And if you are consistently winning they will ban you! They can legally back off (reduce max bet to a tiny amount) or straight up ban people who bet smart.
These books also market what are the hardest to understand and worst bets to consumers. Think 4 way parlays. Like all 4 legs seem reasonable. They probably on their own each have a 70 pct probability. But that means a 24 pct of hitting. Of course they are all over props because people love to bet over. They are taking advantage of the fact that most people don't understand expected value or odds of multiple independent things happening
I know a guy who sells odds to online betting platforms.
If they don't purchase his odds (effectively paying him not to play), he just plays them. Wins either way. I dont think he has ever been banned, but I think thats because they appreciate the option to purchase his service.
The big asian bookies don't ban you if you win, they use your sharp bets to improve their price accuracy. Not legal to bet on them if you're from the US though (land of the free??).
The biggest betting syndicates use platforms like Punterplay to place bets (often via API) at multiple bookies (Pinnacle, Singbet, SBObet, Betfair, Matchbook, 3ET, VX etc) at the same time.
In a somewhat ironic turn of events the more regulation you have, the worse it is for the customer. Big regulatory burdens require the bookies to extract more from the users, making the offerings more predatory. This is also why the likes of Kalshi can provide a better product to customers at the moment - because they ignore all the regulation.
Casinos have a ton of leverage in some states. Here in Nevada MGM and Caesar's and Wynn, thanks to their expansion, are effectively treated as too big to fail and given huge amount of deference in how they operate by the gaming commission. But there are also incredibly problematic protectionist regulations that I and several other residents who didn't really know each other tried to get rid of through the admin law process, primarily allowing remote signups which would also allow out of state entities to set up shop without literally having a physical casino. Having to physically go to a casino and sign up in person was onerous and clearly pointless, and then impossible during the pandemic, and became a really silly charade. What was supposed to start as public meetings right before the pandemic got dragged out, meetings would get rescheduled at the last minute, and casinos made entirely spurious rationales like "there aren't enough local datacenters" (Google Cloud's Henderson datacenter is surely sufficient for in state traffic?), that they would want taxpayer money for potential loss of revenue (capitalism dude, what are you afraid of?) Meetings would get scheduled in Carson City and that's literally six hours away by car. Agenda items would suddenly be altered. It was a hot mess. We managed to get iGaming in theory legalized but they straight up never even pretended to start working on regulations for it, and now with the 90% loss deduction limit by the IRS on the OBBB books basically have 12.5% house edge on any line to start if it's properly priced. My model can beat 2.5% but 12.5% is insane. If the feds are going to ban pros constructively, well, I can't out lobby a casino. And the pro betting constituency isn't big enough to pander to, frankly. If there's action, it can't actually happen on shore. I realize that "people who can beat the books due to specialist knowledge and can bankroll drawdowns to the extent that returns long term profit" is also publicly not sympathetic and generally people either think we're touts (if it makes me money touting absolutely won't help me, in fact the fewer people I have to interact with the better) or something. Wagering by hand sucks, but no model is perfect, just some are more useful than others, and someone in accounting may be able to figure out that ban or bankrupt is not a sustainable strategy to run books. But with the feds involved to put that imprimatur of authority in writing, I guess I'm never getting my limits lifted. Good luck finding stable liquidity elsewhere.
Not as much as traditional bookmakers but they absolutely care. Betfair has a "premium charge" where if you earn over a certain amount in a year, you get charged a fee equal to a % of your gross profit.
Its the same as poker. An exchange wants a bunch of equally skilled players betting against each other. If everyone has zero edge, all the money stays on the exchange betting over and over and the money eventually all goes to the exchange in commissions.
Players with a strong edge dramatically reduce the time before the losing players run out of money, meaning less commissions for the exchange.
If you earn over a certain amount in a year, and are categorised as a deriving your majority income from gambling in a 0% tax Territory (Austria, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, UK/Ireland etc...), you can offset the % charged as an expense.
FWIW, an exchange doesn't necessarily want a bunch of equally skilled players betting each other, they want a lopsided book on the bigger markets to attract domestic bookies and match-makers laying or staking across multiple platforms to leverage Matched betting discrepancies on promotions for new players etc...
//Players with a strong edge dramatically reduce the time before the losing players run out of money, meaning less commissions for the exchange.
Poker Players with a strong edge have a +ev Variance. Over 100 hands they're not guaranteed to be a winner. Over 10,000 hands they are.
YMMV massively in other sports, but for horse racing the big gamblers tend to only put down big money once or twice a year on maidens and trial-runners for Cheltenham or Grand National. They wouldn't touch a big festival other than for fun.
The exchange is not taking the other side of the bet; they're just matching you up with another user who wants to take the opposite position to you and then taking a fee for providing that service.
The problem I you compete with other exchanges and so need to compete on odds or customers go elsewhere. If there is an imbalance in your system because the favored home team has more people on you platform (or someone else has extra of the unfavored team and so has better odds) you take the losing side just to keep the customers and then pay out when you lose.
the above is much less likely if you are national, but there may be small competitors with an advantage live this you are trying to compete with
A restaurant won’t start selling clothes because if they don’t the customers will go elsewhere to buy clothes and they won’t come back.
A stock exchange won’t start holding a book of shares to give “better” prices to customers. What would that even mean? If the price is better for the buyer it will be worse for the seller! (If you mean that they will buy for a high price and sell for a low price to keep all customers happy maybe the customers won’t go anywhere but the “exchange” will go bankrupt.)
Why would a betting exchange be different? Does Betfair for example act like you suggests or is it just something you’re imagining?
In Stocks exchanges and brokers are different things. Exchanges list companies, they are the places where different brokers gather to exchange stocks and agree on prices. Brokers are people/companies who go to the exchange on your behalf (historically someone physically went there, now it is mostly computers)
NYSE and NASDAQ do complete with each other for companies to list on them. (as do other exchanges around the world). When a company is on more than one exchange there are people who make it their job to run "arbitrage" - this is they buy on one and sell on the other anytime the prices are different and this keeps things in check.
It is also valid for betting platform to run arbitrage with their competitors - but various anti-monopoly laws and other such things should(!) get in the way. I don't know what they are doing about this or exactly what the law says. As such I don't know what Betfair is really doing, but I know this is a risk they somehow either take (which if they are national might be low enough), or if they somehow get arbitrage done.
And betting platform is normally both the exchange and the broker. As such they have this risk and need to mitigate it while staying within the law. There are many ways to abuse mitigation that need to be illegal and so it must be hard to mitigate - this doesn't mean impossible.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is all the online options are platforms - the exchange for their own bookmakers. Vegas does have exchanges, but most online options don't use them.
That ESPN link doesn't tell me anything. Wikipedia says Kalshi is trying to become available on other brokers, but also implies that the majority of their "trades" come from their own in house brokers.
As such I still need to stand by what I said: at least for now the online platforms are not exchanges (though some are trying to move that way)
> The company says one difference is that users are not going up against the house but instead trading contracts with other users on the opposite side of the proposition.
> "We are simply an exchange. So we sit between people that are buying contracts on a yes and a no side. We don't win by people losing. And we don't lose by people winning. We simply sit in between that transaction."
I don’t know what else would you like to be told. That’s an exchange, with one user taking one side and another taking the other side. No brokers are involved when end-users connect directly to the exchange.
Wikipedia mentions that they would like other platforms to give access to the exhange, and the existence of market makers (one affiliate company, one independent company) that may provide liquidity. But the basic exchange is user-to-user.
It's an exchange. You offer to bet X and wait for a matching offer. If no one wants to bets that much your order waits in a queue - same as on a stock market.
There is 0 risk for the exchange and the bettors can only use what they put in front.
Bookies run some risk because they accept the bet first and try to hedge (or got more people to bet on the other side) later. The exchange doesn't have this problem.
Exchange doesn't even need to charge commission cause they make money on float.
It’s even worse with parlays: the events are potentially negatively correlated. There may be a 70% chance that Giannis has 3 or more turnovers and a 70% chance the bucks win, but the odds of both happening are less than 49% because more turnovers directly reduces the likelihood of a Bucks win.
I won't bother asking how this is legal because it's clear there are no rules to any of this stuff right now. But it's absolutely insane that as a business you can just take your 20 most unprofitable customers and then just ban them.
In the US, a business can refuse service to anyone, generally, as long as it isn’t because the person belongs to a protected class (e.g. you can’t ban all black people or all Jewish people). You could refuse to do business with someone because you didn’t like the way they looked at you, or because you were grumpy the day they came in.
Famously, for example, James Dolan bans all sorts of people he doesn’t like from Madison Square Garden and any of the other venues he owns. He notoriously bans all lawyers who work for any firm that sues him (which happens a lot). He even uses facial recognition to catch them, and kicks them out without refunding their tickets. People have tried to sue him for this (many of them are lawyers, after all!) and so far no one has won against him for it, so he keeps doing it.
IIUC, that article is written in 2025 and cites stuff pre-2023.
IN 2023 the city threatened them with violating the terms of their liquor license [1] (which doesn't prevent you from refusing service to anybody short of actually illegal behavior). I can't really find any follow-up about this.
In Colorado, such service refusals are illegal. The civil rights agency prosecutes them and their legal rationale is that historically every "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" has only been used to discriminate against non-white customers.
> Rule 20.4 – Discriminatory Signage in Places of Public Accommodation.
> No person shall post or permit to be posted in any place of public accommodation any sign that states or implies the following:
> “WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.”
> Such signage implies that management may rely upon unlawful discriminatory factors in determining access to a place of public accommodation and thus is prohibited.
Generally most businesses are allowed to refuse service to customers for any reason, or no reason at all (there are certain legal exceptions to that principle for protected classes). As a practical matter, banned online bettors often sneak back in with strawman accounts.
Likewise. The guy bought two laptops to compare for a week and returned the one he didn’t like, then later that year did the same thing between two TVs. When he went to return the TV he didn’t want, he was told he was banned from returning any other good to Best Buy and it’s monitored against his credit card.
Perhaps after just two events that might seem a little harsh, but I definitely understand the store's reasoning here. You've got a guy that is pretty much guaranteed to lose you money in the form of his regular auditioning of big ticket items (can't sell that returned item for full price anymore). Why would a store want to keep a customer like that?
It’s not returns fraud - he was operating entirely within their policy, just returned too much stuff too often and BB eventually figured out they weren’t making money off him.
I don’t think he was even intending to return things when he bought them. Dude just had high standards.
A brick and mortar casino down here banned a guy for some bathroom activity. But made him agree that it’s to everyone’s advantage if they agreed it was because he was a sharp.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. I've definitely seen my fair share of people on Reddit who seem to regularly have the misfortune of opening video card boxes only to find rocks inside. Multiple times -- just a coincidence, I'm sure. Not saying the person you know does this, but return scamming is definitely a thing.
This dude wasn’t doing that, he was just using Best Buy as an extended trial period for whatever new gadgets looked cool. Eventually they decided they weren’t making any money off him.
Years and years ago I had the misfortune of knowing someone that bragged about how he'd buy a video card at best buy, swap a dead card in it, then redo the shrink wrap at his job (an indie computer place) before returning it. There's lots of banal scummy scams you can do like that.
There are absolutely companies that “stack rank” their customers and cut the bottom N%, or even just keep the top N, period.
