7 ms·
When legal sports betting surges, so do Americans' financial problems
- black_13 7mo ago[dead]
- SoftTalker 7mo agoGambling can be a fun way to make a game more interesting. Some people can't stop there, but government lost any moral high ground when they legalized state lotteries.
- dolphinscorpion 7mo agoFun turns to disaster when you lose. Sadly, many can't control it, destroying entire lives in the process. (Not passing judgment)
- gruez 7mo ago>but government lost any moral high ground when they legalized state lotteries. What's the implication here? "In for a penny, in for a pound", so might as well legalize every other form of gambling?
- SoftTalker 7mo agoI think so. If you're going to regulate sports betting (and I think there are good arguments for doing that), but you yourself run a lottery which is a tax on people who don't understand probability, then you are just preaching in a "do as I say not as I do" kind of way.
- HWR_14 7mo agoThe difference between the ability to make bets 2-3 times a week for a dollar or two and the ability to drop $500 every play of a sporting event is dramatic.
- kjkjadksj 7mo agoWhat about someone buying $50 of scratchers a day? Why conflate a reasonable habit on one thing with an unreasonable habit on the other when both can obviously be done reasonably or unreasonably?
- laughing_man 7mo agoThis. There's a lady that comes in to my local 7/11 and spends at least $200 on lottery tickets every week. There's no limit for people who really like to buy lottery tickets.
- HWR_14 7mo agoThat's in between. I would be fine doing away with scratchers as well. But having to go to seek out the tickets is better than your phone reminding you it's tip off in 3 minutes and you have a free $20 to bet on prop bet.
- evilduck 7mo agoThat describes someone with maybe an irresponsible but manageable gambling habit, not a gambling addict. Maybe it's because of pay-at-the-pump popularity now but have you never seen someone standing off to the side of the main gas station counter surrounded by a pile of scratch offs? People exist who will drop their entire paycheck on them in a single day. I've also seen people buy irresponsibly large stacks of Powerball tickets and not just the "oh, I like to fantasize about winning so I buy a ticket each week since you can't win if you don't play". It's gambling all the same.
- bl4kers 7mo agoThe predominate reasoning for a long time now has been lotteries are addicting and bad but a small demand is guaranteed. Therefore, in the name of maximizing social benefit, only the government should run them and the profit is used to funds something less partisan (e.g. education, parks, conservation, gambling addiction services) For these private betting firms, it's open season trying to find whales like mobile gaming, and there's no end to their greed and exploitation.
- ikr678 7mo agoYou regulate other vices (alcohol, tobacco). Limiting gambling to govt owned lotteries or licenced operators is no different, you can set limits on harm, remove the profit motive if the govt operates it, and (at least where I live) the state lottery funds a large number of community grants. Regulating it also removes demand for underground or foreign online gambling.
- dinkumthinkum 7mo agoI think this is a little myopic. There are degrees to this. It is very rare to see anyone chase their losses to a lottery ticket. I have literally never heard of anyone doing that in my life. If anything, you see some poor place overspend a bit on those tickets. With all the other types of gambling, you see people being wiped out. I think the details matter.
- chistev 7mo agoDoes it really make games more interesting? If anything, doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game? Is anxiety interesting? And if you only bet a negligible amount of money, then the outcome of the game doesn't really matter all that much.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago> doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game? I don’t generally like gambling. On a recent trip to Vegas I socially gambled with friends and won about $5k, but then lost $500 of it and was more annoyed about losing that sum than the net amount gained. Such is my personality. That said, a friendly game of poker is absolutely more fun with a $10 buy-in or whatnot. So I can see the general idea holding water. What we don’t need are (a) ads or (b) large bets.
- emptybits 7mo ago> Does it really make games more interesting? > If anything, doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game? > Is anxiety interesting? Yes. Adding anxiety generally makes things more interesting. Think of watching a story or a film or a game play out. Good stories often involve giving the reader some anxiety. Tension. Not knowing what's going to happen, but being somehow invested in it ... to stay engaged.
