what bets can be placed and their payouts so that winners win less amounts and losers lose less amounts (i.e. you don't get wiped out). It will feel like gambling, but overtime is no different than coin flipping for lunch money with a coworker every day. Essentially math away the "house always wins" part.
  • r00fus 2y ago
    Hot take: The entire goal of the gambling industry is to act as a one-way function for money (ie, laundering). Thus, your proposal might actually work, except what's in it for the rubes?
  • WorldMaker 2y ago
    One way to look at this is it is already sort of the dividing line between traditional "Fantasy Sports" and modern "Sports Betting". Fantasy Sports involves finding a like-minded group and winnings are often as much "bragging rights" and camaraderie as it might be any actual pool of money. Sports Betting is certainly not that. A problem is infection. As Sports Betting is more legal and profitable, Fantasy Sports gain more Sports Bets and pseudoanonymity and lose some of their community spirit for "micro-transactions" and other "extreme gamification" and the line between each blurs. (Including to the point where groups looking for one might be easily confused into doing the other.) I idly wonder if there is a way to shore up Fantasy Sports against the tide of Sports Betting profit.
  • njtransit 2y ago
    There are such attempts, e.g. Smarkets. The general approach is called a "betting exchange" where you buy and sell bets with other people to set the market price for the various games / events going on. It's too complicated, though. Most people just want to bet on the Pats winning. They're not rational financial actors.
  • user90131313 2y ago
    great but who is funding that at %0? is it non profit? like website, company and math people there will have wages. so even 1% is impossible without incredibly big volume and liqudity.
• recursivedoubts 2y ago
  and the gods of the copybook headings limped up to explain it once more...
• add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  I don't understand why there couldn't have been a middle ground where we legalized it but restricted the advertising so that it wouldn't be shoved down our throats so aggressively at all times whiched has ruined sports altogether.
• vitalurk 2y ago
  Who is fighting against this veritable scourge? I'd love to join in!
• sfg 2y ago
  I don't want to stop those who enjoy it from enjoying it for the sake of those whose decision making doesn't interact well with its legalisation. I think others care more about preventing people from acting in ways that have negative consequences than I do, so I don't expect many to agree with me.
  • left-struck 2y ago
    I think the majority of people who are against these changes, like you, don’t want to ban people from gambling. The situation before was that bets between individuals on sports events was totally legal, but no businesses were allowed to profit from it. It’s not that casual bets between friends should be banned, but this insidious industry that spends 100s of millions on marketing, and uses every tactic available to lure people and then get them addicted. That is such a far cry from not wanting people to gamble at all. Those who want to be a nanny and say boo hoo gambling bad are in a totally different category to the people who reasonably think that there’s a serious issue with this industry.
    • sfg 2y ago
      I think you are right that most people who want to ban such activities want to go back to the former situation where people could only bet on sports with friends. Their position is different to mine.
• stillold 2y ago
  I don't understand why the free speech rules everyone wants aren't also trying to be applied to these platforms.
• neonate 2y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20240926163805/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/09/legal-sports-gambling-was-mistake/679925/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240926163805/https://www.theat... https://archive.ph/CmsIZ https://archive.ph/CmsIZ
• avazhi 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • jknoepfler 2y ago
    By exposing complete and utter ignorance about the neurobiological mechanisms behind motivation and addiction, you've evinced a "stupid" opinion. When, in your own time, your ignorance leads you to make "stupid" decisions, I hope there's a safety net in place to protect you and people who depend on you. I also hope there's a support network to help people you mislead with your idiotic parenting, should you breed, which at the moment I hope you choose to defer. In the meantime enjoy congratulating yourself for accomplishments you almost certainly didn't earn purely in virtue of your perceived "intellectual superiority" while denigrating others for mistakes we could have helped them avoid. Your lack of compassion does not withstand rational scrutiny. I sincerely hope that as you gain experience in the world you continue to reflect on your relationship with other human beings, and that in your own way you develop a deeper and less idiotic understanding of others.
    • avazhi 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • jknoepfler 2y ago
        "You can't fix stupid" doesn't entail that you shouldn't regulate activities with potentially catastrophic consequences for families. It entails the opposite. We can, and should mitigate the harm to individuals and families that stems from said "stupidity" through... precisely... regulation. Go to a GA meeting some time. People who develop crippling gambling addictions are exposed to gambling precisely through going to a casino "as a gag to throw away expendable income," the same way most alcoholics are exposed to alcohol through casual, healthy drinking. No one walks into a casino thinking "let's throw my life and the financial security of my family away," and the proclivity for such is not readily predictable with any meaningful precision at present. The inference to draw from this is that we should reduce harm through regulation, not double down on the damage we're causing and writing off the resulting, predictable damage as immaterial because the "people were stupid." Like... what is your actual goal? Increasing human misery? Creating a society in which people predictably suffer from the predictable, catastrophic consequences of unregulated enterprise? (This isn't even touching the blanket categorization of everyone who develops a crippling addiction as "stupid," which doesn't withstand even superficial scrutiny. What's the point of that blanket demonization?) The medicalization of the underlying problem should push you towards an epidemiological perspective on the problem, not a thin, incoherent moralizing knee-jerk. Like... "you can't fix stupid" - sure, my grandmother was scammed while declining into (heretofore undiagnosed) dementia. Is the inference to draw "she's stupid, let's permit unfettered exploitation of people?" No, it's let's keep financial fraud illegal, prosecute the scammers, take some steps to help grandma prevent a repeat, and behave like sane, compassionate individuals.
• vitorbaptistaa 2y ago
  Unfortunately Brazil also legalized it in 2018, after Dilma was impeached using very sketchy arguments (many call it a legal coup). It is spreading as a cancer. This month the central bank published a report saying that in August 20% of the Bolsa Família, the largest money transfer program for very poor Brazilians, was spent on these bets. Out of the 20 million people that receive it, 5 million made bets during that month. This is 2 billion reais (about $450M) spent in a single month by the poorest Brazilians. It's a cancer. Everywhere you go there are ads. The influencers, the biggest athletes and musicians are marketing it. Although I tend to be liberal, this needs to be heavily regulated.
  • oceanplexian 2y ago
    We’ve spent years conditioning an entire generation of kids on quick hits of dopamine from mobile phone apps. I personally believe that it’s a “glitch in the matrix” for a large enough segment of the population to cause societal chaos. As a libertarian however, I break with the opinion of making consensual activities illegal even if they are self-harming. So I guess my stance is probably the same as addictive drugs. They could be legal, but come with the same labeling, warnings, ID requirements and age restrictions that come with a pack of cigarettes. We should probably be educating kids about the dangers of addictive apps like we once did with DARE on the dangers of drugs.
    • caseyohara 2y ago
      It's funny you mention DARE because studies have shown the program was a complete failure, along with the War on Drugs™ and "Just Say No". The only reason it continued as long as it did was not because it was effective, but because it was popular with politicians and the general public because they thought – intuitively – that the program should work. It did not reduce student drug use. In face, it backfired and taught kids about interesting drugs that they probably wouldn't have found learned about otherwise. This ineffective program cost U.S. taxpayers $750M per year for 26 years. Let's not do that again.
      • giantg2 2y ago
• nektro 2y ago
  surprised pikachu face
• ezekiel68 2y ago
  For me, this topic is prototypical of a larger conversation which goes something like, "Should individuals be permitted to slip between the cracks of society?" For the first three centuries of the Industrial Revolution, the answer in the West was, "Yes, of course." c.f. indentured servitude, honor duels, and debtor prisons. By the way, this way of life was, for certain, a shining improvemnt for the average person who would have previously been trapped in serfdom under Feudalism. The Progressive ideal, which started as only a faint glimmer in the US at the turn on the 20th Century, has grown to dominate our social mores over the past 50 years. For most people reading HN, it's all they have ever known. But there is a serious cost. We infatilize our adults and produce generations of new citizens paralyzed by anxiety and (to a large extent) incapable of tolerating the faintest hint of discouragement. But at least fewer of them slip through the cracks.
  • jknoepfler 2y ago
    you make absolutely no argument for why strengthening protection of individual rights requires living in a shithole where people are free to exploit well-known vulnerabilities in the human motivation system. "prosperity required permitting unregulated sale of fentanyl!"... sounds nonsensical, because it is. > We infatilize our adults and produce generations of new citizens paralyzed by anxiety and (to a large extent) incapable of tolerating the faintest hint of discouragement. I played poker professionally for seven years. I've seen the full gamut of responses to gambling on the human brain. Gambling absolutely hijacks the neurocomputational circuitry of some people in a way that it doesn't others. Infantilized? I managed my risk of ruin carefully and rationally, others didn't. They invariably got ruined. Period. Those people should not be gambling. There was no safety net, which you falsely imagine exists. I wish there had been. The consequences to their lives outweighed, by far, the prosperity gained by permitting large-scale high-stakes gambling (which is at best a zero-sum game if the house is included). I do not think my former profession should be openly legal to everyone. Participating in it was an act of willful evil on my part. I am glad to have it regulated, for the sake of the families of the people whose lives I helped destroy. There was absolutely nothing and nobody "infantilizing" me to induce "anxiety". There was a largely unregulated free-for-all into a brutal, unforgiving world, in which you can lose a fortune in the blink of an eye if you elect to wager it and lose. Sure, I thrived in that environment, but it was at the expense of vulnerable individuals. Seriously, what the actual fuck are you talking about. If you'd ever taken actual, life-altering financial risks in a society without a real financial safety net (the United States), you'd know that there is absolutely nothing between a foolish series of decisions while drunk (or much worse, in the thrall of a persistent gambling addiction) and complete financial ruin. We can do better as a society, and we should. While we're at it, gosh, you know what would have improved the poker economy? Unregulated firearms at poker tables. Hell, let's just make homicide legal if the other person bets their life. Or maybe even if they don't! That would have really let us demonstrate our fully-enfranchised individual wills to power. No one would be confused as an anxious man baby! We could have thrived like real manly men! Letting people blow each other's heads off at a whim during a gambling free-for-all ("between consenting adults!") would surely improve prosperity. Great idea! Agreeing as a democratic society to regulate that behavior would only produce a society of emasculated degenerates incapable of expressing the full range of the human spirit! Think of the sacrificed business opportunities! /s.