I have always found this to be maddeningly counterintuitive, because surely at least some of these customers yield a net profit. But I have to admit that I’ve seen it done to very profitable effect.
I think the problem isn't banning per-se, because I can "ban" companies as well.
The problem has something to do with the asymmetry of information or bargaining-power. Unlike card games, the house has quite an advantage in data-mining.
I'm pretty sure they actually use their data-mining advantage to make their betting offers as attractive to regular users as possible, and therefore maximise profit.
It's so easy to just ban any user who gets "too lucky" (simply ban the top ~0.1% of your userbase every week) why waste resources on offering actually fair bets? And the requirement for "fair bets" probably interferes with the requirement for bets to be as attractive to "regular users" as possible.
> And the requirement for "fair bets" probably interferes
Don't forget the possibility of promotions, which is a major thing for marketing and distinguishing yourself from the pack.
A world of fair bets would be a world where you would need to market your superior odds (e.g. what pinnacle does).. which is directly at odds with fleecing your under-educated customer base.
How does the house not have a data-mining advantage in card games?
They would know whether you make bad choices on Tuesdays, how people of your nationality and consumer preferences react to seeing an Ace, they can deal the better card to the person they’d like to have win, or the opposite, they know what effect the equivalent of a hot waitress bringing you free drinks will be on you specifically as well as on people statistically similar to you and at what moment in time…
Do you just not play against the house when you play cards? And do you 100% trust the house to deal randomly? Does the house not care at all who wins at cards?
Sorry if these are stupid questions, I don’t gamble, but it seems like they have lots of actionable data if they want to use it. Even if they only use it to get you to play more (or less).
I know few mathematicians that work in betting world and model data (both odds as well as user profiling).
It is not true that you get banned if you win too often, but it is true that you get banned, and flagged, if your winning patterns are suspicious.
It's essentially like in a casino. You can win more than once and big, good for you.
But if patterns emerge, you get banned.
E.g. Betting small sums on football and suddenly betting very big on a specific baseball game and winning. Do it few times and you're banned as it's obviously strange.
In these cases one should apply the cybernetic principle. The purpose of the system is what it does.
The intention of the mathematician friends of yours may be to prevent money laundering and match fixing from being profitable (and thereby providing a public good). However, so many genuine sharp and/or plain lucky bettors are caught in these AML & Match Fixing cross-fires, it would be very naive to assume these are all just unfortunate false positives.
Sportsbooks are however legally hamstrung in what they can admit to of course. By doing so they would also admit to completely ignoring and even violating one of the core duties imposed on legal sportsbooks: the duty of care (in EU countries at least this is supposedly an important aspect of the legalisation).
By kicking someone off your platform, you definitely no longer have any way to nudge their behaviour into something less self-destructive. Some players might quit, but for those that do not: Illegal sportsbooks will try to take even more advantage of their players, and now you have also indirectly caused the financing of all kinds of other activities that AML regulation is specifically designed to prevent.
My hot take: your mathematician friends looking at suspicious betting patterns are a way for sportsbooks to greenwash and "legalize" their exploitative practices.
> My hot take: your mathematician friends looking at suspicious betting patterns are a way for sportsbooks to greenwash and "legalize" their exploitative practices.
I have no clue, but I'm sure that it's meant to make money, not be a charity. If someone does show some suspicious alpha he gets banned.
Users with non-suspicious alpha are generally kept on the platform but they get limits (how much can they bet).
I absolutely believe that the betting industry is exploitative in any case. It's not a business where I would want to be involved.
Of course I don't expect these businesses to be charities, but I do expect them to uphold their side of the bargain.
The basic bargain of sportsbetting legalization is that sportsbooks are allowed to legally operate (retain a license) in this lucrative market if they 1) ensure taxes are paid, 2) the money involved is not flowing to bad actors (e.g. through match fixing and other methods of money laundry), 3) the sports themselves are not corrupted (imo an impossibility, but a different discussion) and 4) gamblers are taken care of properly (i.e. nudged away from self-destructive behaviours).
Point 1 is one of those unavoidable things like death. Point 2 is actually in line with their own incentives: match fixing directly hurts their bottom line by paying out on essentially highly mispriced odds. Point 3 is a much bigger discussion, which I feel they are already failing on (for me as a sports viewer with the incessant ads, but also in protecting the athletes that are not in the top 0.01% of any sports).
Point 4 however is something they are claiming they are doing, but in actuality it is complete reversed: the illegal sportsbetting market is, by all measures, out-growing the legal one. In the current environment, the major thing sportsbook legalization did is to provide a gateway drug for the illegal market. Limits and bans in order to (POSIWID) protect margins are the strongest nudges gamblers experience to move from legal to illegal sportsbooks.
> It's not a business where I would want to be involved.
Good :) The fewer competent individuals involved in any way, the harder it is for (owners of) sportsbooks to claim they are upholding their side of the bargain, as this will stand or fall with the competent execution of the AML/Match fixing & duty of care controls. Now to actively discourage others from working there as well...
You're right that people don't get directly banned for winning too often, but they will get their maximum bets limited to something like $10 if they consistently place bets where they get a good deal on the odds (i.e. placing a bet at +100 when the odds closed at -200). This is one of the worst aspects of legalized sports betting IMO, and why I think it should be regulated. The companies running the sportsbooks are free to make errors on their odds without consequences because they're allowed to identify and ban anyone who takes advantage of the mispriced odds. This means they get to limit their customer bases solely to people who don't understand expected value, which turns the whole industry into a mechanism to take money from the stupid/uneducated. If you have an account at a sportsbook that's more than a few weeks old, and it's still in good standing, it's because the sportsbook knows you're a loser and that even if you win big a few times, you'll be profitable to them long-term.
>And if you are consistently winning they will ban you! They can legally back off (reduce max bet to a tiny amount) or straight up ban people who bet smart.
I'm not from US, I'm from EU but I'm still paranoid of that so I only sports bet at state owned lottery/betting company.
State run bookies charge commission so high you will not win anyway unless you have insider info and then your risk is bigger with a state run bookies.
Big bookies won't have you so easily. Multiple small ones will but you will get your money back. They not paying is a very small risk even if they decide to not do business with you later.
Company is owned and run by state and I doubt they would allow themselves to have any shenanigans with their customers. You can always sue them, you can sue private companies too but private ownership is just an extra worry. That's why I also have a bank account at the state owned bank not the private one.
That’s probably a good intuition and definitely smart about the bank — I was dropped by Commerzbank in Germany without explanation — but if I were so good at betting that I worried about a ban, I’d want to double check the actual rules.
I mean state is probably the better custodian of your money and your interests than the private investors unless you live in a rogue state run by criminals.
Leaving aside the question of whether it has to be a rogue state to be run by criminals, I think that operating a gambling syndicate is never in the interest of the citizenry, and that includes the Lottery, which is functionally a tax on the poor. For very gaudy spectacles of that exploitation, turn on the TV at Christmas in Spain.
I mean technically stock trading platforms can ban you if you trade too well. Usually happens with options, not buy and hold positions. Retail trading platforms need users that are statistically no different than random to sell their order flow to HFT firms.
The hot new interview question for 2025-2035 will not be:
- How many golf ball fit in a school bus?
Or the like that dominated Google hiring for nearly a decade. No the hot new interview question will be:
- Do you have an account with any of the major sports bettors in good standing?
The Goofus answer to this is : Yes, I can bet whatever I like with them (they are an idiot that doesn't understand how money works. Hire appropriately)
The Gallant answer is: No, I don't do sports betting. (This shows they at least know to lie about it)
The Galaxy answer is: No, they banned me (only sharps get banned, meaning they are either very lucky or very good with probabilities and numbers)
There exists now the potential for a small service company that can help interviewees and the spouses of gambling addicts: We'll make you look like a sharp to the sports betting companies. You sign up for the service and a big-time sharp takes over your accounts (or directs you personally) and tells you what to bet and where. They then give you the money to bet, making you effectively a mule for them. It's win-win. Real sharps get a mule, you get to look like a sharp and you have the proof. This also works for the family of addicts (probably the larger market), as their affected loved-one gets banned/downgraded and all the money stops flowing out of their accounts.
Or they just don’t do it? I don’t enjoy gambling at all. I don’t do it in casinos, I don’t do it online, and I don’t even do it with friends where there’s no “house” to pay off. I think the worst night gambling I’ve ever experienced, I lost $20. I still remember it.
'Proper' gamblers use exchanges like Betfair rather than Sportsbooks, where the host takes a rake off the spread with individuals laying against you. The only major issue with this is not being able to do things like place betting accumulators.
FOI in EU means you can get the notes attached to your account - the insights can be staggering, down to friend and family connections with Jockeys or Racing Stables, Sports Personalities or High Net Worth individuals.
Any modicum of research will show how dangerous this is. Despite warning against addiction, sports betting websites engage in dark patterns because whales are where the money is at. Your local bookie isn't engaging in AB testing to see how long before sending you free credit promotions will bring you back to their platform.
I have only ever bet on sports once (a fantasy football thing at work that I was required to join), and I was very lucky because I lost and had zero fun in the process. I don't like sports anyway, so the odds were never very high, but the fact that I didn't enjoy losing $50 made it so I've never had the temptation to do it again.
I think about the alternate universe where I won and started betting more a lot; sort of a "there but for the grace of god go I" situation.
I tried this but I'm also hopelessly superstitious so I could only do it once. But I think it was I who ruined Arsenal's chance to win the prem when Leicester took it
Was it a fantasy league? I guess it’s gambling, but not what most people would consider sports betting. I know lots of people who play in a fantasy league with friends every season and do no other gambling.
Drafting players and then fielding a team every week for a season can be fun if you like the sport.
It was a fantasy league, and yes I am sure if you liked football it could be fun to figure out players and the like and having a small amount of money on the line might even make it a bit more exciting.
The problem for me is that I had no idea with regards to anything about football, so my picks weren't radically different than a random number generator, and unsurprisingly I lost. I had absolutely no fun in the process and I would have rather spent that $50 on a video game or something.
It’s unfortunate you didn’t have fun. We often do leagues at work and it’s great team building. People have won who just used the auto draft feature and a woman won one year who picked all her players based on uniform colors.
You don’t have to know much about football, and it gives some common ground for small talk.
I think a large part of it was the fact that it was mandatory, and I didn’t like my coworkers very much, but I don’t have fun with the selection process.
I signed up for one of those first time deposit offers and made a bet on the Super Bowl once, as I was going to a watch party and find it to be unbearably boring, so I figured this would make it somewhat interesting. I ended up winning, I think I tripled my money when including the bonus. Even though I won, I had zero interest in ever betting again. I got so much spam texts and emails from that Sportsbook over the next few years trying to get me to bet again it was insane.
My brother jokes and says I am in the top 1% of sports bettors now
I am very very careful around activities and substances which could become addictive, because I know from benign life experiences that I sometimes lack the self control to stop.
It would probably be fine but there are no upsides risking it.
That and ever since my undergrad statistics class I hate the thought of playing games which are staked against me from the beginning. The thought of betting or gambling feels like voluntarily signing up to be swindeled.
I won nearly a grand on one of these. Pretty blindly. I came out on top after a year of using the platform but not by much. It's definitely predatory. I'm fine with it being legal as with drugs it's going to happen either way but the promotions should go.
I think —as with drugs— if we are going to allow it, it should be taxed enough to provide cessation services, counselling, rehab to anyone who needs it.
