10 ms·

The fact that ESPN itself has a sports betting app tells you all you need to know about the perversion of sports now that gambling is blessed by the government.

• ronsor 2y ago
  I'm surprised that people seem to just now realize that sports betting is a bad idea. As you said, the worst aspect is the large amount of marketing and advertising these platforms receive; I wouldn't care if they weren't pushed so heavily.
  • hluska 2y ago
    People have known for years - that’s the really terrifying part. Heck, when I was in business school I wrote a paper on the dangers of sports betting. There were many resources available then…and heck, Gmail invites were a rare commodity when I was in school. Edit - I just found a printed copy of the paper - I wrote it so long ago that the term 'sociopathic compulsive consumer' was being used. At the time, I found a lot of evidence of casinos using terms like 'instant gratification' in their marketing commmunications. This is over two decades ago. Heck, the actual paper is on a 3.5 inch floppy.
    • vundercind 2y ago
      I was briefly involved with a major sports & esports betting company. It was way grosser than I ever imagined, and they had multiple astroturf campaigns working on legalizing betting in more places. Took me from a generally laissez-faire attitude about gambling, to being entirely on board with simply outlawing at least that sector of it. So very nasty. (Incidentally, this did answer a question for me: “how did esports get so big so fast, financially?”. Never made much sense to me. The money’s in gambling, and it’s a fucking lot of money. Lightbulb went on and I felt dumb for not realizing it sooner)
      • hluska 2y ago
        I'm completely with you, my friend. I was in business school when I studied betting. All the stereotypes of business students are true - I could have suggested putting thalidomide into lollipops and nobody would have batted an eye. Despite that, my class had a serious problem with legalized gambling. One of the most free market absolutists I have ever met even concluded that gambling should just be outlawed. He was (and I believe still is) completely in favour of all drugs being legalized, but legalized gambling bothered him in a way that legalized crack cocaine never could have. What pushed him over was how they fund legalization campaigns with all these promises for help for addicts - they'll usually even offer to put a portion of total book into rehabilitation. And then as soon as it is legalized, they will specifically target people who could become addicted.
      • wnissen 2y ago
        Oh, no, are you serious? I thought esports was fun, maybe a little silly. It's the gambling? That's the big lift? Argh.
        • vundercind 2y ago
          It’s where a ton of the money in the overall sector comes from, and why a lot of the viewers are watching. There’s a large audience that wants anything to gamble on, and gaming’s very convenient for streaming and stats-collection and such, plus it has frequent matches. There are sponsorships and all that, but I doubt those would be as big as they are without the gambling, either (the audience would decline significantly). Lots of the tournaments are funded wholly or in part by gambling.
      • sensanaty 2y ago
        I had a long-haul flight last year and was sat next to a gentleman who worked for one of those betting companies in Europe who I had a chat with during the flight. The guy exuded pure sliminess from the minute he explained his job, and I couldn't believe the kinda crap he was proud of peddling to people. It's a good grift unfortunately, an insane amount of money is involved in it as is usually the case with these sorts of morally bankrupt endeavors.
  • vharuck 2y ago
    Before it was legal, most people's experiences with sports betting were small wagers between friends. Maybe a few large bets that they'll still talk about to this day. Gambling with friends or even just coworkers comes with natural limits: the size of one's bets is limited by others' aversions to risk, compulsive gambling is easily spotted, and the players' winnings/losings are zero sum. Yes, there were illegal bookies before legalization, and they had all the problems of legalized gambling plus more. But the law-abiding (or at least casually law-breaking) majority of voters didn't think increasing the prevalence of sports gambling would hurt. Not too mention all the revenue promises (more benefits, cuts to other taxes). It's no surprise legalization was politically popular.
    • SoftTalker 2y ago
      Yeah, making a small "fun" bet on a game is a way to make it more interesting. I've done it a few times and it really does. I'm talking maybe $20 though, I am far too frugal to put any real money at risk on a bet. I don't go to casinos for the same reason, I'd play a few hands or put maybe $20 into a slot machine and then I'd really start thinking about how I'm flushing my money down the toilet and I'd stop having fun. My mother in law loves it, she will go to the casino and come home up $1,000 or down $1,000 and it's all just entertainment to her. She loses probably a steady 5% on average, which is exactly what the casinos want.