- roland35 7mo agoI am staying away from sports betting, but I have done fantasy football a few times. I was constantly on edge from it all, even when I was winning! Constantly thinking of who I needed to pick up, who to trade, which matchups were good, it was a time sink. And I ended up losing to my 10 year old nephew for the championship game!
- laughing_man 7mo agoPersonally I suspect American football viewership would collapse if you actually managed to ban all the gambling people do on it, from office pools to Vegas lines.
- actionfromafar 7mo ago"Someone did a bad thing, now we must do all the bad things."
- unethical_ban 7mo agoThere are significant, real differences in betting on a random number generator once a week and betting constantly on the real outcomes of individual behaviors. Most notably with sports, institutionalized prop bets destroy the integrity of the game. At least with win/loss, the ability to outright manipulate the outcome for financial gain by players, coaches and refs is a lot harder to accomplish without detection. Prop bets? Who knows if a player or ref or coach made a decision on who gets the first 3pt basket of the second half?
- SoftTalker 7mo agoYeah I've never made a prop bet, or even a points bet, that feels too degenerate to me. I have occasionally made a $10 money line bet on a game and that does make it more interesting to me in that now I have a small stake in the outcome. YMMV. And people do spend stupid amounts of money on Powerball tickets too. I just think if the state is running a numbers racket, that they don't have much of a leg to stand on when they want to regulate other gambling.
- recursivedoubts 7mo agoremember when gambling was illegal? and the idea of advertising gambling on television wasn't even something conceivable? and, even more so, the idea that sports entertainment channels would be directly involved in the operation of gambling of was just completely beyond comprehension? ahhh, the remote, halcyon, bygone days of 2018...
- deadbabe 7mo agoAll those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned.
- prpl 7mo agoIt would be interesting to make that sort of thing generic. A law couldn’t legalize something without backporting the legalization.
- sandy_coyote 7mo agoPete Rose: reprehensible pariah or radical pioneer?
- georgemcbay 7mo ago> All those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned. That is certainly on the table... as long as they have a couple of million stashed away to put into World Liberty Financial and the charges are federal. The unwashed poors though... they are SOL.
- skdhfkdjfhsjk 7mo agoIt was a quaint, simpler time. Now we are much more sophisticated and modern.
- fasterik 7mo agoRemember when alcohol was illegal? Ahh, the remote, halcyon, bygone days of the 1920s. How about we treat adults like they're adults and let them make their own choices?
- JaceDev 7mo ago[flagged]
- gz5 7mo agoand the US govt often helps facilitate gambling during downturns so we could see even more direct and indirect promotion of the problem. examples: + in stagflation of 70s/early 80s - states create state-run lotteries to help fix their budgets + 2008 great recession - states legalize casinos to recover lost tax revenue and prevent folks from traveling out of state to gamble + C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue
- kotaKat 7mo ago"Lottos help your school!" they said. Until you're in rural bumfuck nowhere, and your lotto win suddenly drags your community's average income from "dirt poor" to "middle class" by becoming Spiders Georg and you end up costing nearly half a mil in state aid to go up in smoke. https://www.syracuse.com/news/2017/07/one_mans_huge_lottery_win_costs_cny_school_district_452000_in_aid_district_says.html https://www.syracuse.com/news/2017/07/one_mans_huge_lottery_...
- bityard 7mo agoI'm not sure you read that article all the way through... The loss is $450k, but that's only 3% of the year's state aid and an even smaller amount of the district's operating budget. And it only impacted that one year. Inflation and random political feuds usually impact public school budgets to a far greater degree. The problem in this case is not that the lotto exists, it's that the formula for awarding school funding is (or was?) broken in this state. This is a textbook example of why you almost always use the median instead of mean on things that have a bell curve.
- gruez 7mo ago>+ C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue This seems questionable given that covid-19 relief funds from the federal government left states flush with cash, causing them to spend lavishly or even cut taxes. It also makes me suspicious of the other examples. Recessions happen every 5-10 years, and if you count the few years after a recession as part of the recession, it's not hard to pattern match a little too aggressively and think it's tied to economic downturns, when it's really a secular trend.