Even then it's hard to ignore that both these things destroy people with precious little informed consent. If you're the sort of person who gets hooked, you're stuffed.
So what? those malicious advertising practices should be illegal. not just for sports betting but for any website or business. Gambling is a person's natural right.
In a capitalist system, gambling has a lot of negative externalities that go far beyond the individuals participating. It must be carefully controlled. In some countries like Monaco, citizens can’t gamble, but foreigners can do so freely.
My position is that every country should do what Monaco is doing, except if a citizen want the foreigner treatment, they can abandon whatever social benefits that would be harmed by gambling and be allowed to gamble or partake in activities that harms themselves only.
Many developed countries are struggling with birth rates for example. Should that be regulated? It is harming countries much more than gambling could ever have. The whole right-wing resurgence happening across western democracies is a direct consequence of lower birth rates demanding offshoring and immigration.
advertising is your right, so long as the venue of advertisement is owned by you or you get the owner's permission. What isn't your right is being deceptive and fraudulent with your advertising. It is just free speech otherwise. I'd say you have an even stronger right to advertise than to gamble, just not advertise deceptively.
Yes, I sincerely agree. But the person that sells them the poison has to make sure they are of sound mind and fully understand the consequences. So long as a person is well informed and of sound mind, I don't see the problem. I'm even for putting their names in a registry so that they won't receive any social welfare benefits in the future if they go down that route. But outright jailing people, that's insane. Imagine eating something unhealthy and suddenly you're serving 25 years in prison for it. What is happening is only mildly less absurd.
Oppression is not the only alternative to legalization. Just because your country's policy on drug addiction is very misguided and does more harm than good doesn't mean the solution is to legalize everything.
Anyway, my point, that you seem to have completely missed, is that some rules that Americans would reflexively dismiss with a thought-terminating cliche like "nanny state" are in fact necessary. You wouldn't want the road to be a free for all, would you? Well, I don't want psychological warfare to be legal and used to trick my neighbor into losing vast sums of money to online platforms. Poor, addicted citizens make the country worse for everyone.
Also, "But the person that sells them the poison has to make sure they are of sound mind" made me laugh. When has it ever been in the business owner's interest to vet his clients? Legalize fent and in a year, half the superbowl ads will be selling you drugs in rainbowy attention-grabbing displays of decadence.
False equivalencies. Roads are shared, gambling is not. psychological warfare is against the masses and is being done under deception against targets, gambling is not, and despite that, it is your neighbors problem,not yours in that example.
The bit about poor addicted citizens (if it actually is the cause,instead of welfare and similar things), it sounds like your priority is improving the economy despite its effects on people's rights?
> When has it ever been in the business owner's interest to vet his clients?
When not doing so could mean serious consequences, like capital punishment or life in prison.
50% of all men below 50 have an online sports betting account.
Hmmm .. you might have to back that stat up. I am guessing there are men who have several accounts and over counting is happening. Or that was just made up like 62% of all statistics.
I don't find it hard to believe at all. Here's an incredibly unscientific way of looking at it:
I'm 27. Among me and a hastily-assembled list of 14 of my male friends, 7 of us definitely have at least one sports betting account, 4 definitely don't, and I'm not sure about the other 4. I'd bet (heh) at least one of them has an account.
It might be more informative to see how many men actually use their sports betting accounts. Technically I have an account, but I haven't used it in over 2 years. Won a bet that the Heat would beat the Celtics in the conference finals, realized I was now net-positive by several hundred dollars, cashed out, and uninstalled the app. Never looked back.
>It might be more informative to see how many men actually use their sports betting accounts.
A sibling poster posted a link to Siena survey that has related betting statistics. For males the percentage that "have accounts" vs those who "had accounts" is 30% and 6% respectively. You see similar ratios in the age breakdowns. Therefore it's safe to say that around 40% of males below 50 "have" betting accounts.
It would be difficult to loosely follow any major league sport and not know it was legal, regardless of age. The ads have been everywhere. These companies have user acquisition costs well over $100.
If you didn't know it was legal, you're probably well outside the target audience.
Even with that link I have trouble believing it myself.
Like how was this data/survey gathered/administrated? Sample size ect...
Also I don't understand how sports seem to get so much attention. Like they are just games why?
Another post I was reading a bit ago was how Spain what basically suffering internet outages to stop pirate streams of games on the weekend: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
Like why is a game considered so important that even internet traffic has to suffer. It boggles my mind.
> Like why is a game considered so important that even internet traffic has to suffer. It boggles my mind.
Because that game makes 1.8 billion dollars a year in TV licensing rights [1], and pirates undercut the pay-TV stations' ability to recoup these expenses.
Add in a ... questionable legal system, club and league presidents with friends with very very deep pockets, cloud providers that don't care what they host as long as the legal system of their host country absolves them of liabilities and that's how you get inane rulings like this.
There's a difference between having an account and actually using it.
I suspect the amount of US men who regularly bet on sports is much, much lower.
That being said: I find sports extremely boring. If I had a lot of social pressure to watch sports, I'd probably gamble, just to keep the game interesting.
To be fair, at some point I registered in one of those sites because a bar had 50% discount on the tab or something similar for first time account registration. I don't even live in the states, was just visiting.
Yeah, I registered with every single one I could find when they all had $300 bonuses, just took the bonuses, made 99% sure bets on everything (bet $300, win $300.01) and cashed out about $3000 and never touched them again.
50% off for punching a lewd name, some bigco support phone number, a made up birthday and your spam catchall email into a web form seems like a pretty good deal.
I'm definitely skeptical of this. When my state legalized sports betting there was around 6 or 7 books that came online and they ALL had pretty juicy sign up bonuses, like "bet $5 and get $250 in free bets." Damn right I signed up for all those books to get the free bets and converted those into cash by doing safe moneyline bets.
I don't bet at all (excluding the financial markets), but I'm often surprised at how many of my relatives and people from all walks of life pull out their phone and fire up an online betting app. All men.
Note that the article uses an outdated name for the Supreme Court case: Christie was replaced as governor while it was ongoing and the final name was Murphy v NCAA. That will make it easier to search for later coverage of the result instead of just early blog posts from when it was brought to court.
I don't think that straight up banning things is the best answer, but clearly, legal sports betting comes with a high cost - to individuals and to the society as a whole. So barriers should exist.
You may stop short of making sport gambling illegal, but you should at least make it annoying. Completely ban advertising it, for one. Set harsh legal limits on user spending - so that the betting companies aren't incentivized to burn through their users and extract the entire life savings out of them.
Harsh legal limits seems obvious to me. If society benefits at all from sports betting, all that benefit happens in the first few hundred bucks of spending. Meanwhile all the biggest harms to society are happening when people spend a lot.
The fact that these limits don't exist seems like evidence that the lawmakers didn't care about the effects on society.
> The fact that these limits don't exist seems like evidence that the lawmakers didn't care about the effects on society.
The lawmakers care primarily about the wants of their corporate donors, which is why this legalized gambling situation arose, and also why you have many geriatric congress people on both sides of the aisle suddenly very interested in legitimizing crypto with soft "regulation".
Cigarettes and alcohol both have advertising heavily regulated/banned. The government just needs to make a public health argument which is easy enough here
They would have to stop pushing their own gambling sites to accomplish that. 45 States have lotteries they aren't going to give up, and one of the other five has legal casino gambling.
I think betting needs to work like credit cards. When you get a credit card the bank does a risk assessment to evaluate your line of credit and you won't be able to spend over that limit.
Well, sports betting could have the same mechanism, where you are only allowed to bet an amount proportional to your line of credit.
If the banks don't trust you to spend over that limit and honour your debt, why should betting houses be any different?
The problem is that the incentives are exactly reversed. Banks limit your credit because they don't want to lose their money. Sports betting/casinos/etc want you to place bigger bets because they want you to lose your money.
It's the same for casinos. If you buy $50k of chips, lose them to someone else in poker and they redeem them. If your $50k purchases bounces the casino loses money.
Wait whose money do you think is in the bank? Banks are funded by depositors' money and they absolutely play fast and loose with it when not regulated.
That is not true at all. Banks are not funded by depositors money. Banks create money when they make loans, and destroy money when loans are repaid. Deposits in current accounts are liabilities from the bank’s point of view.
Yes, deposits in current accounts are *liabilities* from a bank's point of view. This may seem counterintuitive, as we typically think of deposits as the bank's money. However, in accounting terms, a liability is something a business owes to others.
### The Bank Owes You Your Money
When you deposit money into a current account, you are essentially lending that money to the bank. The bank has an obligation to return these funds to you whenever you demand them, whether by withdrawing cash from an ATM, writing a check, or making an electronic payment. This obligation to repay the depositor is what makes the deposit a liability for the bank.
### How it Works on a Bank's Balance Sheet
A bank's financial health is represented by its balance sheet, which must always balance. The basic accounting equation is:
$$Assets = Liabilities + Equity$$
Here's a simplified breakdown of how your deposit fits in:
* *Liabilities:* Your current account deposit is recorded on the liability side of the bank's balance sheet. It represents a debt the bank owes to you. Other liabilities for a bank include savings account deposits, certificates of deposit (CDs), and money borrowed from other financial institutions.
* *Assets:* When you deposit cash, the bank's cash holdings (an asset) increase. The bank then uses the funds from your deposit to generate income by making loans to other customers or by investing in securities. These loans and investments are considered assets for the bank because they represent money that is owed to the bank.
*In essence, the bank takes on a liability (your deposit) and creates an asset (a loan or investment).* The bank's profit comes from the difference between the interest it earns on its assets (e.g., the interest rate on a loan) and the interest it pays on its liabilities (e.g., the interest paid on a savings account, though current accounts often have very low or no interest).
Therefore, from the bank's perspective, the money you have in your current account is not its own money but rather a debt it must be prepared to repay at any time.
The conversation is credit cards, in which case you are absolutely paying with the bank's money, and if you don't pay it back (particularly if you can't and declare bankruptcy), they lose their money.
No. Don't make it different per person. Make it a blanket "maximum." Sure, one could just have multiple apps or accounts with multiple companies... Either way would be hard to regulate.
If we truly believe that sports betting (at this scale, at our fingertips on our phones, unlimited) is bad... trying to band-aid it won't work.
For those who scroll, it’s become obvious how much energy the gambling platforms have expended to get their name in front of youth. These ads are cleverly embedded in the content, a simple bet to cover lunch or to give a tip. They typically win and make it look as simple as pressing a button to win some money. I believe that these ads should be more prominently labeled and upfront, given the target audience.
A significant difference with gatcha games compared to traditional cash gambling is that you cannot chase your losses. You either get the skin/item or you don't, but there is no false hope that you could recover the money you gambled with if you spend even more. Obviously, that's not true when the game allows you resell the skins individually for real cash (eg. CS skins). Chasing losses and borrowing money to earn back the money you lost and getting even more in debt is what makes people kill themselves in casino parking lots.
Yes the best examples of chasing is probably TCG, followed by Valve.
With young people, not sure that it matters. They will become gambling age eventually. The psychological affects are there. See Genshin and Monopoly Go.
They left out the UIGEA which specifically legalized fantasy sports for money and the fact that FanDuel was not the first daily fantasy sports site (went through YC with one myself in 2007) but good primer nonetheless.