      • bodhiandphysics 2y ago
        no... if she's losing a steady 5% of $1000 bucks, she's paying 50 dollars to the casino. That's not enough for the casinos... her room costs more. The casinos want her to spending a lot more money. That's the really big problem of gambling... most people can do it in a relatively healthy way. But problem gamblers make the house most of their money. The house is strongly encouraged to find the problem gamblers and focus on keeping them.
        • henryfjordan 2y ago
          I haven't been to Vegas but I was shocked to learn that the minimum bet at blackjack tables is like $50-100. Too rich for me
  • darth_avocado 2y ago
    This. There’s plenty of things in society that are similarly bad, legal, but have restrictions on how you can sell them. There’s nothing inherently different about sports betting than options trading on a brokerage platform. But only one of them is advertised in every commercial break during a sports event.
    • datavirtue 2y ago
      Options are genius trading instruments. A sports wager doesn't even deserve a comparison.
  • tomcam 2y ago
    Now apply that same kind of thinking to legalized prostitution and human trafficking.
    • BobaFloutist 2y ago
      I'm far from an expert in the issue, but I think that most people that support the legalization of prostitution don't support the legalization of human trafficking.
    • dvngnt_ 2y ago
      i think in both cases regulation is the key. for gambling there could be max $ per bet/month/year and for SW more testing and background checks to blacklist bad actors
    • singleshot_ 2y ago
      Okay! > worst aspect is the large amount of marketing and advertising these platforms receive Virtually no one is advertising prostitution or human trafficking — certainly not to the degree that gambling is being advertised. By extension, it seems we can agree prostitution and human trafficking are not nearly as severe a problem as gambling.
    • some_random 2y ago
      That's a really bad example because prostitution by itself is victimless crime. In fact, it's perfectly legal when money doesn't change hands! With gambling you have a winner and a loser, so all the other issues end up downstream necessarily whereas human trafficking (and other issues with sex work) is an enabling tool for criminals running prostitution operations.
      • BobaFloutist 2y ago
        The weirdest thing is that (paid) prostitution is completely legal as long as there's a camera involved and you distribute the recording.
  • jerf 2y ago
    Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do learn from history learn that we never learn from history.
    • kayodelycaon 2y ago
      I always phrased it as "Those who learn from history are doomed to watch others repeat it." :)
  • billti 2y ago
    I lived in Australia for quite a while. It's a terrible example of what can happen. There was recently a very good BBC article on it and the connection between sports, gambling, and marketing: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2yg3k82y0o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2yg3k82y0o Similar to many other toxic things, once the genie is out of the bottle and the government gets used to the revenue it generates, there is a large disincentive to tackling the problem.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • vintermann 2y ago
      For the government, it probably doesn't generate net revenue, because the government has to pick up a lot of the bill for gambling problems. Lobbying corruption, though, is another matter.
  • caeril 2y ago
    Gambling is the only way for some of us to make Sportsball interesting, and attempt to fit in with the absurdist normie culture in which we live. Realistically, there's nothing particularly interesting about the Dallas Frackers versus the Washington Rentseekers. But if you have money on the outcome, watching a game (with a sufficient supply of alcohol) is actually bearable. Edit: I'm explaining a real, actual reason for the value of sports betting for some people, but it seems that the Sportsball enthusiasts don't like desecration of their Holy Church. I apologize.
    • dehugger 2y ago
      If you loathe sports that much why are you forcing yourself to watch them? "Fitting into absurdist normie culture" is ludicrous. Are you not capable of making friends without drunkenly feigning interest in their hobbies?
      • caeril 2y ago
        Short answer: No, I'm not. People are generally extremely intolerant of others who deviate slightly from the norm. Having friends is a fun fantasy, though.
        • groby_b 2y ago
          You might invest some of that money into therapy instead, then. It's perfectly possible to find friends who aren't into "sportsball", but it takes more than paying an entry fee so you're allowed to hang.
        • aseipp 2y ago
          I don't watch sports and have plenty of friends. This sounds firmly like a you problem, I'm afraid.
        • sensanaty 2y ago
          Out of my entire friendgroup there's perhaps 2 people that are into any sports at all to the level of regularly watching it. I think what you need is to see a therapist and to rethink your position in life a bit, because it seems very misanthropic without being based on reality. I'd wager that most people don't care about sports all that much, at least anecdotally.