• Log_out_ 2y ago
  betting is entrepreneurship for suckers. it can only exist in places with zero upwards mobility as a sort of firefly at the end of the tunnel for the eternal serfs. Any libertarian society tolerating it,proofs its no longer a libertarian society with chances for all just feudalism were the aristocrats play meritocrars to calm their consciousness.
  • fsckboy 2y ago
    you think a libertarian society solves the problems of unequal distribution of wealth? Or do you simply want libertarian gambling casinos to collect all the money from suckers, and the government should stay out of it?
• mlsu 2y ago
  Sports gambling, like all gambling, ruins lives. It's certainly worth having the discussion about whether people should be able to run a train through their life and the lives of their families via app. But a much easier argument against sports betting is that it ruins the sports. Players throw. They get good at subtly cheating. The gambling apparatus latches itself to the sport, to the teams and players, the umpires and judges, the sporting organizations. With this much money on the line, it's not a matter of if but when games are thrown, cheated -- the bigger the game, the bigger the incentive. It's even easier now because of the amount of side/parlay betting that is available. It exhausts the spirit of competition. Sports gambling is diametrically opposed to sport itself.
  • fallingknife 2y ago
    Best make it legal then, so bookies have the threat of losing their license if they get caught rigging a match. Black market bookies couldn't care less.
    • noqc 2y ago
      It's much easier to collect evidence for gambling itself than to collect evidence that a match was thrown.
    • bbor 2y ago
      Much, much fewer people would gamble if you had to do it by finding some weird person and handing them cash and trusting them to run a fair book, than just clicking some buttons on an app. After all, that’s why they’re apps that are constantly advertised; gambling services don’t have customers they attract with offers on the free market, they have victims who’s better sense they overcome through convenience and manipulation. Black market bookies also would see consequences from getting caught rigging a sports match, anyway. For one, they would be punished by the law for being black market bookies.
    • pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      Would gambling do so well without the constant brainwashing (advertising). Almost every advert I get on TV/web is designed to convince me how much fun gambling is. That seems to include every minute of sport, either player clothing, hoardings, or on-screen. It's soul-destroying.
• giantg2 2y ago
  "But the more elegant solution is the blunter one: ban sports gambling once again." I don't think anyone would call blanket banning "elegant", even if it would be the best solution. "They estimate that legal sports betting leads to a roughly 9 percent increase in intimate-partner violence." I'm sure the numbers are probably right, but I can't help but feel some of this is reaching a bit - many population causation studies seembto be more about triggers than true root causes. Just because betting triggered this doesn't mean betting needs to be banned. What this should lead to is better support and treatment for people affected by this type of violence. If it's not betting that set it off, it would be some other stressor (probably also money related or feeling like a loser). Trying to fix the person's behavior such as impulse control and anger management would be much better than progressively banning everything as the next trigger emerges.
  • lynx23 2y ago
    I am waiting for the day when one of them proposes to ban relationships altogether, because they have an inherent risk for partner violence... A certain TOS episode comes to mind, which depicted the aftermath of such a law.
• esaym 2y ago
  I didn't even know this was legal. When did that change??
• hn72774 2y ago
  I met up with some old college friends on a trip after 20 years of not seeing them, and all they wanted to do on Saturday and Sunday was sit around, watch football on TV, and talk about their bets. No one was going for any team in particular. They were cheering for their bets to win. I lost all interest in the idea of me ever gambling after that. There are certains sports I love to watch because I love the game. Gambling would ruin that for me. No thanks.
  • tomcam 2y ago
    Makes me sad to read this
  • zmgsabst 2y ago
    “People don’t like what I like so they’re wrong!” Contrary to you, there’s certain sports I find boring to watch as such (eg, American football) — but enjoy in a condensed version focused on bets (eg, RedZone and dailies on American football). The game of predicting individual performance and ensemble outperformance is more interesting to me than the underlying sport — and much more interesting to discuss than any single game. You don’t have to gamble, but trying to portray it as some grievous fault people enjoy things differently than you is ridiculous.
    • hn72774 2y ago
      I re-read my comment and did not pass any judgement then, nor now. I simply shared my experience. If you are triggered by something I wrote, that's all on you. I get it, no one dealing with addiction wants to be called out on it. That is less than helpful for either party.
      • zmgsabst 2y ago
        > No one was going for any team in particular. They were cheering for their bets to win. I lost all interest in the idea of me ever gambling after this. You’re negative here — and I think you know it. > I get it, no one dealing with addiction wants to be called out on it. Wowza, calling me “triggered” and an “addict” because I enjoy something differently than you and thought your comment was negative isn’t appropriate. I think your response here confirms my initial impression that you have issues with this topic.
• mppm 2y ago
  In my view, gambling should be a service provided directly by the government. And I'm not talking a "public-private partnership", but an actual DoG that will be taking bets, running gaming rooms in select cities etc. -- all with the explicit mandate to make of gambling available but boring. No bonuses, no ads, no promotions, no glitzy websites. Gambling is inherently exploitative and no amount of regulation will align the incentives for commercial operators. You also don't want to ban it outright, as it may descend into the underground otherwise, so this looks like a reasonable area for the govt to take direct control.
  • mattmaroon 2y ago
    In the US that’s called the lottery. Go into any gas station in a poor neighborhood and there’s a line of people buying tickets.
    • Ericson2314 2y ago
      They advertise government lotteries in the US though, which is fucked up.
  • fakedang 2y ago
    Well we do have that in some states of India, and guess what? It has the same effects. Moreover the government is incentivized to promote this as it's an alternate source of revenue. Roads are peppered with ads, and there's the constant infighting in the ruling government to see who gets the gambling and liquor sales portfolio (and usually it's a buddy or kid of the chief minister).
  • Kiro 2y ago
    That was how it worked in Sweden and it solved nothing.
  • jamesfinlayson 2y ago
    I think this used to be the case in (most of) Australia (it's still government run in Western Australia but that will change - they've already tried twice to privatise it but the first time was derailed by the pandemic and the second time no one was offering enough money). I think privatisation happened quite a while ago (mid to late 1990s) but my vague memory is that there was some sort of deregulation in the mid 2000s (or at least that's when I remember the ads becoming incessant) and that seems to have coincided with the endless offers of bonus bets, deposit matches, bet returns etc.
• heisenbit 2y ago
  While betting may be harmful the cash rich industry has helped many to escape poverty by enabling money laundering.
• ookblah 2y ago
  ban the advertising around it
• beginnings 2y ago
  Humans would be absolutely nowhere as a species without the gambling trait, we would never have left the trees, never mind the caves, we need a certain percentage of the population to be turned on by risk and uncertainty, because the majority are terrified of it. If we are hell-bent on forcing people to play this artificial money game against their will, with no opt in or out, they're just born and told they now have to work all their life for this piece of paper that some apes printed, then they should at least have total control over that money, anything less and the entire game is unjustifiably immoral. Not everyone has their cushy little tech salary like you, the majority of people hate their lives and gambling provides an escape just like drugs, and the slim hope of winning big - something that was taken away from real life. The masses have been drained of any hope of improving their situations the old-fashioned way. If you want to reduce self-destructive behaviour, make a fairer game, make it a game worth playing, offer decent rewards, make it a level playing field instead of the 1% owning 90% of the game. The average shelter in America costs $500k and the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and you wonder why people are gambling? Fuck me. As an aside, a lot of smart, high quality people are drawn to the puzzle of sports betting, and are skilled enough to get out of slavery with it, why should those people lose their out? Their intelligence and self-control to beat the game was their birthright, just as an expensive education was likely yours. Fundamentally, it's an issue of freedom, the right to self-destruct, the right to throw your life away, as an act of protest or otherwise. I wouldn't want to live in a world where I'm not allowed to put everything I have on the line against someone else who's willing to take it on. The government has no business infringing on that basic freedom of exchange between individuals. And you know gambling will only be the start, eventually they will come for something you like because when it comes to removing freedoms and rights, one thing always leads to another. Outlawing gambling does nothing to change the circumstances that are churning out self-destructive humans, it doesn't fix the root cause, our society is generating broken people and their needs for escape will always be met in any remotely free world.
  • left-struck 2y ago
    This isn’t about outlawing gambling. In the US it was legal to gamble between friends on sports events but businesses weren’t allowed to be involved. That changed in 2018 and business were allowed to be involved and then everything went down the drain.