Yeah, as someone who lived through this entire saga first-hand as well, it's...an OK article but it's really missing a lot of things.
DFS, in particular, was and is very legitimately a game of skill. (In fact, looking at it from an Elo perspective and from the perspective of "Who should win?", it's more of a game of skill than the sports themselves!) There was absolutely no reason for it to be made illegal, other than to protect the tribal gaming interests in California and Florida. They pushed back so hard and with such little justification that the tide really, really turned against them in a much more broad way than they ever anticipated.
The ironic thing is, Matt King at FD and Jason Robins at DK probably would have been perfectly happy if the outcome had been that they be allowed to merge and that DFS is legalized and regulated. Instead Robins is a billionaire and Flutter made the best corporate acquisition of the 2010s.
The article itself is garbage and I strongly believe it's AI generated.
But even on top of that, the coverage of this issue is severely lacking. There were already many online sports books "legally" HQ'd in the Caribbean or other offshore locales. They were pointed to as proof of how much money could be made and money won. That's the story. We allowed greed to addict millions of young men on sports gambling because we lost our spines in this country.
It doesn't matter if it's a game or skill it not. It's still gambling and it's still terrible. You can even argue that games of skill for money are worse than pure chance game because there is one more mechanism for people to get addicted: delusion of having an edge.
If DFS is legal roulette should be legal as well because it has fewer negative consequences for society.
I know it's popular narrative among pro gamblers that games of skill deserve a different (better) treatment but it's just self serving nonsense in my view (I've spent most of my adult life in a gambling world as both a pro player and software developer).
It's the opposite on both counts.
There is additional mechanism to get addicted - delusion of having an edge. If you're a bad addicted player you will also lose more (cause others have an edge over you bigger than casinos at their games).
Chess is the biggest game on Twitch, but getting addicted to it is pretty rare, and you certainly don't hear of people losing their house over their chess addiction.
Chess is a great game but it is rare to play for money because you have a very accurate rating system and no luck, so you know to a high degree of certainty who is going to win before the game starts unless the players are very close in rank. You can’t fool yourself easily.
With games of skill that also have a strong luck element (poker, fantasy sports, betting horses, etc.) you can fool yourself very easily into thinking the odds are in your favor when they are not. If you won you thought it was because you played better, if you lost you got unlucky, and if you don’t track it (even many professional players don’t) you may have a hard time even knowing after a long sample size where you stood.
Gambling relies on the ability of anyone to get lucky and win on any given day mechanisms rely on inconsistent rewards.
People don't play it for money. I mean specifically they don't bet on outcomes of their own games. This is what gambling is.
Chess wouldn't be as addictive anyway. You need a bit more luck ingrained in the game mechanics to trigger the addiction mechanisms. In games of skill like poker people get deluded all the time because they see lucky wins of their opponents and unlucky losses of their own. People are very bad at making judgements about probability so a lot of them get deluded into thinking "if only unlikely X didn't happen 3 times recently I would be ahead".
This happens in both poker and sports betting. In both games you can always pick some unlucky events (ball hit the post, referee gave an unjustified penalty, the only card falling on the river) and point to them to say "if only" while missing all the small lucky events on your side.
A close second is being shown the odds for every little thing during the live broadcasts.
Apple TV is the worst offender. Their coverage of Major League Baseball was already bad, but they found a way to make it even worse by constantly showing the odds of this, that, or the other.
A 90% RTP will typically (typically - lots of exceptions and caveats) be quite volatile - offering big wins but long losing streaks. Exactly the kinds of game behavior designed to extract long playing times and really peak the dopamine response.
The casino will be accounting/forecasting a 5% take across stakes made as it's super complicated with jackpot contributions/payouts and stuff.
These machines are there to be always accessible and to train the human in just the right way so as to get you addicted.
I don't know what slots you play but the ones I've been at you can play the game at any speed you want. A single tap of the button places the bet and plays the animations, etc. A double tap does that and skips the animations, immediately showing your winnings. If that isn't enough there is usually an option to increase your bet by a multiplier or to make multiple plays on one "spin". The play speed is effectively up to that player.
I used to work with a guy who had a long stint at IGT. He said the most popular game he ever "made" was to take his previously most popular game and just have one set of controls play 4 of the same game all at the same time on one screen.
I don't play slots, but I did manage an online casino for 3 years. Auto-spins allow users to play without "interaction" but, at least for my players, the animations and chirps were all part of the "fun".
All go towards the same thing - dopamine addiction as an activity.
I think I just wanted to say that the perception of a 90% "success rate" v's all or nothing with sports betting felt like a troublesome comparison, for me at least. These games arent safer or fairer at all - they are both doing the same thing - in different doses to different audiences.
Many of my slots players didn't consider what they did "gambling" at all.
The 3% have either won a decent amount early and haven't averaged out yet, or they're a sharp who is carefully betting skillfully on winning bets. I don't think those people actually win too much since the platforms are always hunting to ban them. The missing money of 97% pretty much overwhelmingly ends up in the house's hands.
Slot machines typically keep 3% and returns the rest to the player. They do many things to keep people play to empty their deposit. Bonuses, wins on every spin (but amount is usually less than stake). Use internal coins to hide actual value etc
> Some people are sick and cant control themselves.
If people being sick and not being to control themselves required an intervention phone number in general, we'd run out of 10-digit numbers faster than Elon lasted in the government :)
> It provides entertainment, same thing tickets to the event provide. A lot cheaper than seeing the game in person too.
This 100% is the reason most if not all of my friends put money on the games. Not sure why this is so hard for A LOT of people to understand, putting money on the games gives many people I know more of a rush than sky diving
My cheeky answer to "how should this be regulated?" is that sports betting isn't materially different from other high-risk private investments, so it should only be available to accredited investors. Imagine if fanduels/draftkings had to verify assets and income before taking a single bet?!
And when they lose all their money it becomes a tax on society.
Lest us not forget the origins of prohibition where women were collectively extremely upset about their husbands constantly going out and spending their salary on drinking instead of actually buying food and etc for the family.
I play low stakes poker occasionally, there is nothing better than a bunch of students sitting at the table :-) As an aside I think poker in casinos is the only game that you have a chance of winning at.
I know quite a few casino addicts. They all understand the math just fine. Some are actually very good at math but still can't stop themselves from betting on a spinning wheel.
My grandpa, a World War II Veteran, lived in Kansas City his whole adult life. He saw ballot measures come up over and over to legalize river boat gambling, and it failed for decades. Another initiative would always crop up a few years later.
In 1992, when the innocuously named “Proposition A” finally passed, these monstrous “riverboat casinos” were built all along the Missouri riverfront.
He said before he died, “it’s funny, once it passed, there weren’t any more votes on it”.
TFA doesn't make it clear to me how the line is drawn from "bunch of mates playing a pro-sports seasonal drafting game and spice it up with a buy-in pot" to "you sit alone in front of an online skinner box and lose money on opaque spot wagers on ongoing pro sports events".
Seems like this article is mostly just a rehash of that podcast. At least it's linked in the piece but for anyone not on Spotify, here's a link to the actual podcast page: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules
I came here to say exactly this. It's excellent. I loved when he gave his kid $5k and hoped he would lose it and learn a lesson, but things didn't turn out as he expected. But, all the episodes are incredibly interesting.
The funny thing is the platforms are barely profitable if at all. The earnings all get funneled to ads as that's the only way to differentiate, aside from maybe a slightly better UX.
You seem to be telling a tale of two industries, sports-betting and advertising. The sports-betting industry lobbies for reduced regulation, while the advertising industry sits on its hands, ticking along providing advertising for other businesses.
Eventually the sports-betting industry wins its lobbying campaign. But what did they win? The different sports-betting companies are in fierce and unprofitable competition, while the advertising industry walks off with all the profits.
That tale is at its most ironic when the advertising industry is consolidated and makes monopoly profits on advertising on behalf of sports-betting companies.
As with alcohol (and I say it as someone with alcoholics in the family), there are the vast majority of users who are doing nothing wrong; sellers who are generally not doing anything wrong (ok, banning sharps is wrong, but that is not core to the service and could be regulated at the cost of higher fees for everyone). And then there are few alcoholics/whales who ruin their lives.
It is bizarre to me personally that what we want to regulate/stigmatize are sellers and even recreational users (50+% of men who have an account or whatever), and not the over users. Instead, we try to protect over users from themselves, and society from them, by making life worse for everyone else doing the pass time. That to me seems deeply immoral. By cracking down on abuse or consequences of abuse we could protect the society, and abusers themselves deserve everything they get - although if we treat them like children "you are demonstrably not responsible so like a 13 year old you don't get to drink/manage your own money anymore" that would also be accomplished.
> In 1992, New Jersey Senator and former basketball player Bill Bradley sponsored a Federal law called PASPA, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. This law banned most states from legalizing sports books: businesses that set odds, accepted wagers, and paid out winnings on sports games.
Federal laws (i.e., laws of the United States rather than the individual states) derive their authority from the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reads: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ No part of the Constitution delegates power to the United States to regulate intrastate sport or gambling; no later amendment repeals the Tenth with respect to sports gambling.
So Congress had no constitutional authority to pass the law in the first place.
I detest sports gambling with a passion, but that doesn’t matter: PASPA was never constitutional. The federal government has legitimate power to regulate interstate gambling and the states each have the ability to regulate intrastate gambling. I don’t think that it should be illegal, but I do think that it should be regulated like other addictive and dangerous things.
On the contrary, from what I gather, the Justices were amenable to the federal government regulating or even banning intrastate (non-cross-border) gambling as well!
The problem was that PASPA was sloppy and didn’t do that; its mechanism was to tell states what laws they could or couldn’t pass, which is unconstitutional for reasons outside the Commerce Clause.
Per Proskauer:
> Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the opinion was Justice Alito's unequivocal statement that "Congress can regulate sports gambling directly," if it elects to do so. While Justice Thomas, citing an 1867 Supreme Court case, expressed doubt that Congress could prohibit sports betting that does not cross state lines, there appear to be at least eight Justices who believe that Congress has this authority under the Commerce Clause. Thus, Congress could adopt a uniform federal policy that would permit and regulate sports gambling throughout the nation and thereby preempt the various state laws. Alternatively, it could choose to outlaw sports gambling throughout the country, although that approach seems unlikely at this point.
Sports betting is one of those things that sounds kind of harmless in the abstract, and like something that consenting adults should be allowed to do. But in practice, it causes enormous harm, both by draining the meagre resources of the people who get addicted to it, and by changing the nature of the sports in ways that make them less enjoyable for everyone who isn't betting.
I think this is more a function of the internet than purely the legality. Legal gambling wouldn't be nearly as damaging if it was limited to sportsbooks that only allowed gambling on-site similar to how some places have handled gambling on horse racing for decades. The dangerous part is not simply the ability to bet on a sport, it's having a device in your pocket that allows you to gamble instantaneously at any time and (almost) any place.
I think the same thing applies to most vices. Any friction in engaging in the vice is a moderating influence. Someone is more likely to get dangerously drunk while drinking at home than at a bar in which you have to order every drink from a bartender. It was likely more difficult to fall into a porn addiction if you needed to look another human in the eyes when you rented that dirty VHS tape. It's easier to overeat if you're having the food delivered to your home than if you order every item from a waiter in a restaurant. When we all know an activity should be done in moderation, making it as easy to engage in that behavior as possible is probably a bad idea.