• HDThoreaun 2y ago
  Most gamblers are casuals. I spend $5-10 a week during football and usually am down like $10 at the end of the year. It provides a lot of entertainment, sucks that some people can’t control themselves but I shouldn’t be punished for that. Agree that heavily regulating and perhaps banning advertising needs to be done.
  • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Most gamblers are casuals. I spend $5-10 a week during football and usually am down like $10 at the end of the year An annual cap of $500 on bets per social security number seems reasonable. At the very least, 10% of state's median income (a whopping $4,222 nationally [1]). [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
    • whatshisface 2y ago
      I think a proportion of income would work better, because $500 would be a lot for some people.
      • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > a proportion of income would work better, because $500 would be a lot for some people Sure, if a state is willing to enforce that added complexity. I'd still have a hard cap to remove plausible deniability. Otherwise every trailer-park resident will be a millionaire while FanDuel et al do a Facebook-can't-tell-if-I'm-12-or-52 shrug.
    • tiznow 2y ago
      $500 per year? I know people who put a grand on FCS football on Fridays
    • HelloMcFly 2y ago
      I don't gamble outside of a few small wagers during March Madness. Having said that, I have a viscerally negative reaction to your proposal. It feels paternalistic to the point of near Puritanism. I don't want a laissez-faire free-for-all out there, I'm not saying "everything is fine as-is", but a government capped limit on how you waste your own money when the terms and odds are clearly communicated (unlike traditional scams, for instance)? I'll pass on that, and I'm confident I'm more of a "big government" proponent than most commenters in this community. At a minimum I do think the government should limit advertising and crack down on incentives these sites gives to keep people hooked.
• adw 2y ago
  "perversion of sports" is a particularly American viewpoint, I think! The latent streak of puritanism, maybe. Yet, somehow, the NCAA (which is wage theft on a truly industrial scale) is morally okay. It's weird. (The intersection with US ad culture – for existence, drug ads on TV – is maybe also unique.) Sport has, as a business, always been random number generation for gambling purposes. Some, like horseracing, have basically no other point. Gambling is going to happen, and like weed, it's probably better that it's regulated and taxed than entirely underground. There's no more gambling content now than there was fantasy football content before, and fantasy football was gambling too. If we're looking for a perversion of sports, though, how about the NCAA's industrial-scale wage theft? US professional sports should have junior systems which pay the players like the rest of the world...
  • HDThoreaun 2y ago
    NCAA players are now being paid for what its worth
    • adw 2y ago
      The NIL loophole? Yeah, not really, and not enforceably, and examples of teams reneging are not hard to find.
      • VWWHFSfQ 2y ago
        Not NIL. lawsuit in court right now is reaching a settlement to directly pay players. https://www.npr.org/2024/05/24/nx-s1-4978680/house-ncaa-settlement-pay-college-athletes https://www.npr.org/2024/05/24/nx-s1-4978680/house-ncaa-sett...
        • adw 2y ago
          22% of revenue, not employees, colleges don't accept employer liability. This settlement should be rejected as unconscionable. Public universities (and private universities which actually care about education!) would be well advised to get out of the business of running professional sports teams, I think.
• kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
  [dead]
• highwayman47 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    HN sides with money at every opportunity, outsources their own morality to the govt, and complains that the govt shouldn't legislate morality.
  • computerdork 2y ago
    hmm, what post did you get that impression from?
    • zahlman 2y ago
      I've only been here a month and a half but it already seems to me like the appropriate response to any "the majority opinion of HN on [non-technical topic] is [confidently stated speculation]" comment is to flag it.
• glitcher 2y ago
  Similarly as Lewis Black likes to point out, we're one of only 2 countries that advertises drugs to ourselves.
  • zahlman 2y ago
    ... What's the other one?
  • chgs 2y ago
    Ibuprofen, paracetamol etc is advertised in the uk.