• lequanghai 2y ago
  [flagged]
• khafra 2y ago
  It's a strong sign of our overall civilizational inadequacy that betting on events where the discovered probability would actually be useful--like economic policy outcomes, natural disaster frequency and magnitude, etc.--is still illegal, while bets with no positive externalities are fair game.
  • GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
    Polymarket
• keiferski 2y ago
  This, along with innumerable other things like lifting the ban on usurious interest rates, is ultimately a consequence of the same phenomenon Nietzsche describes as “the death of God.” We have forgotten the deeper reasons that certain things were prohibited or discouraged, assuming that these rules were only there because of a belief in a religion society doesn’t follow anymore. That was a naive view and it turns out that many “old” rules are actually pragmatic social codes disguised as beliefs. This isn’t limited to a particular tradition, either: pretty much every major religion has frowned upon things like gambling. And so in the absence of any real coherent philosophy that aims to deal with complex problems like gambling, addiction, or excessive interest rates, you’re only going to get an expansion of what is already dominant: markets. Don’t expect this to change until knowledge of ethics and philosophy becomes widespread enough to establish a new mental model for thinking about these issues.
  • hgomersall 2y ago
    What are usurious interest rates? Is some amount of interest ok?
    • keiferski 2y ago
      Depends on whom you ask, but this case had a major effect on removing restrictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_National_Bank_of_Minneapolis_v._First_of_Omaha_Service_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_National_Bank_of_Min.... Prior to that, usury laws existed in most states that restricted consumer loans to something like 5-13%. Personally I don’t have an issue with the concept of interest itself, but if you look at the huge amount of Americans in debt paying 20-30% on credit cards, it certainly seems excessive and usurious to me.
    • CamelCaseName 2y ago
      It depends (especially with inflation), and yes.
      • hgomersall 2y ago
        So it's ok to have high interest rates with the hope it will cause unemployment in the hope that reduces inflation?
• djmips 2y ago
  You think?
• devonsolomon 2y ago
  I worked briefly building sports betting software after being a part of an acquisition at a major brand. The biggest surprise for me was that the people running the company were gamblers too. If someone beat them, then they wanted to beat them back (which made no sense to me… given that the statistics are running over the group, not an individual). If someone beat them badly, then it was okay because it’s good marketing (and the player would always bring that money back, they’d say). They would also say “all gamblers are addicts”. Rivalry with their players high, respect low… Except perhaps for their “Whales” where the social contract between the two parties was more explicit. Also worth noting that from what is saw, 80% of revenue comes from <10% of players. There is no differentiation to the company between sports, slots, lotteries and other games.There are no noble games, just ways to extract money from confused or vulnerable people. Crash games seem to be deluding people the most currently. I don’t believe it’s possible for these companies to behave anything close to ethically. Regardless of regulation, the business model is corrupt. At conferences anyone I spoke to would say “you can’t leave the gaming industry, the money is just too good”. Which is why I promptly left.
• renewiltord 2y ago
  All the arguments here apply stronger to alcohol prohibition. Terrible drug. Banned in Islam for a reason. Source of domestic violence. Source of drink driving. Valueless. I am very libertarian but this drug must be banned.
  • Ylpertnodi 2y ago
    Thanks for letting me decide.
• injidup 2y ago
  I was just talking about this issue last night with a friend. When I was six, my father burned me with a lesson. We were at a fairground, and I saw a pyramid of cans. The standard game: throw a ball and knock em down. At six years old, I was already a good throw. I knew I could win. My father made me an offer. He gave me the money for the game and told me that was my lunch money. If I won, I'd get both lunch and the win otherwise ..... Of course, even the best six-year-old has a very low chance of knocking over those weighted cans. The house wins. I went hungry that day. Since then, I’ve had a terrible reaction to gambling. Casinos make me feel ill just walking through and seeing all the sad faces. I’ve never bought a lottery ticket in my life. I always feel that hungry belly when I think of gambling and it turns me right off.
  • cheschire 2y ago
    Little did you know at the time that your father was also gambling. His bet was against you. His reward was that you would align to his views. Had his gamble failed, you would’ve been addicted at a young age to that rush, and his authority on many life matters would’ve been diminished in your young eyes.
    • Shocka1 2y ago
      A 99% probability of winning is a gamble I would take any day.
    • lucianbr 2y ago
      Many choices in life have some risk and some odds of failing. Calling them all gambling is plain wrong. Are you gambling that you will not be implicated in an accident every time you leave your home? There's definitely a risk, and a significant number of people lose every day. Or maybe the odds do matter, as does the existence of a house that manipulates them.
    • nbardy 2y ago
      This is baseless cynicism.
    • jjulius 2y ago
• ocean_moist 2y ago
  People highly underestimate the number of 18-21 year olds sports gambling. At college it seems like slightly over 50% of the guys I meet do. Some just using pick 'ems but it's not uncommon for them to use their parents identity to get on real sport books. The somewhat "nerdy" ones also just use crypto. Some are terribly in the gutter, I told my friend that India was all but guaranteed to win the chess olympiad and he bet on it somehow...
  • AlexandrB 2y ago
    One thing that's not often talked about is how heavily gendered gambling addiction is - with something like 2/3 of gamblers being male[1] and an even more skewed ratio for problem gambling. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4736715/#:~:text=In%20terms%20of%20engagement%20in,7.8%20%25%20of%20the%20female%20gamblers https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4736715/#:~:tex....
• braza 2y ago
  Two interesting things that I noticed from the betting industry: 1) In Brazil there's an entire industry of athlete's from lower divisions and agents that sells transient results that is taken in consideration in the bets. For instance, number of corner kicks, number of fouls, yellow cards and so on. It's hard to trace it back the intention and there's a player from the National Team being investigated due to betting patterns [1]. With 80% of players earning less than USD 300 [2] when someone have the offer to take USD 10000 to receive 3 yellow cards in 5 games, it's hard to say no for those guys. 2) The problem that I see with the regulation is that not only in the sporting and social aspects (that is bad) but the money laundering and the lack of tracing in the money that goes in bet houses. For instance, Germany has some regulation around the topic [3] but the reality if you go in some Tipico or some small bet house you can carry EUR 10000 and bet in anything, no questions asked; that's the reason why a lot of people around the world come to Germany for sports betting [4]. Anecdotally speaking, an old colleague used to manage some players in Brazilian 3rd division and he had some connections with folks in places like Germany. Before the game he already knew the bets and then just told to the players what needs to be done (e.g. I want a penalty kick after 80min, or a yellow card before 70 minutes) and after the bet being payed the agent just passed the money to the players (more or less 30%). [1] - https://onefootball.com/de/news/fa-want-to-ban-lucas-paqueta-for-life-for-breaching-betting-rules-39581367 https://onefootball.com/de/news/fa-want-to-ban-lucas-paqueta... [2] - https://g1.globo.com/trabalho-e-carreira/noticia/2022/12/04/salario-medio-de-jogadores-de-futebol-nao-alcanca-nem-as-100-maiores-remuneracoes-de-contratacao.ghtml https://g1.globo.com/trabalho-e-carreira/noticia/2022/12/04/... [3] - https://cms.law/en/int/expert-guides/cms-expert-guide-to-online-gambling-regulation-in-europe/germany https://cms.law/en/int/expert-guides/cms-expert-guide-to-onl... [4] - https://n1info.rs/biznis/fatf-nemacka-raj-za-pranje-novca-godisnje-se-opere-oko-100-milijardi-evra/ https://n1info.rs/biznis/fatf-nemacka-raj-za-pranje-novca-go...
• spurgu 2y ago
  What the fuck do you have against people "ruining their lives"? I've made a ton of bad decisions in the course of my life. And I'm all richer for it. Don't take that away from me. I despise the nanny state policies of my homeland Finland. I've been a nomad for the past decade and a half due to it because I don't want to settle down in a place where people think they should be able to force other people to not make what they (or "the majority") think are stupid decisions. You will always find justifications once you start going down the rabbit hole of "what's best for them".
  • left-struck 2y ago
    I believe that making mistakes is an integral part of learning and the way our society views failure is totally wrong. When you’re failing as often as you are succeeding this means you are operating at or near your limit, absolutely something to be proud of. None of that applies to gambling though. Not only is there nothing to learn from failing that you couldn’t have learnt before placing a bet, but success could mean addiction and the eventual ruination of your life and the lives of those you love.
    • spurgu 2y ago
      > None of that applies to gambling though. Are you sure about that? > Not only is there nothing to learn from failing that you couldn’t have learnt before placing a bet Just look at investing with fake money portfolios vs. making decisions with real money. Or playing poker with play money. It's a whole different game mentally and some lessons you just don't learn unless you got a real stake in it. > but success could mean addiction and the eventual ruination of your life and the lives of those you love. In my case my success (in poker) led to a prosperous career playing professionally. No lives ruined. YMMV. Poker, or sportsbetting, is not gambling any more than investing in the stock market is, or choosing a spouse. Sure, you can gamble and YOLO your life savings on either of them. But you can also learn to make better decisions, the hard way. Or try and fail and lose money in the process. Rather than having a small set of "safe" pre-chosen options laid out for everyone. Disclaimer: Games where you play against the house (that has an edge) like slots or roulette is gambling. But again, just because there are people playing slots to make a profit doesn't mean that we should ban being an idiot. Life is dangerous and you will eventually die from it. This is more of a personal philosophical opinion than a "what's best for people" one (which I think is wrong).