That's interesting, but it's almost the opposite for me. I get way drunker in a bar because the environment is inviting and it's easier to order another drink at the bar than to get up and get it myself. The bartender typically sees when you are getting low and offers another drink.
I would also spend way more money on gambling when at a location to do so. The desire to bet on sports on my phone is really low because it's boring so I won't do more than enough to make a game interesting.
When I used to have to make an effort to get things that are now legal but previously illegal I would be much more compelled to make that effort to avoid having to do it in the future when I wanted the thing. Which inevitably would lead to more doing of the thing. Now that I know I can get it anytime I don't actually care about it.
I think maybe you aren't the target market. Just like I don't understand my friends who somehow sink hours and hours into pay to win games.
There are fake games, and even leagues, made specifically for people to bet on. To me there is no appeal, but I'd expect to someone gamblign there must be some appeal. See this article, there have been cases in cricket, but I know less about that game. https://josimarfootball.com/2024/10/21/childs-play/
I tend to agree with the parent that friction is useful for many 'sin activities' I might extend this to most drive through restaurants. For gambling having to go to a casino, a racetrack, or a bookkeeper who isn't legal all act as points where users drop out of the process. Having it on your phone is always available and the path of a user can be modified to get them to spend/bet more.
I've actually never seen a physical sportsbook where employees walk around asking for bets like a cocktail waitress. I assume there's some good reason because you're right that you would expect doing it that way would encourage more betting.
Horse racecourses have physical on site betting, because that's what the sport is for, but it's usually behind a desk rather than walking around. I'm not sure whether the old ambulatory bookies still exist.
I definitely agree, but I don't think all of those examples are apt. Particularly the drinking one, because I think that's fairly likely to be 50/50.
Some other good examples (I think) are simply watching things. It doesn't need to be porn, think about how many people are chronically watching mindless trash content for hours at a time because we've made constant scrolling an immersive experience available all the time everywhere. I know I am. We've gone so far as to even eliminate the necessity to decide what to watch, the media companies have automated the process of turning what used to be customers into their products and delegated the friction to the telecom companies. When you think about your phone bill, really we should be paying basically nothing for it (and in some places it's nearly that cheap), but in expensive places we're paying like $80/month to engage with 5 free addictions that only take value away from our lives. They're charging us to sell ourselves to each other.
Weed: I agree that it should be legal, but how many new customers have been created since a store opened in every available vacant commercial space within a legal jurisdiction?
The pursuits of car and oil companies have literally re-shaped the built environment in the name of making it as easy as possible to be sedentary when you'd otherwise have to move—most significantly so in places that missed out on dense urbanization in the pre-industrial period—and now all we know how to do is get in our big SUV and drive to Costco, then to McDonalds, because otherwise there's a near-zero likelihood you have access to more economical healthy choices that are persuasively close to not drive to. Most North American cities effectively made it illegal to do anything else but sprawl, and concentrated as much wealth and power as possible in the hands of mega-franchise companies and private equity while we watched our wetlands get paved over for parking lots (we unironically should have listened to Joni Mitchell on this one). Good luck opening up a new corner store, those only go on the main avenues and shockingly someone owns that land already.
Credit Cards: Obvious one, but if you obscure how much you've spent and eliminate the requirement to keep track of what's available to you, maybe even add a nice little ding sound when you tap your phone, you're going to buy a hell of a lot more.
India very recently banned sports betting due to the affect it is having on society - particularly due to gambling on cricket which has been a problem for years.
Here's a list of cricketers that have been banned over the years. Many were even the captain of their respective team:
In terms of rates of smoking, it is going well. Australia has the second lowest smoking rate of any country where women smoking isn’t taboo. (I.e., the only countries with lower smoking rates are New Zealand and a short list of countries where it’s culturally unacceptable for women to smoke.
While the article you linked points out that illicit tobacco sales make up a large percentage of the market, it’s a much smaller market. You might as well tell us that most guns sold in Japan are illegal, and therefore Japan has a bigger problem with guns than America.
The article notes that according to wastewater testing, nicotine consumption in Australia is at an all-time high.
I'm no fan of tobacco, I think taxing it heavily is good, and Australia's policies were (IMHO) working well until quite recently. But, as the article explains at length, the price difference is now so extreme and the legal risk of illegal sales so low that drug dealers are muscling in and we're getting drug dealer competition tactics as a result.
The article is about gambling in the U.S., not cigarettes in Australia.
Also, these policies usually fail in getting existing users to quit, but they succeed in deterring prospective users. The idea that these policies are "not going very well" is an incredibly narrow-minded and short-sighted perspective.
Did you read the article? By effectively banning legal vape sales to all (including consenting adults), there's now an explosion of completely unregulated vapes in the illegal market catering to all and sundry including children.
There are countries that let people do fentanyl out in the middle of the road because they're unable to enforce basic laws. Then there are countries that give people the death penalty for having a few grams of a common herb. Whether laws are enforced and enforced predictably and equally to everyone determine the effectiveness of a ban.
Australia doesn't let you bring a bottle of water onto planes going into their country, even if you bought it inside the airport. Allowing people to bring in drugs like tobacco but strictly forbidding a 1 dollar bottle of water is a problem with enforcement. If tobacco were treated the same way dangerous, addictive substances like H2O are, things might work better.
Per TFA, the people of New Jersey voted in a referendum to make it legal by a 2/3 supermajority, for example. Why should it be illegal if most people don't want it to be?
I'd like to see how many would vote the same way again, now that they've seen the outcome. But they probably won't be given the opportunity to vote on it again, now that the commercial interests got what they want.
Not a lotto fan, but, in theory, the money collected by state lotteries goes to some sort of public good (scholarships, etc.). Don't get me wrong, I still see them as destructive, but they don't operate with the same intent.
These new sports books are operating purely to enrich the owners of the platform. Ban 'em.
> Not a lotto fan, but, in theory, the money collected by state lotteries goes to some sort of public good (scholarships, etc.).
Problem is, state funding for those public concerns are often reduced by the same (or more) amount lottery revenue generates. For example, Florida pitched their state lottery as funding education (amongst other "who could be against this?" programs), yet failed to inform voters that existing funding would ultimately be reduced in a compensatory fashion.
There's also a difference between people who buy lottery tickets religiously, and who buy them once in a while. I like to play once in a while when the jackpots are high, just in case. Unfortunately, the answer to it is really hard, like most issues society faces today.
Yeah I occasionally will buy a ticket or two. Not often, but sometimes on a whim I get them. I figure it is probably a slightly healthier version of buying the king size kitkat or snickers in the checkout line. The cost is the same, the satisfaction is just as transient, and I'm not jamming a bunch of sugar in my face.
I've been in an online community where some users do a group buy for certain lottos when the prize is big enough. Sending $2 by paypal/venmo is easier and lower friction that going to one of the stores near me where I can but a ticket myself. I still think it's kinda dumb, but I do plenty of dumb things and I buy one infrequently enough to be ok with it.
I don't think that's the case. Most of the expected value comes from the jackpot, and even if a large jackpot means you should expect to share with 1 or 2 other winners, but the large jackpots are easily more than 3x the small ones.
If true, that's definitely a US localized thing. The places I've lived in the big winners in the big lotteries are disproportionately often middle class compared to what you'd expect if the large majority of buyers were poor.
The problem isn't so much sports betting in and of itself, I don't think, but the ease of being able to do sports betting from your pocket, at any time.
The idea of “consenting adults” is a libertarian fantasy unsupported by evidence. Between low IQ, impulsivity, addictive personalities, etc., a large fraction of the population needs guardrails imposed by society for the sake of both themselves and the people around them.
Sports betting has significant negative impacts. For every $1 a household spent on betting, it reduced savings by $2. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/online-spor.... This impacts not just individuals, but spouses and children who don’t “consent” to the negative impacts this has on their lives.
> Between low IQ, impulsivity, addictive personalities, etc., a large fraction of the population needs guardrails imposed by society for the sake of both themselves and the people around them.
I find it telling the the people that have this opinion always seem to believe that they are going to be the arbiters of how other people should live, and that they themselves are without the vices that they would regulate.
And I even agree on the betting bit: it's bad. But then again, so is voting for criminals and yet, we allow it and arguably that causes a lot more damage than betting.
> I find it telling the the people that have this opinion always seem to believe that they are going to be the arbiters of how other people should live, and that they themselves are without the vices that they would regulate
I’ve been blessed not to have addictions to substances or gambling. But I’m a snacker and could afford to lose 25 pounds. (Cardiovascular issues present in south asians at a lower BMI than for others, apparently.) I’d love social reinforcement to help with weight management, e.g. portion sizes when eating out.
I think these issues invariably boil down to the same things: education, self discipline, resistance to peer pressure. Some people have neither of these or only in short supply so there will always be people with problems. Substance abuse (including smoking, alcohol, drugs, and possibly even food), gambling, violence and so on are only - in my opinion - regulatory domains when society has to bear the cost of individual transgressions or when other people (not the people abusing / being violent etc) are directly impacted. Other than that I think live-and-let-live is a pretty good guideline because one person's controlled and self-disciplined pleasure is another persons reason for going after them. And before you know it sexual preferences and other personal stuff are also seen as within the domain of regulators. 'Educate, don't regulate' seems to be a good first principle until you hit the sharp edges.
As for portion sizes: my simple rule is that if I did not put it on the plate myself I don't necessarily have to eat it and peer pressure be damned.
I don't think that follows. Doctors are doctors but also they are people and whatever metric you apply to any large fraction of the population will most likely follow a bell curve. A subset of doctors will probably shift the centerline a bit left or right depending on what the subject is but there will still be outliers. So fat doctors will exist, mostly because they can exist, and likewise very skinny ones will exist too.
The society is not separate from "those people". Indeed, given the results of referendums, it would seem that the society is in fact mostly those people. So, who should be imposing guardrails on them, exactly, and how do they justify it in a democracy?
Most people know that they could use a little help from society. After all, people voted for gambling bans in the first places. What changed is we went through a libertarian phase as a country where we promoted individual choice as an end in itself and demonized any attempts at social regulation of choices. As we see the effects of that, I don’t think it’s
impossible to imagine getting the pendulum to swing back at least partially so people might decide gambling bans were a good idea after all.
I'm generally a libertarian-leaning person and I completely agree. Some things are just too destructive/addictive/etc to allow easy and free access to them.
And it really saddens me to see American children being introduced to gambling at a younger and younger age via things like loot boxes, blind boxes, and trading card game speculation.
I live were gambling machines can be in restaurants and bars. Saddest thing I saw was the 10 year daughter of a nice restaurant taking part. It was one of the owner's daughter play pull-tabs. She didn't even discourage it or try to teach her daughter how you loose in the long run.
> And it really saddens me to see American children being introduced to gambling at a younger and younger age via things like loot boxes, blind boxes, and trading card game speculation.
I wonder if that makes them more or less vulnerable later in life. Are lootboxes a vaccine or a devastating childhood infection?
> the amount wagered on sports bets has grown from $5 billion to $150 billion annually. 58% of college students have bet on sports. 50% of all men below 50 have an online sports betting account.
If I had my way, everyone who has ever made a "why make it illegal/regulate it? People will just do it anyway."-style argument would be forced under penalty of law to write the above quote 300 times on a chalkboard.
