3 ms·

Sports betting has the side effect of making things surrounding sports themselves more toxic. Betting being as pervasive as it is, and only increasing, causes

by nusl 2y ago

Sports betting has the side effect of making things surrounding sports themselves more toxic. Betting being as pervasive as it is, and only increasing, causes more people to view and interact with sports with bets or money, and thus can react negatively toward their losing teams. If there's a large number of angry, vocal "fans" jumping down your neck every time you lose a game or make a mistake that caused their bet to fail, there's a lot of negativity fabricated where the team or player merely played the sport as usual. Teams are made of humans, and humans make mistakes. This is normal for any sport or activity, but when you've got a chunk of cash in the game it turns into not-normal reactions. This also bleeds into other forms of sport, like esport, and feeds into some already-negative online communities. Games like League of Legends or DotA 2 come to mind. I really, really dislike the way sports betting has gone and how it's corrupted everything it touches. Couple the above with the way these companies effectively prey on betters likely to lose money, and even encourage them to bet and lose more, while at the same time stonewall those that actually know what they're doing and make money, these companies are scum and should be eradicated.

WorldMaker 2y ago
It also infects players and referees. It's harder to trust referees in a sport where you know what the big bets are, whether or not the refs are actually cheating to try to change the outcome it's hard not to feel that they might be. Baseball alone has had some prominent sports gambling by players in its past change the record books. There's a bunch of interesting arguments for and against that maybe the records for Joe Jackson and Pete Rose should be reinstated now that sports gambling is so generally legal in so many more states than their time. There's a bunch of interesting arguments of how many of today's players might be "on the take" as much as or worse than those historic gambling scandals. Other sports have their own histories with it. Sports are different when you are wondering if even players are betting for or against themselves.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Isn't there rules about anyone in a sport (players, managers, referees...) not being allowed to bet? I work with people who are not allowed to trade commodities because they are in a division where people who make those commodities store data that isn't yet public knowledge. The SEC knows who those people are and the list is sent to every broker to ensure they can't trade. If sports betting isn't checking on this and cracking down there is a major problem.
  - WorldMaker 2y ago
    As far as I know there's no central regulatory authority like the SEC. Every sport has its own Commission or Committee in charge, and many of them are profit motivated in weird conflict-of-interest ways that a government regulatory agency shouldn't be. In college sports alone the NCAA has been (badly) wandering from scandal to scandal for decades and dealing with the repercussions in increasingly baroque individual judgements (some schools are too big/make too much money to punish; other schools seem to be punished too much as scapegoats in their place), and increasingly strange forfeits and legislation-impacted regulations (such as the NIL system [Name-Image-Likeness] reshaping a lot of what used to be illegal in college sports ten years ago into a game [lit.] changing new sluice of money). Given how much the NCAA is dealing with all those scandals and the fresh regulatory burden of NIL, sports betting is probably not even on their radar until someone with too much power at the FBI says it is and picks a scapegoat school to suffer for the rest. It gets back to why there's so much debate that the MLB should either clean up its current act, or reverse older decisions against sports betting players. There's no right answer, and it is as much a question of how much of a regulatory body does the MLB want to be against sports betting in a year where most states have now made it legal in one form or another.

by nusl 2y ago

WorldMaker 2y ago

It also infects players and referees. It's harder to trust referees in a sport where you know what the big bets are, whether or not the refs are actually cheating to try to change the outcome it's hard not to feel that they might be. Baseball alone has had some prominent sports gambling by players in its past change the record books. There's a bunch of interesting arguments for and against that maybe the records for Joe Jackson and Pete Rose should be reinstated now that sports gambling is so generally legal in so many more states than their time. There's a bunch of interesting arguments of how many of today's players might be "on the take" as much as or worse than those historic gambling scandals. Other sports have their own histories with it. Sports are different when you are wondering if even players are betting for or against themselves.

bluGill 2y ago
Isn't there rules about anyone in a sport (players, managers, referees...) not being allowed to bet? I work with people who are not allowed to trade commodities because they are in a division where people who make those commodities store data that isn't yet public knowledge. The SEC knows who those people are and the list is sent to every broker to ensure they can't trade. If sports betting isn't checking on this and cracking down there is a major problem.
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  As far as I know there's no central regulatory authority like the SEC. Every sport has its own Commission or Committee in charge, and many of them are profit motivated in weird conflict-of-interest ways that a government regulatory agency shouldn't be. In college sports alone the NCAA has been (badly) wandering from scandal to scandal for decades and dealing with the repercussions in increasingly baroque individual judgements (some schools are too big/make too much money to punish; other schools seem to be punished too much as scapegoats in their place), and increasingly strange forfeits and legislation-impacted regulations (such as the NIL system [Name-Image-Likeness] reshaping a lot of what used to be illegal in college sports ten years ago into a game [lit.] changing new sluice of money). Given how much the NCAA is dealing with all those scandals and the fresh regulatory burden of NIL, sports betting is probably not even on their radar until someone with too much power at the FBI says it is and picks a scapegoat school to suffer for the rest. It gets back to why there's so much debate that the MLB should either clean up its current act, or reverse older decisions against sports betting players. There's no right answer, and it is as much a question of how much of a regulatory body does the MLB want to be against sports betting in a year where most states have now made it legal in one form or another.