• odiroot 2y ago
  A secondary effect is also a new venue for money laundering. In some EU countries it's pretty much an open secret.
• alephnan 2y ago
  There are various comments about fixing matches. There’s a meme/“theory” in retail options trading about “max pain”. Wherein, the stock price will move as to maximize the total amount people lose on options.
• akhileshwar09 2y ago
  yes ,, this is not a good thing to gamble
• OfficeChad 2y ago
  [dead]
• t-3 2y ago
  So, gambling can ruin lives, sure, but the only reason lives are ruined is that money is so essential to everything in life. The problem isn't that our brains love to take risks and get immense pleasure from winning against the odds, it's that society is set up so that we can easily destroy our lives by doing otherwise harmless things that feel good. It very much reminds me of that Iain Banks quote: "Money implies poverty." The sooner we get rid of money, the sooner people will just bet their imaginary internet points on internet gambling instead of their real life right-to-live-points, and everybody will be better off.
  • Rygian 2y ago
    Money is not the issue here. If something different, call it 'X', had a similar impact on life, then people would gable with 'X'.
    • t-3 2y ago
      If 'X' had a similar impact on life to money, it wouldn't be 'X' it would be 'money'. Not to mention, the claim that people will only gamble for real-life money is absurd. I've found gambling in various video games is just as enjoyable as gambling in real life, the only difference is the reward for winning is video-game-points and not money.
  • cambaceres 2y ago
    Why not get rid of unhappiness while you're at it? Just do it man, I'm sure you can figure out how.
  • AlgorithmicTime 2y ago
    [dead]
• DanielHB 2y ago
  It is crazy to think that many countries ban cigarette advertising but not sports betting. The same moral and social arguments can be made for both, so why different rules?
• concordDance 2y ago
  The elephant in the room is that there are a small percentage of people (1% or so) who just can't function in the modern hyper-optimized, complex and competitive world. The state should take over the management of the finances of these people.
• dkrich 2y ago
  I actually think this will be a self correcting problem. Contrary to popular belief, running a sportsbook is a terrible business. Look at draftkings for instance. They’ve gotten gambling legalized nearly everywhere yet are still wildly unprofitable. I guarantee you that they will never be profitable unless they are granted a monopoly which will never happen. It’s fairly obvious. If you travel to Vegas and go to the Aria, one of the premier casinos on the strip, you will have to walk around to find the sportsbook. When you do you may be surprised to see that it’s not out in the center of the floor inviting people in, it’s in a dark remote enclosed corner that feels like a large coat room. Now ask yourself why that would be? And why do casinos devote so much floor space to slot machines and table games? Betting apps offer the terrible aspects of running a book- relatively unwealthy gamblers with the inability to cross subsidize more profitable games and alcohol along with the added drag of attracting disloyal users who can and will easily use other books to compare lines or take advantage of promos.
  • CarVac 2y ago
    Does the "correction" you speak of involve business failures and acquisitions until a monopoly does exist?
    • dkrich 2y ago
      its going to end with these companies going towards zero and then possibly being acquired by private equity
  • RandallBrown 2y ago
    > They’ve gotten gambling legalized nearly everywhere yet are still wildly unprofitable. They're predicted to profit more than $400 million in 2025. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/draftkings-inc-nasdaq-dkng-breakeven-111140892.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/draftkings-inc-nasdaq-dkng-br... Somewhat like Amazon in its early days, their lack of profits was mostly because they were investing their money into growing the company. DraftKings spends hundreds of dollars to acquire each customer.
  • overstay8930 2y ago
• londons_explore 2y ago
  Gambling ruins lives. We could solve that by banning/restricting gambling. But it seems that's just a patch on the bigger problem: That our citizens are insufficiently educated to see what is ruining their life and stay away from it. Sure, some people waste all their money on gambling. But others waste all their money on drugs. Or theme park rides. Or model trains. Would it not be better to have better training not to waste all your resources on something that doesn't benefit you?
• afh1 2y ago
  "Because some people are irresponsible, responsible people should be prohibited of taking risky actions responsibly." It's the same with the prohibition of alcohol.
• PaulRobinson 2y ago
  Banning is the wrong way to go. It just moves everything to black market. Regulation, however, might be OK. In the UK we are now at a stage where bookmakers have to do Know Your Customer (KYC), checks to do identity validation, you can't gamble with credit cards (debit cards are fine), and "VIP Schemes" to incentivize those who gamble the most to gamble more are not allowed. All sites have voluntary limits for players on deposits or timeouts, and a lot of TV ad spots are about staying in control of your gambling. What's interesting is that most of this (except KYC and CC deposits), are not government-mandated - the industry has gone down a path of self regulation to try and keep the government out of it. There's expected to be some announcements in this space in coming months, and there is a fear of "affordability checks" being mandated - to bet above, say £100/month, you'll need to show bank statements that indicate you can afford a higher level of betting. The fear is that this will just mean rich business for the offshore black market guys on WhatsApp and Telegram who are ready to move in. I think what might actually be a better solution is for us to talk more widely about "value", and educating bettors. There is little value in slots or casino games - you will rarely, if ever, be in a place to get +EV on those, and when those situations do arise it requires an incredible amount of expertise and insight to exploit them, far more than Hollywood or the books you may read suggest you need (Ed Thorpe invented the World's first wearable computer to get +EV on roulette). However, sports betting is different. Value is often there, waiting to be found. Particularly on prop bets. If you're prepared to do the work in figuring it out, you will either win, or lose more slowly. As such, I'd argue more education and more controls around bad habits seems a better way to go than banning it outright. But then, I'm happy to do that work, I enjoy it, it's fun. Most people don't, and they're losing money to me and people like me via a commission agent (the bookmaker).
• rty32 2y ago
  Silly take: humans are really bad at controlling themselves and stick to doing the correct things, that's why newer languages like Go and Rust force you to check errors in return values, among many other additional checks/guardrails that didn't exist or weren't common in older languages. It is just easier to have the compiler checks these things for you instead of manually making sure things are correct. Same for sports gambling. Human nature is really bad, and it is really hard to control yourself. See that wsj reporting. Even someone as rich and educated as a psychiatrist can sink 6 digit amount of money into gambling. When the law allowed gambling, especially online gambling, it opened a can of worms.
  • sneak 2y ago
    If human nature is truly that inherently bad and dangerous, then the worst possible thing we could do is to allow adult human beings to rule over other adult human beings as their parent, using the threat of violence to prevent them from doing things “for their own good”. Indeed, allowing this to occur has wrought orders of magnitude more death and destruction than sports gambling or drug use or prostitution. no victim == no crime
    • rty32 2y ago
      If I understand your comment correctly, you are saying laws are bad, and decriminalization/deregulation is good I would very much like to believe that. But see what happened in Oregon after decriminalizing drugs.
      • sneak 2y ago
        Look what happened in Mexico and California and many other places after criminalizing them. They are not the same thing. One causes huge amounts of murder and violence, and the other is simply people destroying their own selves, as is their right. Almost all of the gun crime in the US is the direct result of the prohibitions on the sale and manufacture of drugs.
    • snapcaster 2y ago
      I used to think this, but do you really see the liberalization of gambling laws as having a positive effect? Would you describe the previous state of it being illegal as some kind of dystopia? Do you care at all about the wreckage it creates in the lives of individuals and their families?
• discoramallah 2y ago
  [dead]
• da_chicken 2y ago
  I don't necessarily think legalizing the gambling was a mistake. Vices are notoriously difficult to manage whether they're legal or illegal. But legalizing advertising for sports gambling was definitely a mistake.
  • tiptup300 2y ago
    I would argue that they are the same thing.
  • verdverm 2y ago
    It's more that gambling is now in the pocket and they have expanded what you can gamble on, like 12 year olds playing baseball
• eadmund 2y ago
  Legalising it? No. Normalising it? Yes. Unfortunately, our culture seems to have two settings: legal ban; full celebratory embrace. We don’t seem to be able to handle tolerating and discouraging (see smoking, which is slowly being banned across the once-civilised world). Should the awesome power of the State be deployed to wield violence against people who bet money on sports? No, that’s insane. Should there be half a dozen betting ads every hour on primetime TV? No, that’s crazy too.
  • SammyStacks 2y ago
    >> Unfortunately, our culture seems to have two settings: legal ban; full celebratory embrace. If something is legally banned, there's generally a black market for it. Once it's legalized, the bar for consumers to enter the market is nearly eliminated; large companies can pour a ton of money into gaining new users in the legal market and moving users from the black market to the legal market. >> Should there be half a dozen betting ads every hour on primetime TV? No, that’s crazy too. It's even worse than that. There are betting ads during the actual game broadcast. Commentators read ads listing various odds on the current game. Betting companies sponsor a ton of stuff related to the teams and leagues. ESPN (Disney) both broadcasts games and runs its own sportsbook. You can't watch a sports game without hearing about betting on that game itself, much less sports in general.
  • steviedotboston 2y ago
    Prior to legalized sports betting, was "state violence" used against people who bet on sports as a casual hobby? It seems like it was basically tolerated as long as it was kept amongst friends/coworkers, etc.
    • creaghpatr 2y ago
      Not the bettors as much as the organizations facilitating it.