While I have no doubt sports betting is much more popular now, I presume the $5 billion figure does not capture the considerable amount of illegal betting that happened previously.
"Estimates of the scope of illegal sports betting in the United States range anywhere from $80 billion to $380 billion annually, making sports betting the most widespread and popular form of gambling in America."
"AGA’s report estimates that Americans wager $63.8 billion with illegal bookies and offshore sites at a cost of $3.8 billion in gaming revenue and $700 million in state taxes. With Americans projected to place $100 billion in legal sports bets this year, these findings imply that illegal sportsbook operators are capturing nearly 40 percent of the U.S. sports betting market."
I think what would be more interesting to me is estimates on the unique number of citizens betting. Is it up? If so, how appreciably?
If you wanted to bet on sports when I was in college you needed a bookie. Now, you have access to all the legal bookies in the world in your pocket. It's hard to make an argument that something that is now legal and much easier than before is not much more popular than before.
I remember walking into Powell station in the mid 2010s and the whole thing was plastered top to bottom in DraftKings ads and wondering "why is this allowed". It was like a switch flipped and suddenly gambling was being advertised everywhere.
Why make it illegal or regulate it? So what if half of men have gambled on sports? How many people throw away money on casino games, lotteries, raffles, loot boxes, et cetera? It's not my business how they throw away their money.
It is, because we live in a society, have a social safety net that you and I pay for, and our kids go to school with their kids. It’s your responsibility as someone fortunate enough to be graced with intelligence and impulse control to help those who weren’t, and you’re not doing that by encouraging them to do whatever they want.
Something like 3-5% of the gambling population are "problem gamblers". This is a much lower percentage than problem drinkers or smoking addicts.
I'm really not comfortable with the idea that we should only permit activities that are purely harmless. 30-50 people die each year in skiing accidents in the US alone. Those people have families too. Where do you want to draw the line?
It's pretty easy, we draw that line at things that are psychology designed to be exploitative. Well, I mean, we DON'T draw the line, but we should. Skiing carries risk but it generally provides participants enjoyment. There aren't companies that exploit psychological quirks to compel people to ski continuously even when they actively state they don't want to. Even alcohol companies don't generate their revenue on exploiting behavior patterns to compel more drinking.
Gambling and Social media do exactly that. In fact social media has purposely adopted the exact same patterns of gambling to make it so that "scrolling" IS gambling, but it's time and enjoyment instead of money. They don't just show you what you want all the time, they induce FOMO by only occasionally offering rewarding content, which results in compulsive usage.
I see, you want to take away my social media. While I'm pretty ambivalent about gambling, I very much enjoy my media habits. I am glad to have my intuition confirmed - you're a busybody who wants to meddle in my life for my own good.
I don't like these modern temperance movements. Leave people alone.
Are you happy / accepting of the current state of alcohol / cigarettes or do you think they should be less regulated in how they manufactured and market their products? I would advocate taking anything away, only applying standards and regulations to how companies employ algorithms and dark patterns to increase engagement. I think we need to have consumer benefit driven standards and regulations around user generated content platforms.
I certainly enjoy mainstream social media platforms but find it frustrating that the company is motivated to show me what I don't want to see and make it difficult to find the content I prefer. Simultaneously this is done while creating walled gardens to limit open access to information that is only the property of the platform by virtue of anti-competitive user agreements.
First and for most user generated content should be openly accessible.
I have almost zero opinion about the marketing of alcohol or cigarettes. Except that if people want to buy them, someone should be allowed to sell it to them.
I don't trust people saying that "society is going down the abyss" and then using it to justify a crackdown on personal freedoms - ranting about "degeneracy" is how authoritarians destroy democracy time and again.
“Freedom” in the American context means something different than the how people use it today. It’s closer to “freedom to make the right choices.”
John Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He was making an important point that has nothing to do with theology. Society can have extensive individual freedoms when people are socialized to mostly to make the right decisions without government coercion. If we loosen the social guardrails, as we have done, more government coercion becomes necessary to suppress anti-social behavior.
> It’s closer to “freedom to make the right choices.”
Not quite. It means, individuals have to have the freedom to make their own choices, because nobody can be trusted to know what the "right" choices are and dictate them to others.
By "a moral and religious People", John Adams did not mean that every one of those people must agree on exactly what the right thing to do is. He meant that the people have to have the concept of right and wrong as things they are supposed to discern, things outside themselves that aren't dictated by any other authority (or at least not any human one), and to understand that they have a duty to do their best to make the right choices. The problem with our society today is that that concept of "right" has been discarded; instead there is a different concept of "right" that revolves around adherence to whatever political ideology is favored by those in power.
> more government coercion becomes necessary to suppress anti-social behavior
The problem is that the government can't be trusted to do that job. That's what "freedom" means in the American context. That's why the US Constitution doesn't give the Federal government the power to do it. The fact that our government does it anyway is a bug, not a feature.
Your words amount to saying that freedom is only allowed when it's meaningless because nobody is actually exercising it in any way that matters.
Separately from that, I don't think that the original US constitution - you know, the document that explicitly protected the interests of slave owners, i.e. the vilest kind of filth - could be meaningfully said to be made for "a moral and religious People". Or, if we take that at face value, then that tells us volumes about the value of said morals and said religion, and it's deeply negative.
> Your words amount to saying that freedom is only allowed when it's meaningless because nobody is actually exercising it in any way that matters
It’s interesting that you think freedom is only “meaningful” if people actually engage in the anti-social conduct which they’re free to do. I would say the point of freedom is to eliminate the apparatus of control because you can trust nearly all people to do the right thing without it. That’s the highest form of society.
That slavery existed is not some trump card that negates everything else. It’s also a particularly uneducated comment to level at John Adams of all people. The idea that slavery is intolerable, which you easily hold in your head in 2025 without having worked for it—was bequeathed to you by John Adams and his ilk. In 1789, you would have looked the other way at slavery, just like you look the other way at everything you tolerate today. You probably would’ve even called John Adams a religious nut for believing everyone was created equal in the eyes of god, and demanded scientific proof of that.
I agree that social media is exacerbating a lot of problems right now, and I don't have a ready answer as to how to fix that (or if that is even possible at all - it wouldn't be the first time a society is radically disrupted and reshaped by new tech). One thing I'm pretty confident about, though, is that heavy-handed regulation will not only not solve that problem, but will create many others. Maybe if we had some kind of widespread supermajority social consensus on this, it might have worked, but we don't.
Thanks for taking the time to answer. In my view, it's easy to legislate away at least 50% of the harm. Not perfect, but much better than 0%. This would be banning recommender systems and infinite scroll feeds for platforms above a certain size ("gatekeepers"). I'm sure there's a number of loopholes, and you might still believe that even this kind of measure would create more than it solves.
On the supermajority bit, in more and more countries there's already a supermajority for banning phones from schools, more and more for banning it for children altogether, and so on. I think that's a clear sign people would actually be in favour of quite a lot of measures to tone things down, like the one I mentioned. Total bans I wouldn't vouch for.
Something that couldn't be sustained cannot be said to have worked. The numbers don't matter if the policy doesn't have genuinely broad and non-performative public approval, and Prohibition clearly didn't, given how many people skirted those laws.
Wait; are you saying that as a society we should regulate EVERYTHING people spend money on regardless of their method of doing so? Because, as everyone knows, EVERYTHING is addictive in one way or another.
I don't personally agree with gambling, as I just don't understand how someone could possibly enjoy it; but, I sure as fuck believe that every human being can spend their hard-earned money however they see fit.
Churches, retailers, bars, strip clubs, restaurants, etc. All of these allow people to spend their hard-earned money in questionable ways and many folks go WAY overboard w/them. But, my guess is, you don't really want to regulate all of those; just the ones you disagree with.
> I sure as fuck believe that every human being can spend their hard-earned money however they see fit.
Why? Do these people not live in society next to you? Don’t you subsidize their healthcare, the education of their kids, etc?
> But, my guess is, you don't really want to regulate all of those; just the ones you disagree with.
The only one of those I wouldn’t regulate is churches, and that’s because study after study shows that people who participate in organized religion are happier and healthier, and communities with healthy churches do better in social metrics than ones that don’t. E.g. Mormons live 5-10 years longer than white Americans generally: https://www.deseret.com/2010/4/13/20375744/ucla-study-proves.... (I suspect New England Congregationalists have similarly superlative outcomes, but I don’t have the data.) Imagine how much lower our healthcare costs would be if you could take the social magic Mormons do and apply it to the whole country.
Maybe we don’t have to ban coffee. But is the alternative really for society to suffer the negative externalities of every individual choice with no power to regulate those choices?
For example, the study above shows that smokers *are actually a net benefit* to the government's bottom line since they pay taxes throughout their lifetime on tobacco and then they die faster (therefore spending less money in the form of healthcare/ aged pensions).
solid points but why do we “regulate” anything? why is prostitution illegal? hard drugs (well best drugs you can get from
your Doc if you are rich but say street-drugs)? we should either stop all the nonsense all together and if we are already “OK” with regulating something, gambling should be close to the top of what we regulate
I like electronic music and I have a Sweetwater credit card with a limit of several thousand dollars. Why should I be allowed to go into debt to buy electronic doodads that I don't need?
So now what if my hobby is betting on sports? I don't see a difference.
To a degree you aren’t! Many countries take a little out of your paycheck every month (and often make your employer do the same) because the government knows you won’t plan for the future properly.
Just because a relatively few can't handle it doesn't mean we should take it away from everyone. How about we just educate or deal with the few in some way?
Because education doesn’t work. If it did there wouldn’t be fat doctors. Everyone knows don’t eat too much and that gambling is bad. A significant fraction of the population needs more intensive management and supervision.
Cause they become gamblers and then everyone else has to deal with the problem. Notably, their wifes are responsible for paying half those debts and their kids suffer. Gambler causes hell including financial one for everyone.
Also, because their gambling asses smart wifes divorced get lonely and somehow it becomes contribution to male loneliness epidemic and then we have right wing using them as argument to stop "no fault divorce" and restrict women so they have no choice.
It's kinda bad for society if a bunch of, let's say, middle class men become economically lower-class men while the upper-class owners of such gambling establishments rake it in.
We as a society should get to decide what "freedoms" and what "constraints" make for a better society as a whole, don't we?
Its for the same reason you don't give a license to someone with a DUI.
They are a harm to others. People with gambling addictions don't just hurt themselves - they hurt families, friends, and also the society at large as they come to be dependent on the safety net for substeance.
I think you dont need to make it illegal to keep it in check. A simple rule saying: IF a person spends more than 20% of the overall W2 or 1099 income on gambling, then the gambling house is liable for every 95 cents of every subsequent dollar paid out. We transfer liability for selling alcohol to irresponsible bartenders - casinos should also take the heat for the malaise they inflict.
Could you explain more what you mean? Like after 20% of someone's W2, the gambling house pays out 95/100 times? Trying to understand how this regulation works, I'm intrigued by the idea of progressive levels of taxation against industries but I don't know if this is what you're arguing.
This makes no sense at all. You shouldn't be gambling against the platform, you should be gambling against other users. The platform profits equally whether you win or lose, since they take a cut per bet, not per loss
Poker has the same problem. The casino wants people to keep playing for as long as possible, so they can keep raking in ante/commission. People play longest if they win and lose almost equal amounts.