- bmitc 7mo agoAmerican citizens have willingly given up their freedom and allowed themselves to be captured by corporate control.
- nikanj 7mo agoGambling seems like a rational choice, when all the ”traditional” rational choices just lead into a mountain of student debt, not being able to afford a home, and general failure to launch Summed up very nicely in https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy
- watwut 7mo agoSeeing gambling as rational choice is spectacular fail of logic. It is an emptional choice of action.
- caditinpiscinam 7mo agoWas "emptional" intentional, or a typo? Apparently it's a real word. > From emption + -al Adjective (obsolete, rare) Capable of being purchased
- atom058 7mo agoI also did a double take on this one! New word discovery. Sharing the same root as e.g. 'Emporium' I would assume.
- revlsas 7mo agoHow could it possibly be the rational choice if the ev doing so is so ridiculously negative? Having student debt doesn't justify throwing away the rest of your residual income
- toast0 7mo agoWhat's the ev for going to college once you factor in graduation rates? People that get two or three years of college debt and no diploma have a big hole to fill and a small shovel. Anyway, I think ev isn't the right tool to model gambling behavior; dollar utility isn't linear. It's more about a small spending for a large potential. But then you get into repeated small wagers and such.
- chistev 7mo agoThe house always wins. I don't know of any long term profitable sports gamblers - but that makes sense because why reveal yourself and your methods if you're profitable? By long term I mean at least 1,000 bets while still being profitable. Even more impressive if they are making a living off of it. The only person I can think of is Picks Office on Twitter.
- gnopgnip 7mo agoIf you profit at sports betting they limit your bet size severely
- awakeasleep 7mo agoEven if you don’t profit but place what looks like smart bets
- michaelt 7mo agoA casino or bookmaker doesn't need to heuristically identify betting behaviour that's 'smart'. They don't need to spot evidence that could be hidden by good opsec. No need to find micro-expressions or hidden cheating gadgets. Nor to do background checks to know you've got a buddy with insider knowledge. All they need to do is check if you're cashing out more chips than you came in with.
- dmurray 7mo agoIt's not trivial for the casino to track this against a determined adversary. If you're already thinking about "good opsec", you can get someone else to help cash out your winnings. A buddy from out of town, or a losing regular, or a poker player who the casino doesn't care if they win. In Vegas some casinos' chips are negotiable, officially or unofficially, in other casinos.
- GBeastMode 7mo agoExactly - they don’t need to catch you cheating, they just need to decide you’re bad for business
- sidrag22 7mo ago> And research shows young people are particularly at risk of sports gambling problems, lured in by splashy advertisements often featuring celebrities and promises of low risks and high rewards. The Fed study found that the sharpest drop in credit delinquency rates were among people under 40 years old. There are so many portions of the post Muprhy vs NCAA world that bum me out, but this is by far what makes me the most annoyed. There seem to be so many objectives being achieved while hiding behind the guise of protecting the children. Yet we just let these advertisements slide by and infest broadcasts that children largely consume. Not like getting an older person to buy you a GTA game when you are 12 or something either, this is just watching any sort of sports broadcast, aimed at all ages. I see some other people here mentioning how we gave into legalized state lotteries and its why we arrived here, its such a stark difference though. There was a ton of back and forth for state lotteries, the results were tons of advertising restrictions, and the profits largely benefited the education system. Murphy vs NCAA was passed in 2018, we have legal sports betting now in 38 total states after ~8 total years. New Hampshire legalized state lotteries in 1964, from that point it took 32 years to reach 38 total states with some form of a state lottery.
- vkou 7mo ago> the profits largely benefited the education system. The profits didn't benefit shit. Yes, the money went into education, and that same education system saw commensurate cuts from regular tax revenue. What it did is shift the state's tax burden towards people who play the lottery... While permanently entrenching the lottery (How can we ban it! It would gut our education budget!).
- sidrag22 7mo agoI agree with your point, its something i kinda didn't really consider how its perversely intertwining itself with the education budget and making itself effectively immune. I still think its a solid demonstration that comparable sports betting legislation surely lacked any sort of compromise at all, as it was all pushed through so aggressively fast.