    • eadmund 2y ago
      > Prior to legalized sports betting, was "state violence" used against people who bet on sports as a casual hobby? Yes: Sal Culosi was shot and killed by police in Virginia for wagering more than $2,000: https://reason.com/2011/01/17/justice-for-sal/ https://reason.com/2011/01/17/justice-for-sal/ I am certain that there are more — that’s just one which leaps to mind.
• TomMasz 2y ago
  They eliminated the "friction" associated with sports betting, threw in some easy credit and the result was exactly what you'd expect.
• valval 2y ago
  I have nothing against gambling as a libertarian, but I don’t want to be liable for people who made poor life choices. I don’t want to pay for the welfare of people who ruined their financials or health, nor do I want to look at homeless people on my commute. If what we’re going to have is a society where I’m paying for the housing and health care of other people, I’d like to be able to dictate with an iron fist what the other people are allowed to do and be.
  • misja111 2y ago
    How about alcohol consumption? That surely ruins a lot of lives as well and causes loads of health issues.
    • valval 2y ago
      Yes, the exact same reasoning applies to my stance on alcohol and all self-harming behavior. Did you really have to ask?
  • Meniceses 2y ago
    This is a really great: You don't mind when companies optimize for making money even if a company makes other people addicted to gambling or similiar things but then you don't want to help these people because its the peoples fault. You know why you think like this? Because you are, by accident, on the side which benefits most of libertarianism. You really think a human becomes homeless because of 'poor life choices'? No. They become homeless because they never got a chance, have neurological issues, bad parents, bad upbringing, whatever. Its a lot easier to be a libertarian when you won the birth lottery... Man you are ignorant
    • valval 2y ago
      The company doesn’t make individuals do anything. You have power over yourself, and trying to shift blame is the most naive idiocy present in human nature. You represent exactly that. Also yes, a large enough majority of homeless people got so because of poor life choices that the minority that didn’t isn’t even worth bringing up. You’re also entirely correct that some people are destined for more success than others due to predetermined factors. That’s absolutely fine.
• misja111 2y ago
  Sure sports gambling ruins some lives. So do alcohol, fast food, you name it. Does this mean all of those should be forbidden? In the end these things are a trade-off: a very large part of the population has no problems with them and enjoys being able to gamble/drink or eat. A small portion does have serious problems. Should these people be protected against themselves, at the price of forbidden most people their little pleasure? Personally, I think not.
  • xandrius 2y ago
    Alcohol is definitely regulated and fast food is too a broad term to mean anything. But yeah, gambling should also be heavily regulated (as alcohol) and it is far from a "little pleasure", it can easily become an addition even without throwing around ads, free first bets and gamification.
    • misja111 2y ago
      Regulating gambling is a good idea, but most people here seem to be talking about forbidding. I find that odd, compare it with the general opinion here about soft drugs, there HN seems to be pro-legalization.
• pelasaco 2y ago
  Brazil took long to allow it and now its spreading like wildfire! In September, the central bank released a report revealing that in August, 20% of Bolsa Família — the largest cash transfer program for Brazil's poorest citizens — was spent on betting. Out of the 20 million recipients, 5 million placed bets during that month, amounting to 2 billion reais (approximately $450 million) spent in just one month by the most vulnerable Brazilians. Every day we are reading reports of family loosing their cars and saving because kids were betting, which is crazy. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/business/2024/09/brazilian-social-program-beneficiaries-spent-549-million-on-bets-in-just-one-month.shtml https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/business/2024...
• imgabe 2y ago
  I think the best equilibrium is probably when gambling is illegal but unofficially tolerated as long as it doesn't cause too many problems. Some people are going to gamble, but it should be dangerous. You should have to deal with the mob. It should reflect the risk inherent in gambling. It should be understood as a kind of shady and degenerate thing to do, not like a normal hobby.
• xbmcuser 2y ago
  looking at wallstreetbets is it any different than allowing people to speculate in the stock market with options and derivatives. Its sad when it comes to sports people took notice that oh its ruining their sport but why dont they see how this same gambling is ruining their own countries and world economies.
• xrd 2y ago
  I used to love watching basketball. I hate all the ads now and don't want to have my kids see that. But, what's the alternative? Going to a live event, for two bad teams, for four people, cost me over $500 a year ago. I can't afford that. Youth sports? I live in Florida, and was hoping Jai Alai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jai_alai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jai_alai) would be a weird respite, but that was the original gamblers refuge.
  • Spivak 2y ago
    College basketball for an unranked school probably fits the bill. I go watch my local uni's volleyball team play and it's super low budget, all run by volunteers, the fans are invested and local, and it's just all-around wholesome.
• bloomingeek 2y ago
  Simple question: isn't risk taking a part of most people's lives? Speeding on the highway and jaywalking may seem harmless, but can have dire results at times. Other risky behaviors can spin out of control sometimes before you have a chance to understand how it all went so bad as quickly as it did! I've known several gambling addicts down through the years, the damage they did to their financial and family lives was tragic. Divorce was almost a given, homelessness occurred on several occasions. Being shunned by their parents and siblings sometimes followed after money was borrowed and never paid back. Two things I never could understand after all the above. First, I couldn't get any of them to attend GA meetings after I offered to attend with them and second, why they ever thought they had a chance to win consistently in any gambling endeavor when the gamble itself is connected to a computer. (Yes, I'm saying cheating can be involved. Imagine!)
  • tokai 2y ago
    >Speeding on the highway and jaywalking may seem harmless These two are not at all the same, and one is much more dangerous and asocial than the other.
    • potato3732842 2y ago
      They're also a terrible comparison to gambling because the participant can massively reduce the risk compared to the baseline by having the "skill" to not take the risk when the odds are particularly bad, like not jaywalking through traffic that's blinded by sun whereas with pretty much every form of gambling you can only change the risk very slightly if at all.
      • bloomingeek 2y ago
        "skill" is why gambling institutions are making record profits. Sports betting, for example, has way too many variables to ever make winning consistent. Jaywalking when being blinded by the sun is about as silly as you bringing it up to prove some point. Only a fool would do that, like someone who thinks they can beat a possibly rigged gambling system.
    • 2y ago
• alphazard 2y ago
  The biggest argument in favor of sports betting is that it's a prediction market. Prediction markets are the best way we know of to synthesize the opinions of many parties. They should be protected as a class of economic free speech, but in the US there is an effort to eliminate prediction markets on the most important issues (like the outcome of an election). Think about what it implies for the government to be against a kind of organized assembly that causes citizens to become more informed and allows individuals to de-risk the outcome of events.
  • tantalor 2y ago
    Predicting the outcome of a sporting event is pointless. There is zero risk associated with the result.
• snapcaster 2y ago
  The older I get the more I hate gambling. When i was younger I tended to think "hey it's their choice" but i've realized how unfair our society is in terms of things like this. Food, gambling, etc. are all backed by hordes of brilliant well paid people trying to get you to ruin your life so they make money. On the other side is just regular people like us stressed out trying to survive. This isn't some "freedom" issue, it's an incredibly huge power asymmetry and I think "we the people" need protection from these forces
  • tdb7893 2y ago
    Yeah, the issue with "it's their choice" is that through addictive behaviors they are trying to take away that sort of agency from people. I don't have an issue with gambling in general but I have a huge issue with people trying to trigger and profit from addicting behaviors. It's a phenomenally cruel thing to do to people.
    • tootie 2y ago
      It's very analogous to drug use. The libertarian point of view that people should be free to do what they want with their own bodies makes sense at first blush. But addiction is such an absolute blight on society that ending it will only improve the world.
      • dcow 2y ago
        Yeah. I think there must be a balance between let the cyber hippies watch trees grow and needle service for addicts. I don’t even think legalizing weed is aging well.
        • card_zero 2y ago
          Wait, which of those is libertarians?
      • tastyfreeze 2y ago
        Drug abuse is lower where people have a strong sense of community. Drug overuse is a symptom of a larger issue of disconnection and disillusionment. Legislating drug use is like saying "the beatings will continue until morale improves."
• jonnycomputer 2y ago
  We go through periods of liberalization, and then it's opposite, as the ills of each regime become salient. For example, in the US, Oregon abandoned its legalization of hard-drugs, and I expect to see a national push to restrict and regulate cannabis more heavily, for example, regulating THC content more stringently, etc. With so many things, finding the right balance takes trial and error, and what the right balance is may change as other variables change as well.
• jjice 2y ago
  I've commented about sports betting a bit of HN in the past, but it's such a tricky situation for me. On one hand, this is actively bad for people. You can make the argument that some people win, but the vast majority do not (over any extended period of time). People are hurting themselves and the people around them. I personally know so many young guys who have lost thousands of dollars that they really didn't have the opportunity to lose on sports betting in the last few years. On the other hand, why would I restrict someone's freedom to choose to make a poor decision? I find this so hard to make a personal judgement on because I see myself going both ways in my own life. I drink alcohol despite it being bad for my health, but I scoff at smoking cigarettes for the same reason. You can actively justify either of these, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. I just don't know where we begin to restrict people's choices when it primarily affects them - the obvious exception being their friends and family who are affected as well. Do we step in and prevent this transitive negative effect? I'm really not sure. I've seen some other comments mention having heavier regulation. That idea makes sense as a middle ground to me, I guess (although I'm really not sure).