Having a high skill player at a table/bookie breaks this cycle. People start losing faster, and end up playing less. The high skill player continuously drains money from the table, money that would have been bet again in a later bet if it had gone to an average player.
I find this really irritating, it’s not just that sports gambling is legal, it’s also legal for sports gambling companies to limit their customer base to only the people who are bad at it.
It seems totally unbalanced, predatory, like an overt scam.
I would feel a lot better about the law permitting sports gambling if it also required companies to accept bets from all gamblers. It likely would reduce margins and feel a lot riskier to the companies. Like with poker… you can’t sit down at the table hoping to win big without also risking to lose big.
just like politicans LOVE choosing their voters through gerrimandering the legal booms LOVE choosing their customers. pay off some of these politicians and you got a sweet deal…
I don't understand why we couldn't at least have put restrictions on the advertising like with cigarettes. Following sports just feels slimy now, gambling promotion has permeated every part of the game, broadcast, talk radio, online forums, etc.
The thing I'm curious about is how much would it impact sports podcasting/etc if they clamped down on the gambling advertising. And to be clear I'm not saying that is a reason not to clamp down, just anytime I watch any podcast about sports there is all but guaranteed to be at least one ad for a major sports betting site. Plus how much of the new TV deals for various major league sports in the US was driven by the expected sports gambling ad revenue during the games.
In small print, that most people don't bother to read or don't have time to read.
It's probably included because some states require it and it's easy to just make one commercial. For example, Virginia 11VAC5-70-240.B "Advertising, marketing, and promotional materials shall include a responsible gaming message, which includes, at a minimum, a director-approved problem gambling helpline number and an assistance and prevention message, except as otherwise permitted by the director for certain mediums such as social media messages. "
In other rich states, you can do everything with a little bit of money, just pricy. In poor states, they're often theocratic and tightly regulate things but you can still do everything with a little bit of money.
Virginia on the other hand, wealthy various economic drivers and still regulate everything fun out of existence in the least entertaining way possible. Winning the prize of worst state in the union.
Wow, not one mention of the real reason sports betting became legal - the tax revenue.
"50% of all men below 50 have an online sports betting account"
This might be misleading. Many people created accounts to get promotional credit to play with and never played again. A better measure would be how many people are active.
>This might be misleading. Many people created accounts to get promotional credit to play with and never played again. A better measure would be how many people are active.
This is disgusting and the bane of Australia as well.
There is just too much money to be made in that space. It's sickening.
And with apps on phones, it's 24/7 for some people. They get sucked in and gamed like babies bums in talc powder.
And it started with Twitch now. Kids get addicted watching these rigged players and believe they too can get rich doing it. It's a form of opioid legalised because the government gets the kick back.
There's some intense opposition to betting here. It's odd because in the UK sports betting is pretty much embedded in the culture. In fact i'm pretty sure the only reason horse racing is even a thing is because posh rich people like to bet on it. It's something which even the monarchy implicitly supports. I'm anti gambling personally which is part of why i hate crypto but i don't get why sports betting in particular is so objectionable.
My charitable interpretation is that it's a way for fans to feel more invested in the game. When their team wins they also do.
I don't want betting to be illegal, but any rational analysis of it makes it clear that it is a net drain on the people involved in it, and when that proportion is large enough society as a whole is affected.
The reason why there's so much fixation on sport betting in particular is partly because it is doubly addictive (because emotions tend to run high around sports, team sports especially, so even people who might not have bet in a casino might be betting on a game by their favorite team, for example). And partly because, on top of all the other problems with gambling, it creates perverse incentives for the teams to fix games.
> It's odd because in the UK sports betting is pretty much embedded in the culture.
I remember being astonished walking around London for the first time 15 years ago after getting off the plane from the US and seeing a place called "Ladbrokes" that really would leave lads broke.
> I'm anti gambling personally which is part of why i hate crypto but i don't get why sports betting in particular is so objectionable.
There's a direct onramp from something very popular (sports) into sitting on your couch and losing all your money on your phone. It also makes sports worse for everyone who doesn't gamble on it too.
> I'm anti gambling personally which is part of why i hate crypto but i don't get why sports betting in particular is so objectionable.
Because, like the article said, 97% of users lose money sports betting.
It's like the lottery (which I also didn't like the states legalizing). You're essentially taxing poor / uneducated people but with sports betting that tax is a profit to some random businessmen.
It's just like a drug. Just because some people like it, doesn't mean we should allow people to monetize the addiction to it.
I think crypto became "legal" more in the sense that it "failed to become illegal".
When it was just a goofy project only taken seriously by distributed systems geeks and Ancap libertarians, there wasn't much to regulate and it could slide under the radar for quite awhile. Then pretty rapidly it sort of became so big that it wasn't trivial to do actually ban it.
Then we got a president who used it as a streamlined bribery platform.
The problem is the intersection of two things that have questionable social merit and you could easily see a society making illegal.
One of them is gambling.
The other is modern marketing.
Combined, they represent a substantial harm.
With nearly all of our social agency - which in our society means money - already in the possession of a tiny fraction of the country, with the bottom half of the country having approximately zero savings and spending at least as much as they have income? Any revenue gleaned from their dysfunctional attitude becomes a collective hardship, money that needs to be replaced by some form of subsidy to maintain our quality of life and avoid spillover problems like property crime.
> "Social agency" has two primary meanings: first, a governmental or private organization providing community-focused health, welfare, and rehabilitation services to improve quality of life. Second, it refers to the human capacity for individuals and groups to act independently, make choices, and effect change in their social environment.
Out of the two I'd be even more inclined to ban marketing because without marketing, betting is vastly unattractive, you just see yourself and all your friends lose every time you try. It's the marketing that spins the lies that result in addiction.
But you know what? The bulk of the players are not degenerate gamblers. Most even know the odds are against them.
Yet they play anyway. Why? They LIKE to play. They enjoy the games. They enjoy the environment. They’re not all there trying to get money for rent on their trailer or for more cigarettes.
Hanging out at a Vegas sportbook on Super Bowl Sunday is fun. Going to a track, nice day in the sun, couple bucks on some ponies — it’s fun. Spend some time at a crowded, loud, hot crap table. It’s fun, it’s exciting.
Most folks have their head on their shoulders. Most folks have a budget.
Yes, it’s predatory. History and the media is filled with stories about the dark side of it. I, as a rule, don’t support it. If it shows up on a ballot, I vote it down. I wish the local tribes were renowned for their light industry and engineering firms instead of gaming.
But to characterize anyone who enjoys the play as a fool is painting with a very broad brush.
Ted Olson: who America listens to. Olson is a prominent constitutional lawyer who argued the case to repeal PASPA in the District Courts and Supreme Court. He was central to cases involving legalizing gay marriage, upholding the second amendment, and the landmark campaign financing ruling in Citizens United.
If we assume that these are all cases that he was on the winning side of, then good on him for the first one, but dude sure has a lot to answer for with the other ones and the case under discussion in this article.
But wasn't that also true in 1979 when the ban was first put in place? Obviously, yes, money is the main force driving this country toward sports betting, but I argue that there used to be a counteracting force called morals, and the loss of that counter-force is what led us to where we are now.
Well, in 1979 the people who had the money were the existing casinos, operating in the 4 states that had legal sports betting. This was a way to close the rest of the market, so they could continue to have a monopoly on gambling and wouldn't have to compete with other states.
Then FanDuel and DraftKings arrived with a lot of investor capital, and had the money and power to push through the legalization.
It was never morals that kept gambling from being legalized elsewhere, it was protectionism.
I don't gamble but it is batshit insane how it is regulated. Deceptive and fraudulent advertising I get that. but it is a most natural right for a person to be an idiot and ruin themselves by gambling away all their money. Governments have no right or authority to stop us from being idiots if we want to be idiots.
This isn't even about democracy and liberties. Even monarchies and communist regimes have no right. First, it is tax revenue, second it does not harm or directly affect anyone other than the gambler in a negative way, third anti-gambling laws incentivize and enable criminal enterprises. Secret betting rings are usually operated by organized crime.
"You might be homeless or dependent on welfare if you lose all your money"... ok but society helping homeless and impoverished people does not give it the right to police everyone else. Don't help those people if you think they're gambling addicts or don't help them at all. Needed help that comes with sacrificing freedoms is slavery.
"People gamble away their family's money"... ok, then their family sounds like it has a problem that doesn't need governmental meddling. How about we regulate people that aren't ambitious enough to support their family as well. Money left on the table is money lost after all.
Even if less gambling is better for society as a whole, it still does not give society the right to infringe on individuals' ability to be idiots. It is better if people get married for example, that's why tax breaks for that exist (which i disagree with) but society doesn't go around regulating unmarried people or people who refuse to have children (much more harm to society that way than any gambling outbreak could ever cause!).
> Governments have no right or authority to stop us from being idiots if we want to be idiots.
This sounds fine in theory but it ignores the fact that gambling today isn’t just about individuals making free choices in a vacuum. There’s an active, systemic push to get people hooked. Millions (billions?) are spent on ads, algorithms, and dark patterns designed to keep people hooked. That's not freedom - that's exploitation.
With modern tech like gambling apps on your phone, 24/7 internet access, social media tie-ins the problem multiplies. You don't have to go to a casino when you have one in your pocket. The same tricks that make people lose hours on TikTok are being weaponized to make them lose their money.
Freedom matters. But if the entire system is engineered to trap people in endless dopamine hits, then society has to step in. Not to ban choice, but to create a framework that tilts people away from predatory addiction loops and toward things that actually build resilience and meaning. Otherwise “freedom” just becomes another word for “you’re on your own while other people drain you dry.”
Those same traps and dark patterns you mentioned are used well beyond gambling. those things themselves should be regulated, not gambling. You're arguing against something unrelated to the topic here. It's fine to trap and addict people into gambling, and then punish them for getting addicted and trapped? how does that make sense? let people gamble if they want, but ban malicious and hostile practices of capitalism. Whether it is gambling,shopping addiction, social media addiction, porn or political influence campaigns, the practice and trappings are the same and should be heavily regulated. No argument there.
What do you think should governments get involved with?
I think it is the government's responsibility to protect those who can't defend themselves. Women beat by men. Employees being abused by their bosses. People getting robbed or conned.
I happen to be a somewhat big guy, at least compared to the average around where I live. Partially as a result of this I have never been mugged in my life. But that doesn't mean that I think that when someone gets mugged they don't need "government meddling". I know that other people are not like me. I don't call them "wimps" and say that "it's their right to be small" or that "they should have hit the gym more often".
Mental health issues are a bitch. Compulsive behavior issues suck. You sound like someone who doesn't have them. That's great! But hopefully you can understand that other people can have them. Calling them "idiots" is just a trick your brain does so that it can put a label on a problem so you don't have to think about it more deeply. I invite you to spend the 2 calories that it takes to look behind that label.
Hopefully you will find that gambling companies are naturally be incentivized to predate on people with mental health issues, who are a vulnerable group.
And that is why gambling needs to be heavily regulated, if not banned outright.
Can you please be any more dismissive and condescending?
First, I chose "idiots" carefully, if a person has a pre-existing condition or some other weakness, "idiot" excludes them as you've so obviously noted and they should be protected. However, if they chose to enter a life of addiction, fully being informed that even gambling once will addict them, they fall under the "idiot" category, although there are better terms to use and I'm being lazy with my wording there.