• georgeecollins 2y ago
  It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport. When you can bet a lot of money on how long a college players plays, or how many points they get in a particular game, what's to stop them from having a relative make a bet and they just fake a cramp? The stock market is heavily regulated. I don't think you should ban sports betting, because like many vices it's easier to control if it is legal. According to Nate Silver, the more you let people make bets on obscure things the more opportunity their is for participants to cheat. So you should probably restrict betting to things no one participant can control (like the score). You also should try to make it difficult for a person to lose too much. You can't stop it, but you could probably make it harder. In the stock market there is a "qualified investor" that is allowed to take much bigger risks. You could make rules to punish betting sites that accept too many bets from destitute addicts. It wouldn't be perfect, but you can have liquor laws without having prohibition.
  • grecy 2y ago
    > It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport That ship sailed a looping time ago. Sports teams in the US are franchises. Like McDonalds. They exist to make profit. Lots of it. It has nothing to do with sport.
    • astrange 2y ago
      Nothing to do with sports except for all the time and effort they put into playing games?
      • to11mtm 2y ago
        I think one of the uglier examples was an NFL team local to me. They had one of if not the 'worst' season in the last 15 years or so and really didn't care. But a huge part of that was because the way all of the season tickets, merchandise deals, etc etc, didn't matter if the team was any good. Semi-Ironically the economics were explained by a huge fan of them; he appreciated the business savvy.
      • grecy 2y ago
• genericacct 2y ago
  It's worse than bad, I have seen betting ads and placement in content that regular advertisers would not touch with a 10 feet pole, e.g. in pirated broadcasts
• mcmcmc 2y ago
  Hot take: all advertising for any kind of gambling should be banned, and online gambling should be outright prohibited
  • doctorpangloss 2y ago
    The challenge is defining gambling, no? I agree with you, it's easy to determine all of the nasty gambling now. But by the time you know it's gambling as in addiction versus gambling as in a flawed but interesting part of a game, it's too late.
• to11mtm 2y ago
  I went to a local team baseball game and it was frankly depressing. To see someone being put on the big screen to make some guess in a future inning with a plug for a bet site at a baseball game; frankly at this point just allow steroids again if you're selling out that bad.
  • lotsofpulp 2y ago
    >just allow steroids again if you're selling out that bad. As I understand, they basically do. HGH, TRT, and other stuff is used for quicker recovery and to slow effects of aging.
• bityard 2y ago
  > you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market. I can't tell if you are promoting the stock market as a better or worse alternative to gambling? If you meant the latter, you couldn't be further from the truth. The stock market, as a whole, represents the combined productivity of all the publicly traded firms in the country. Day to day, the stock market is unpredictably volatile. But over the long term (decades), it trends upward and by a large amount. There is no safer investment with the same kinds of returns and there is lots of research to prove it. But short-term speculation and individual stock picking is much more akin to gambling.
  • bentt 2y ago
    I meant more like stock picking, day trading, etc. I don't think there are too many gambling addicts that would choose a whole market Vanguard ETF over, say, TSLA. :)
• rincebrain 2y ago
  As I said in the last discussion about this [1], I think outright banning just leads to worse outcomes, so you need to find a medium where you can minimize the abuse while still allowing people to get their hit enough to not go seek out unregulated forms. I'm not fond of it either, but I don't have a better answer that doesn't seem like it's going to lead to worse outcomes. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41667521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41667521
• Terr_ 2y ago
  Policy towards pathological gambling, along with drugs, is an interesting and deep philosophical hole: To what extent do those things represent a kind of biochemical slavery, and if one cares about freedom/autonomy, should that mean letting people enslave themselves, or does it mean blocking them in the name of more freedom/autonomy overall?
• chgs 2y ago
  > But the way that advertising has its tentacles in our culture now... it's bad. Yes. But half of HN works in the advertising industry.
• itsoktocry 2y ago
  >you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market. There's a big difference between betting on sports (zero sum) and buying stocks (ownership in a company), even if the latter can be silly at times.
  • feoren 2y ago
    The gambling addicts who get their fix from the stock market are mostly not buying stocks. They're mostly buying puts and calls, which are much closer to bets (you win big or you lose it all), and much closer to zero-sum (either you or the guy you bought it from loses). If they are just buying straight stocks, it's either a meme stock like GME or multiple-leveraged.
    • a_dabbler 2y ago
      AFAIK there are generally basic restrictions on being able to engage in options trading and I don't think the platforms are trying to encourage you to make more options trades in the same way gambling companies do. It's also highly regulated