  • bcassedy 2y ago
    The some people win argument isn’t even really true for sports betting. Casinos just ban anyone that wins with any regularity. Of course any individual bet can win but casinos stack the deck by only taking action from players they know will lose over the long run.
  • asdflkjvlkj 2y ago
    > On the other hand, why would I restrict someone's freedom to choose to make a poor decision? Ok, let's ignore the individual. But gambling losses that lead to bankruptcy hurt creditor, for instance. Since creditors can't really easily separate out gamblers from non-gamblers, those defaults get spread across society as costs. The linked article asserts that a large proportion of government welfare funds in Brazil are gambled away. The linked article asserts that losses inspire domestic abuse. Consider that net winners may only win 51% of the time-- that's a lot of losses even if the individual makes out better in the long run.
  • mattm 2y ago
• neves 2y ago
  Gambling is a stupidity tax.
• anon291 2y ago
  It's shocking to me that the very same groups that want you to think drug legalization is a good idea are pearl clutching over gambling. In the grand rankings of vices, drugs are significantly worse. Gambling is a vice, no doubt, but honestly Americans are too puritanical about it.
• currymj 2y ago
  like a lot of libertarian experiments in the US, we seem to have done it in the worst possible way. implementation matters. if it had been up to me, sports gambling should have been restricted to physical locations, and marketing prohibited or highly restricted (perhaps only print advertisements in local markets informing people where they can gamble). perhaps also allow an existing customer to place bets via a telephone call. the way I think about it is, the main reason you want to legalize a vice is to prevent criminals from selling it. so you want legal operators to have an easier time doing business than the criminals, so they can outcompete them -- but just barely. app on your phone and unlimited marketing on the internet and primetime television goes way too far.
• setgree 2y ago
  In a sane society, sports gambling would be legal but with a lot of guardrails: * If apps detect compulsive behavior, they could go dark on your phone for a day/week/month/year * All bets could have delayed payoffs (e.g. greater than 10 minutes [0]) to avoid optimizing for a quick dopamine hit * Apps could be linked to a credit score/measure of financial health and allow larger bets for people with higher credit scores, or they could stop you from placing bets if there's evidence of negative impacts on your overall financial situation. In general, the question of: how can we let consenting adults take risks that they find pleasurable (drugs, sex work, gambling, free diving, etc.) while also limiting the worst harms and/or protecting the most vulnerable people, is under-discussed relative to its importance, IMO. [0] https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1822382269669228822 https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1822382269669228822
  • loceng 2y ago
    I've thought that there should people, your family and/or friends, who have to sign on to enable you to gamble - where they will be on the line for any debt or a certain % of the debt the person has, etc. E.g. Dana White of UFC appears to have a gambling problem, but maybe with how much money he earns it actually isn't a problem - but what if it at some point it gets out of control, and that is hidden from friends or people that care about him - and where that loss of control could be hidden from sight, kept secret until it's perhaps too late - however that looks?
    • hx8 2y ago
      I'll be your friend and enable you to spend all of your money for 1% of any earnings you make.
      • loceng 2y ago
        Sure, if you're taking on risk then that seems like it could be a fair arrangement - and then perhaps there's a requirement of putting some of the potential debt you're promising to cover to be held in escrow.
  • astr0n0m3r 2y ago
• NickC25 2y ago
  I don't think legalizing it was a mistake. I think allowing the betting houses and websites to advertise as prolifically as they have been (with very little restrictions) was a massive mistake. Advertising for sports betting is fucking EVERYWHERE. And athletes, such as LeBron James, who while already a billionaire, decided to take the money and advertise for betting companies. When you've got enough money to convince a billionaire with a pretty good image to advertise for you, something is amiss.
• mikhael28 2y ago
  Yeah, huge mistake. I see way too many people casually addicted to wasting their money and burning it for no good reason. I enjoy playing fantasy football, but gambling on it is a sad use of your hard earned money that will only impoverish people and keep them working for the man.
• bugtodiffer 2y ago
  Having it unregulated as fuck was, I can go bet anywhere anytime and get drunk there too. It should be way more serious, then people wouldn't go there to chill.
• pfdietz 2y ago
  To what extent should society protect people from themselves?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• acjohnson55 2y ago
  One fascinating aspect is that gambling addicts are basically paying for my podcast listening habit. So much of advertising is pushing stuff that is exploitative of some hope -- wealth, health, etc. -- the makes people susceptible to things with questionable efficacy.
• moi2388 2y ago
  Poor people from low socioeconomic families will always find a way to ruin their lives. Gambling, smoking, drinking, drugs, risk taking behaviours, crime. We can either ban everything, or accept that certain groups of people will just abuse literally anything
  • tobsimobsi 2y ago
    Do they find a way or are the ways engineered to squeeze every Cent out of them?
    • moi2388 2y ago
      Both. Even when illegal they still do it far more often.
  • CatWChainsaw 2y ago
    Yeah those dumb fucks should have just been rich.
• tenebrisalietum 2y ago
  Gambling is terrible, and I'll never do it, but unless casinos are holding people at gunpoint and coercing them to play, they aren't depriving anyone of anything against their will. Marketing needs to be truthful of course, and sane regulation is OK, but anything pleasurable can be addictive. The whole puritanical notion that anything pleasurable is dangerous and needs to be strictly regulated/outlawed is not a good reality, doesn't really do anything except make people lie about what they really want to do (which causes obssession and addiction), and honestly needs to be buried with all the other outmoded concepts. I'm getting tired of "addiction" being used as a justification to reduce freedoms. If you want to fix addiction, fix the underlying causes instead of banning shit. This involves designing societies where everyone's basic needs are easily met, where people who run into problems can get help easily, where people are encouraged to treat each other equitably, and lowering anxiety and panic. It's hard and doesn't make anyone any money which is why it's not the default state in many societies, but it does prevent these societies from collapsing But all this howling in this whole topic about how gambling hurts the poor, yet no one is actually talking about how to stop creating poor in the first place - is just sanctimonious virtue signaling. Even if you have a poor friend or relative who got bit by a gambling loss - why is he/she addicted - what did you or society do to address that?
• 999900000999 2y ago
  Let adults be adults. The hypocrisy is amazing, many states ban gambling, but have scratches. Online scratchers, state owned digital slot machines. How is that fair when online casinos are banned. The State has a much lower Return to Player.
• bentt 2y ago
  Every time I watch SportsCenter and hear the word “parlay” I vomit a little. They sold their souls.
• catchcatchcatch 2y ago
  You all sound like you have adhd. If you can’t budget you will never get a corporate job and youll be odd about panhandling and asking for money. Gambling is fun when budgeted, sports gambling can have a positive expected value, unlike the games, but they can be fun. There’s people that don’t have money anxiety you live in a money bubble. Go play catch. Most people here need to see a doctor about getting perscribed adderal.
  • superultra 2y ago
    This is one of the most Reddit comments I’ve ever read on hacker news.
    • catchcatchcatch 2y ago
      Why? If someone loses all of their money gambling they’d have to ask everyone for money anxiety free. That’s what a CEO does in general idk what to tell you what do you think y combinator is if guys all want to be a millionaire you can ask 1 million people for a dollar and then gamble and then do it again
      • superultra 2y ago
        Your account is 9 mins old. You started an account to defend sports gambling? Ok. Corporate sports gambling thanks you for your service.
        • catchcatchcatch 2y ago
          You’re probably naricistic and miss the point of freedom and what the community wants. If everyone wants to gamble all jobs would be at the casino because that’s what people want to do.
        • catchcatchcatch 2y ago
          Anyways life more about the time budget
  • 2y ago
• liendolucas 2y ago
  Argentina is currently facing a huge teenager gambling addiction on illegal websites, we're talking about kids from 11 years old onwards. They gamble on school breaks, among their friends as something completely natural. Mobsters catch them by giving away for free an initial fixed amount of money, then they get hooked and keep betting and burning money. The worst part of it is that is an extremely silent addiction: parents would only realize about it once a kid is so full of debts that they get threatened by the mobsters that run these sites, in their despair they reveal the situation to their parents. They easily search them online through social networks and pressure them really hard for the money that they owe. In my opinion online gambling is a f***g disgrace and should simply not exist at all. It ruins lives and families. It should only be possible to play/gamble/bet physically in a casino or authorized venue.
• catchcatchcatch 2y ago
  Gambling in general is not addictive unless you have adhd and are extremely impulsive. That leads to other problems. There’s people without adhd that think it’s fun and sports betting can be a winner not much different poker. They have computer models that are profitable funds a lot of stuff in a world where people think controlling inflation is a good idea. Most people here sounds like they have Parkinson’s or something. Go play catch or lift some weights
  • catchcatchcatch 2y ago
    Maybe they can stammer like the swift compiler on type annotations or that Bachman turner overdrive song you ain’t seen nothing yet
• davewritescode 2y ago
  I personally love sports betting and I’m glad that it’s legal to do and I don’t have to send money to the Caribbean to do it. For me $10 is enough to get me interested in a game and I don’t gamble compulsively. The cat is out of the bag with sports betting, any teenager can open up a Bovada account with no verification. I’m happy to talk about advertising and reasonable regulation but banning sports betting at this point seems silly.
• bnpxft 2y ago
  Let's say it like it is, it is the legalization of profiting off of an addiction that is the mistake.