- seanalltogether 7mo ago
- skyskys 7mo ago[flagged]
- actionfromafar 7mo agoI hope this is trolling?
- unethical_ban 7mo ago14 minute old account with a blurb about people being mind controlled in their bio.
- deadbabe 7mo agoAlso most people’s way into poverty.
- gbacon 7mo agoIs there a causal relationship? If so, in which direction does it flow?
- carefulfungi 7mo ago> A 2024 Wall Street Journal report, for example, found that 70% of the profits from one online gambling company came from less than 1% of its users. Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts. For most, a lottery ticket or an online bet is just buying entertainment - not much different from a movie ticket or steam game. Turns out, though, this majority isn't the target customer; we're just the top of the funnel as these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy.
- OptionOfT 7mo agoThe same thing happens with in-app purchases. A friend of mine worked at Disney, and it is insane how much data they capture on their players/spenders and how they use it for the sole purpose of triggering a popup at the right time, at the right price, that would maximize spending/gambling on loot boxes.
- andrepd 7mo agoAlgorithmic optimisation will be the death of us. Over-dramatic? Maybe, but this thought springs to my mind more and more.
- Triphibian 7mo agoThe first time I heard "whale" mentioned in the video game space was at a GDC panel around a game called Puzzle Pirates, where the dev noted that the bulk of their in-game purchases were made by a small group of "whale" players. In 2003 purchasable skins, pets, hats, etc were pretty new.
- fakedang 7mo agoI remember that one and remember being super exasperated about not being able to do anything without paying upfront for it. Ended up switching to Club Penguin instead lol.
- anonym29 7mo ago[flagged]
- jjk166 7mo agoI strongly suspect if one were to dig a little deeper there would probably be some common factors between loosening financial regulations, community economic problems, credit issues of people in those communities, and impetus to gamble.
- retired 7mo agoGambling is massive in large parts of Europe. For Spain, in 2022 83.9% of the population participated in gambling. Every time I am outside I am confronted with gambling in some sort of way. I don't think society benefits from it.
- NickC25 7mo agoI think the issue is a lot deeper than the article suggests. The problem is, society is fucking broken. The middle class is being decimated. People are going to take their destinies into their own hands, as seen by the growth of daytrading and sports betting. With wages being destroyed, billionaires avoiding taxes, COL skyrocketing for the middle and lower classes, and jobs evaporating, who's going to fucking blame someone for trying to figure out how to use what they know (in this case, sports) to make money? Plus, this generation has seen another class of gamblers (big banks) get bailout after bailout without any problem. Sports betting is the symptom, not the root cause that needs to be addressed.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo agoI just don't think that theory of causation works even if we assume the premise for the sake of argument. Both daytrading and sports betting are much larger now than in 2009, when I hope we can agree wages were destroyed and jobs were evaporating on a scale we can hardly imagine today.
- jimt1234 7mo agoHonest question; sorta related: How long until prostitution is legalized in the United States? Sounds crazy, indeed, but when I was a kid growing up in Missouri - if you told me, someday, businesses will be open on Sunday, alcohol will be legally sold on Sunday, and there will be gambling casinos a few miles from my house, I wouldn't have believed you.
- nsvd2 7mo agoAlready is in Nevada.
- Vaslo 7mo agoI’m a pretty right leaning libertarian. That said there are some hills I’ll abandon like smoking bans and this being legal.
- tsoukase 7mo agoGambling is a symptom of pre-depression or fulminant one. It's a defensive mechanism, quasi suicidal, in an attempt to distract the person from the real problems. It's the behavioural equivalent of drug addiction. Advertising it is sad for the victims and should be illegal. But... money
- tim-projects 7mo agoSociety needs to stop making blanket statements about psychological behaviours: https://immunizenevada.org/the-relationship-between-adhd-and-gambling-addiction/ https://immunizenevada.org/the-relationship-between-adhd-and...
- kjkjadksj 7mo agoI’m not sure that explains the sort of casual gambling on anything at all people might do among friends.
- edge_trader_41 6mo ago[flagged]