• m3kw9 2y ago
  They legalized online gambling basically. It's a online casino, using sports as the random medium. Casino for all.
• stcroixx 2y ago
  Is allowing people to follow an active investment strategy in various markets also a mistake? I understand the need for CME weather futures contracts for a farmer, but anyone is allowed to do this. Hedge funds have rules regarding who can participate.
  • yieldcrv 2y ago
    Yeah its weird to me that gambling is regulated at the state level while investment contracts are regulated at the federal level and therefore have nothing in common, despite the user experience of throwing your money out the window being the same
  • Jaepa 2y ago
    This is a motte-and-bailey fallacy that got brought up a lot by gambling proponents early on. The biggest difference is that by design investments on average will return a zero or net positive potential for return. Gambling will always return an average negative return by design. EDIT: There was a study that came out a month ago that showed that state by state when online sports betting became legal, there was about a $20/month reduction in retirement investments. Considering only ~12-20% of the population has taken part in sports betting, this is not an insignificant reduction in retirement investments.
• tightbookkeeper 2y ago
  to hold the libertarian belief that “people will do it anyway so might as well make it legal”, you must believe marketing and ease of access have no impact on usage.
• aa_is_op 2y ago
  You don't say.... something banned for decades was not a actually banned by accident!
• yieldcrv 2y ago
  I think regulating or limiting ads is a decent direction
  • CatWChainsaw 2y ago
    I would like to see this get legal traction just to see the industry panic and writhe.
• benreesman 2y ago
  So complete prohibition seems bad: it drives activities underground, makes them the purview of organized crime, and is ultimately an insult to the freedom and agency of adult human beings to make their own choices. But turbocharged advertising and online “engagement” and “monetization” hyper-optimization by unscrupulous growth hacker types who heavily optimize for excessive and reckless gambling by targeting, with malice aforethought, people with issues and aggressively try to recruit new people into a risky activity seems maybe even worse? How about door #3: keep it legal to avoid most or all of the downsides of prohibition, and absolutely fuck up the profitability of hyper marketing it? So many problems have plausible if not compelling solutions if you always care more about the welfare of the vulnerable than anyone, anywhere, who is getting shit rich by doing harm. It took a long time, but we finally took the gloves off with Big Tobacco. You can still buy cigarettes, but you so rarely see them anymore. Even I gave up (which I swore I’d never do) because it’s just impossible to smoke most places, they’re not sold everywhere anymore, and it’s expensive as hell. There will always be diehard smokers, but it’s not the crisis it once was and you still don’t have drug dealers involved. How is this not the playbook?
• lgdskhglsa 2y ago
  As someone who worked for a major sports betting company, these are the things we built but only used if required by the country/state/tribe/whatever: * Deposit limits, per day/week/etc to limit the damage someone could do and also to limit money laundering. This could be self imposed or regulator imposed. * Withdrawal limits. This was mostly to limit money laundering. * Wager limits, per event/day/etc * Self exclusion for a certain time period or forever. This kept people from using our stuff to make bets based on our best efforts to identify them. Sometimes we had a government ID, sometimes we didn't. * Other exclusions, i.e. blacklisting for things like not paying child support. * Geofencing to prevent people from using our app outside of the legal jurisdictions. Also, geofencing to only allow people to register for our apps in certain locations, such as a casino. That could easily be extended to prevent people from using the apps outside of a casino, but I don't think that was required anywhere. These things are technically possible and would greatly help if required globally, short of an outright ban.
  • matthewolfe 2y ago
    I also work in industry. I think a national self-exclusion scheme (like the UK has) would be huge.
• lacrosse_tannin 2y ago
  _Sports_ is not some basic fact, moral good in the world. It's just games. If you want to argue against something you need to find some other reason than it's inconvenient to professional sports.
• alex5092 2y ago
  The impact of problem gambling on families can be devastating and we see it first hand in the financial counseling that we do. (Disclosure: I'm the founder of MoneyStack and we run GamFin.org) Since many of you have commented about regulation, check out the SAFE Bet Act https://tonko.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=4216 https://tonko.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=... Also, the GRIT Act may bring much needed federal funding into the prevention and treatment system across the US. https://www.ncpgambling.org/advocacy/grit-act/ https://www.ncpgambling.org/advocacy/grit-act/
• matthewolfe 2y ago
  I'm the founder of BeeBettor (YC S24). I've been working in this space for a while. A lot of the points in the article are valid. I have two major issues with online sports betting (OSB) in the US. 1. Sports betting advertising before, during, and after games is horrendous. There is no way to watch sports without being bombarded. Obviously, this is a huge issue for problem gamblers. Sports become unwatchable. 2. Self-exclusion is impossible. There's 40+ sports betting apps available. There is no centralized body a person can say "hey don't let me bet anymore" and then be automatically restricted from betting across all apps. This is something I think we can help with in the near future. So what can be done now? I don't think OSB is going to be redeclared illegal. I don't think that would be a good idea either. Millions of people have started sports betting. If it becomes illegal, it won't make them stop. Happy to discuss this further. Email is in my profile.
  • volleygman180 2y ago
    > So what can be done now? I don't think OSB is going to be redeclared illegal. I don't think that would be a good idea either. I disagree - I think it would be a great idea. While some may argue that gambling is a zero-sum game (which isn't exactly great, in and of itself), it's really a net loss. While some people may win a bit of money, I'd argue that the degree to which their lives are improved is much less than the degree that some others' lives are destroyed. Gambling, ultimately, being a negative sum. > Millions of people have started sports betting. If it becomes illegal, it won't make them stop I disagree with this too. It's substantially easier for any random person to simply tap a few buttons on their phone to place a bet than to find and arrange opportunities with others to bet on sports or visit a brick & mortar betting site. The level of effort of placing a phone bet is so small (and with 24/7 access), you'd have a very hard time arguing that making OSB illegal would only marginally impact the amount of sports gambling taking place. Bottom line: gambling is an addictive activity for all people and some more so than others. Limiting access to it will have a positive impact on pretty much everyone who does't own or work at a gambling company.
    • matthewolfe 2y ago
      > you'd have a very hard time arguing that making OSB illegal would only marginally impact the amount of sports gambling taking place. "Offshore sportsbooks" are another thing to consider. These companies are not regulated in the US market, but still take online bets from people in the US. The ease of placing bets online does not go away with making OSB illegal. Just eliminates any consumer protection we could have had.
• qwerty456127 2y ago
  Let's be honest. A person who would habitually loose more than half of their monthly income to betting or other things they would do better without is mentally disabled and should not be given money in the first place. Instead they should be given professional care like senile elderly people and underage children receive. The rest can invest their money whatever the way they see fit.
• nonameiguess 2y ago
  This article doesn't address it for whatever reason, but any discussion of sports betting in the US is going to have to deal with the actual reason PASPA was struck down. It was found to be unconstitutional. That doesn't mean sports betting needs to be universally legal across the entire country, and it isn't, but if you're going to make an argument that it should be legally banned, that has to be done on a state-by-state basis. The US Supreme Court, as an institution, changes its mind over time, but I'm not aware of any notable instance where exactly the same court only six years later reverses its own decision. Likely a few of these justices would need to die and be replaced by someone with a different legal opinion before change was possible. You can make these kind of consequentialist arguments anyway. It's worthwhile discussion. But the legal decision itself wasn't made on a consequentialist basis. The court didn't decide PASPA was illegal because it was socially bad and we'd have a better world without it. The proposed "just ban it outright everywhere" can't happen under the current legal regime. It's fine to propose things that can't happen but we should acknowledge this becomes a hypothetical discussion.
  • voxic11 2y ago
    The reason the PASPA was unconstitutional wasn't because the federal government can't regulate sportsbetting. It was due to the specifics of how the PASPA implemented the ban. In particular the authors of the PASPA wanted to "grandfather in" certain states so rather than making sportsbetting illegal nationwide/federally they made it illegal for state governments to pass new laws legalizing sportsbetting in their states (which meant that states which had legalized sportsbetting already could continue to allow it). It was this "commandeering" of the state legislature's right to legislate that was found unconstitutional, not the federal government's ability to regulate sportsbetting. So if congress wanted they could pass a law that made sportsbetting illegal at the federal level and put a federal agency in charge of enforcing it. Its similar to the legal weed situation. States can't be forced to enforce federal laws, but the federal government itself can enforce those laws even if the state governments are unwilling.
• larrydag 2y ago
  I place the lottery in the same category. Punitive on those who least likely can afford it.
• siliconc0w 2y ago
  I think we can have addictive things we just have to rules that minimize their impact. * If the thing you sell is addictive you cannot advertise it. * The thing must clearly tell buyers it is an addictive product designed to extract money from you for the rest of your life. * It should be taxed such that society can pay for the costs of the addiction. * If it's gambling you can only wager low stakes. If it's food we need to draw the line on how much added sugar, salt, or other bullshit can be used to make food more addictive
  • cdaringe 2y ago
    Geewhiz, how do i know im addicted to it until im hopelessly addicted to it? <<The game industry lobby BURSTS through the wall like the kool-aid man to the parent post>>
• lacoolj 2y ago
  Yeah I might be getting a lot of excitement out of all these games now but I could do without the losses. Maybe time to quit?
• ETH_start 2y ago
  First of all, the federal sports gambling ban was struck down as unconstitutional, on the grounds that governing sports betting is outside the purview of the federal government. States have every constitutional right to impose sports gambling bans of their own. Even if you support such bans, you should not advocate imposing them unconstitutionally, by a federal government that was not delegated the power to impose them. Those who support unconstitutional overreaches by the federal government are perhaps not considering the unintended consequences of eroding the principle of governing in accordance with such constitutional limits. They ought to consider a type of government restriction that they oppose and find harmful, and consider how much worse it is when the federal government can nationalize it. Second, once someone reaches the age of consent, they should be able to do things that run a high risk of ruining their lives. The only type of restriction that I could possibly see being justifiable for activity like this is on advertisements for such activity, which could be required to disclose risks and/or not communicate falsehoods.
• samsepi01 2y ago
  We definitely need to pump the brakes on this... Sports gambling ads have become so pervasive that it’s hard to watch a game without being bombarded by manipulative promotions that say stuff like "BET $5, GET $200 INSTANTLY"... I became a recreational sports bettor in college through offshore books. I always felt like I was doing something extremely dangerous and so was very careful - probably in large part because of the societal stigma surrounding sports betting. I feel like I benefited from having instilled in me a greater fear of gambling dangers that I wouldn't have now if I just started gambling after seeing all these prominent sports talking heads discussions, social media influencer promotions, and constant TV advertisements. Trying stricter regulations feels like a no-brainer before totally reverting to a federal ban. At a minimum, we should match the intensity of regulations for other legal vices: - National min. age of 21 for any state that legalizes sports betting, matching drinking regulations that were set 40 years ago. - Restrict advertising to audiences where you can confidently report that >70% of which are adults >= 21 years old, similar to recreational marijuana advertisement regulations in states like CA. - More intense warnings should follow each ad, clearly emphasizing the risks of addiction and the likelihood of financial loss, similar to the mandatory disclosures in prescription drug ads. Additionally, for the unique vice of sports gambling and it's associated societal dangers, there should be: 1. More intense restrictions on ads: a. Clearly disclose all stipulations. For example, language like ‘BET $5, GET $200’ should be accompanied by fine print explaining that the bonus bet can’t be withdrawn, and any winnings must be wagered multiple times before withdrawal. b. Transparent statistics of users' outcomes at specific sports book. Something like: "Y% of our customers who have accepted a bonus bet have successfully turned it into real cash in their bank account. The remaining (100-Y)% lose it all." 2. Regulations on sports book's social media accounts promoting individual bettors' winnings - i.e. Sports books shouldn't be able to promote a story about someone winning $100k on a $1 20-team parlay. 3. Roadblocks, at a minimum, on betting losses for vulnerable groups -- e.g. after a bettor has lost X% of their initial deposit/yearly salary/net worth/etc, the bettor's account should be restricted in some way unless they say to a real person on the phone: "YES, I AM AWARE OF HOW MUCH MONEY I'VE LOST. I WISH TO RISK LOSING MORE MONEY." 4. A requirement that all bets be placed with money deposited via debit card/check/cash. A ban on taking on any kind of debt (like using a credit card to deposit funds into betting account) to place a bet seems reasonable.
• brailsafe 2y ago
  It really seems insane to me (in Canada specifically, but also generally) that alcohol ads and sports gambling app ads are not only legal, but possibly the most common form of advertising, the latter of which only recently becoming legal under our "progressive" government as though having our teeth kicked in during the pandemic wasn't enough. Seems like an almost deliberate effort to screw as many lives as possible
• 29athrowaway 2y ago
  If you don't legalize it, it will still happen, just in a more clandestine way.
• StanislavPetrov 2y ago
  I'm willing to lay 2-1 that it wasn't a mistake.
• bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
  What if I told you that in Sweden, the state runs a gambling ring called Svenska Spel.
• dan_lannan 2y ago
  There are literally thousands of ways someone can be self destructive and ruin their lives or blow up their family. I’ll never understand the mentality of “please govern me harder daddy”. If someone wants to self destruct they’ll find a way to do so. Taking away something that millions of disciplined people also love while simultaneously setting a precedent to let the government tell you what to do seems like a foolish and slippery slope.
• mjtechguy 2y ago
  No one is being forced to bet. The crime is not teaching people self sufficiency and good decision making. If heroin become suddenly legal I would not start using heroin. It’s a choice and it takes self control. It is no one’s responsibility but one’s own to make good decisions. “A fool and his money are easily parted” holds true here. Don’t be fools.
  • thebigspacefuck 2y ago
    I think the issue is that at some point the heroin and gambling leads to desperate situations for the fools, the fools start mugging people and stealing your property, then you feel like a fool for letting them get into that situation when it feels preventable.
    • mjtechguy 2y ago
      I see your point. How far do we go to protect the fools and is there infringement upon the non fools when everything has to be scoped down for the lowest common denominator?
• pmarreck 2y ago
  What do we do in general with behavioral addictions that people can't seem to handle broadly?
• JCharante 2y ago
  Couldn't read full article due to paywall but Singapore has a really ingenious system where family members can report you as a gambling addict which bans you from all gambling facilities in-person & online since you need your ID to enter/signup.
• CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  Touched upon in "The State of the Culture 2024" By The Honest Broker. Many graphics showing how art was swallowed by entertainment which was swallowed by distraction which was swallowed by addiction which is what Silicon Valley wants. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024 https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-202...
• lee1991 2y ago
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• lee1991 2y ago
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• anovikov 2y ago
  Almost any scalable activity optimised for making money is socially harmful. No doubt about it. Dwelling more on this matter risks leading us to outright Communism though which is more harmful than all of those petty harms put together.
• deleted 2y ago
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• SamuelAdams 2y ago
  > A small number of people place the large majority of bets—about 5 percent of bettors spent 70 percent of the money in New Jersey in late 2020 and early 2021, for example. By this logic, we should ban cars because 5% of drivers experience collisions every year. Or maybe we should ban Free to Play mobile apps (5% of users result in 70% of the profits). Or maybe we should ban firearms, because a small number of users harm people. There are always risks with every industry in regards to the safety of those who participate. What is the "acceptable" number of problematic cases for a billion-dollar industry to be legally acceptable?
  • BobAliceInATree 2y ago
    No, you should regulate driving so those 5% stop colliding with things all the time and the gambling 5% gamble a bit less.
• RIMR 2y ago
  Gambling has zero societal upsides. We pretend sometimes it does, but it's always trading a limited benefit for a substantial harm. Sports Betting was supposed to create jobs, and it did. But for every job created, several other people's finances were ruined. The vast majority of this revenue is going straight to the people at the top, so it doesn't even create all that many jobs. Likewise, the lottery is one of the most insidious parts of our society. We dangle the carrot of unfathomable wealth in front of people, and let them spill huge amounts of money into a system that is so unlikely to produce a win that one can realistically conclude that it is a 0% chance. We act like it's beneficial because it funds things like scholarships, but those things could just be offered using public funds without destroying countless lives with gambling. In fact, if we just funded those scholarship with public funds, the impact to taxpayers would be substantially less than the impact on gamblers. Even when someone eventually wins a huge jackpot, there are tons of stories about how those wins ended up hurting, or in some cases even killing, the recipient. The actual reward of winning isn't what people think it is, because most people who gamble enough to have a chance at winning are not prepared at all to handle that windfall appropriately. The price paid for gambling is always too high, and dangling immense unearned wealth just serves to bait lower-income Americans into flushing their limited income down the drain in hope of a free ride. Whatever notion people have about individual responsibility doesn't apply here. This form of exploitation is well understood, and it should not be legal to deceive people this way. The vast majority of gamblers don't understand the math behind it, and vastly overestimate their odds. I've done my share of casual gambling, and personally understand that it can be a form of entertainment that can be enjoyed responsibly. Unfortunately, that is like saying that you've used cocaine a few times without overdosing or getting addicted: you're the exception, not the rule.
• chocoboaus2 2y ago
  Only need to look at Australia as to where this ends up. It's a disgrace. And yes it ruins sports broadcasts. Kids can't watch without getting hammered about odds anymore. In Australia a huge push is on to get it banned from tv.
• set5think 2y ago
  One thing I always struggle with is how any of this is different from the stock market. Most people aren’t smart savvy investors just like most people aren’t smart savvy sports betters. Companies have good days and bad days (wins and losses), and people just invest their lives away hoping for a big change. The only thing I see being a major difference is that the industry around the stock market is too engrained in the world to be ever be removed. I dunno, this article made me really unhappy in a “shine the light on things you don’t think about daily” kind of way.
  • w0de0 2y ago
    The stock market has no house. Every winner is an investor. Granted, retail investors lose more often than they win - but there’s no incentive of the market that ensures this - merely asymmetry of information. In contrast, commercial gambling can _only_ work if the house always wins. This isn’t belied by peer-to-peer gambling (save for non-commercial instances, like a poker game among friends), since in these cases the facilitator will take an exorbitant cut. Moreover, the stock market serves an ethically legitimate purpose - the efficient allocation of capital. Not so gambling.
• banannaise 2y ago
  I wonder if it would be possible to create an app that, instead of acting as the house, merely facilitates sports bets between friends. Post betting lines, let people propose and accept bets on those lines with their friends, take a nominal cut. It's probably both illegal for some reason and unfeasible because it deliberately limits its own profits, but it would make for much healthier relationships with gambling than what we have currently.