Your rant about the government protecting people and you not getting mugged has nothing to do with what I'm saying,that's false equivalency.
I have every right to enter a life of addiction and ruin myself, as do you. i have every right to get addicted and live a miserable and short life. it isn't a great idea, but it is none of your business either.
As I stated very clearly, banning and regulating harmful and deceptive practices by gambling companies is something I support fully. What insane is you thinking you have a right to prevent me from doing something that doesn't affect you in the least because you want to force yourself to being everyone's caretaker. There should be a term for this sickness, perhaps "hostile and performative empathy"?
Help those who can't help themselves and ask for help! You don't get to decide who can't help themselves unless they can't make decisions or communicate on their own. Sane adults can speak up for themselves and tell you if they need help. And your idea of help? what is it? throwing people in prison? that's what you're advocating, you understand why that's insane right? Short of murdering a person, that is the worst thing you can do to them, do you get that? When you say "banning" it must be enforced somehow. Or perhaps you think it will be a small fine, even if that was the case, what happens when gamblers who lost all their money can't pay a fine, other than imprisonment? Loan sharks to pay your fines, and a life of crime to pay the loansharks? Either way, it ends up in people being forced to participate in worse and worse crime and thus causing actual harm to others because of your unending empathy.
I return your invitation to spend a little more than 2 calories and think about what we're discussing here. Your nanny state beating people until they die for their own good.
- 2% of global population suffers from gambling disorder
- Approximately 25% of online gamblers are classified as problem gamblers based on clinical screening tools
> You not getting mugged has nothing to do with what I'm saying,that's false equivalency.
Why, exactly?
> I have every right to enter a life of addiction and ruin myself, as do you.
Yeah here is the thing. You don't know if I have a mental health disorder. Assuming that I do, gambling companies will use any trick they can to hook me into giving them all my money.
> A right to prevent me from doing something that doesn't affect you
I agree the government doesn't need to "prevent you from anything". What I'm saying is that I want them to prevent gambling companies from doing things to me - a hypothetical gambling addict.
I, as a potential person with compulsive behavior, will have gambling companies showing me ads on the street. Tagging me up and showing me adds in Youtube or any other website that uses ads. Offering customized "free samples" to entice me. I don't want them doing that to me and I can't make them not do that to me - only the government can.
So going back to my first question, which you didn't answer - what do you think the government should get involved with?
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I don't have problems restricting and regulating gambling companies and their practices. I do have a problem with the government preventing or banning gambling companies which is effectively preventing individuals from gambling in groups. The government should absolutely do something about malicious and hostile business practices, but not on just gambling but every other business as well. If you have food addiction, how should mcdonalds filter you out? Plenty of diabetics and heart-attack risks out there thanks to that, and I hope you don't think that's less of a problem. Don't pick and choose vices.
If we agree on that last point and you agree that gambling companies should exist and sane people who are well informed have the right to gamble at those places, then we agree on all important points.
Glad that we see some common ground. I think we agree on the essentials.
> If you have food addiction, how should mcdonalds filter you out?
Debatable. Let's go back to this statistic:
- Approximately 25% of online gamblers are classified as problem gamblers based on clinical screening tools
That is not insignificant. I don't know how it is at McDonalds, but I doubt 25% of their customers are food addicts. What is a tolerable range? We do have rules and restrictions for alcoholic drinks and tobacco.
A bunch of mobbed-up northeastern politicians funded by illegal offshore betting concerns hammered the system for 20 years until it broke? Basically the same way as every financial scam became legal, I think.
And if you are consistently winning they will ban you! They can legally back off (reduce max bet to a tiny amount) or straight up ban people who bet smart.
These books also market what are the hardest to understand and worst bets to consumers. Think 4 way parlays. Like all 4 legs seem reasonable. They probably on their own each have a 70 pct probability. But that means a 24 pct of hitting. Of course they are all over props because people love to bet over. They are taking advantage of the fact that most people don't understand expected value or odds of multiple independent things happening
I know a guy who sells odds to online betting platforms.
If they don't purchase his odds (effectively paying him not to play), he just plays them. Wins either way. I dont think he has ever been banned, but I think thats because they appreciate the option to purchase his service.
Well you have a truth telling friend.
He might not be entirely truthful, but I have never seen him lie about his special subjects, economics and sport.
I would like to become friends with your friend.
The big asian bookies don't ban you if you win, they use your sharp bets to improve their price accuracy. Not legal to bet on them if you're from the US though (land of the free??). The biggest betting syndicates use platforms like Punterplay to place bets (often via API) at multiple bookies (Pinnacle, Singbet, SBObet, Betfair, Matchbook, 3ET, VX etc) at the same time.
In a somewhat ironic turn of events the more regulation you have, the worse it is for the customer. Big regulatory burdens require the bookies to extract more from the users, making the offerings more predatory. This is also why the likes of Kalshi can provide a better product to customers at the moment - because they ignore all the regulation.
Casinos have a ton of leverage in some states. Here in Nevada MGM and Caesar's and Wynn, thanks to their expansion, are effectively treated as too big to fail and given huge amount of deference in how they operate by the gaming commission. But there are also incredibly problematic protectionist regulations that I and several other residents who didn't really know each other tried to get rid of through the admin law process, primarily allowing remote signups which would also allow out of state entities to set up shop without literally having a physical casino. Having to physically go to a casino and sign up in person was onerous and clearly pointless, and then impossible during the pandemic, and became a really silly charade. What was supposed to start as public meetings right before the pandemic got dragged out, meetings would get rescheduled at the last minute, and casinos made entirely spurious rationales like "there aren't enough local datacenters" (Google Cloud's Henderson datacenter is surely sufficient for in state traffic?), that they would want taxpayer money for potential loss of revenue (capitalism dude, what are you afraid of?) Meetings would get scheduled in Carson City and that's literally six hours away by car. Agenda items would suddenly be altered. It was a hot mess. We managed to get iGaming in theory legalized but they straight up never even pretended to start working on regulations for it, and now with the 90% loss deduction limit by the IRS on the OBBB books basically have 12.5% house edge on any line to start if it's properly priced. My model can beat 2.5% but 12.5% is insane. If the feds are going to ban pros constructively, well, I can't out lobby a casino. And the pro betting constituency isn't big enough to pander to, frankly. If there's action, it can't actually happen on shore. I realize that "people who can beat the books due to specialist knowledge and can bankroll drawdowns to the extent that returns long term profit" is also publicly not sympathetic and generally people either think we're touts (if it makes me money touting absolutely won't help me, in fact the fewer people I have to interact with the better) or something. Wagering by hand sucks, but no model is perfect, just some are more useful than others, and someone in accounting may be able to figure out that ban or bankrupt is not a sustainable strategy to run books. But with the feds involved to put that imprimatur of authority in writing, I guess I'm never getting my limits lifted. Good luck finding stable liquidity elsewhere.
There are betting exchanges where the platform charges a commission but doesn’t care if you win or lose.
Not as much as traditional bookmakers but they absolutely care. Betfair has a "premium charge" where if you earn over a certain amount in a year, you get charged a fee equal to a % of your gross profit.
Its the same as poker. An exchange wants a bunch of equally skilled players betting against each other. If everyone has zero edge, all the money stays on the exchange betting over and over and the money eventually all goes to the exchange in commissions.
Players with a strong edge dramatically reduce the time before the losing players run out of money, meaning less commissions for the exchange.
If you earn over a certain amount in a year, and are categorised as a deriving your majority income from gambling in a 0% tax Territory (Austria, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, UK/Ireland etc...), you can offset the % charged as an expense.
FWIW, an exchange doesn't necessarily want a bunch of equally skilled players betting each other, they want a lopsided book on the bigger markets to attract domestic bookies and match-makers laying or staking across multiple platforms to leverage Matched betting discrepancies on promotions for new players etc...
//Players with a strong edge dramatically reduce the time before the losing players run out of money, meaning less commissions for the exchange.
Poker Players with a strong edge have a +ev Variance. Over 100 hands they're not guaranteed to be a winner. Over 10,000 hands they are.
YMMV massively in other sports, but for horse racing the big gamblers tend to only put down big money once or twice a year on maidens and trial-runners for Cheltenham or Grand National. They wouldn't touch a big festival other than for fun.
How can it not care if you win? They still have to pay out correct? Do they then limit the maximum payout that can be expected?
I don't know as I don't bet but it seems counter-intuitive that just charging a commission would change the dynamic.
The exchange is not taking the other side of the bet; they're just matching you up with another user who wants to take the opposite position to you and then taking a fee for providing that service.
The problem I you compete with other exchanges and so need to compete on odds or customers go elsewhere. If there is an imbalance in your system because the favored home team has more people on you platform (or someone else has extra of the unfavored team and so has better odds) you take the losing side just to keep the customers and then pay out when you lose.
the above is much less likely if you are national, but there may be small competitors with an advantage live this you are trying to compete with
> If there is an imbalance in your system
That’s what the moving price / odds is for, to rebalance the willingness to take both sides of the bet.
Now your costomers go elsewhere fori the better odds and don't come back.
A restaurant won’t start selling clothes because if they don’t the customers will go elsewhere to buy clothes and they won’t come back.
A stock exchange won’t start holding a book of shares to give “better” prices to customers. What would that even mean? If the price is better for the buyer it will be worse for the seller! (If you mean that they will buy for a high price and sell for a low price to keep all customers happy maybe the customers won’t go anywhere but the “exchange” will go bankrupt.)
Why would a betting exchange be different? Does Betfair for example act like you suggests or is it just something you’re imagining?
In Stocks exchanges and brokers are different things. Exchanges list companies, they are the places where different brokers gather to exchange stocks and agree on prices. Brokers are people/companies who go to the exchange on your behalf (historically someone physically went there, now it is mostly computers)
NYSE and NASDAQ do complete with each other for companies to list on them. (as do other exchanges around the world). When a company is on more than one exchange there are people who make it their job to run "arbitrage" - this is they buy on one and sell on the other anytime the prices are different and this keeps things in check.
It is also valid for betting platform to run arbitrage with their competitors - but various anti-monopoly laws and other such things should(!) get in the way. I don't know what they are doing about this or exactly what the law says. As such I don't know what Betfair is really doing, but I know this is a risk they somehow either take (which if they are national might be low enough), or if they somehow get arbitrage done.
And betting platform is normally both the exchange and the broker. As such they have this risk and need to mitigate it while staying within the law. There are many ways to abuse mitigation that need to be illegal and so it must be hard to mitigate - this doesn't mean impossible.
> And betting platform is normally both the exchange and the broker.
Betting exchanges are different from bookmakers.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Betting_exchanges
Maybe you’re now using “platforms” to refer to everything but the discussion was specific to exchanges as opposed to bookmakers.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is all the online options are platforms - the exchange for their own bookmakers. Vegas does have exchanges, but most online options don't use them.
You’re wrong. See link above.
How Kalshi and prediction markets are disrupting sports betting: https://www.espn.com/espn/betting/story/_/id/45377686/kalshi...
That ESPN link doesn't tell me anything. Wikipedia says Kalshi is trying to become available on other brokers, but also implies that the majority of their "trades" come from their own in house brokers.
As such I still need to stand by what I said: at least for now the online platforms are not exchanges (though some are trying to move that way)
> The company says one difference is that users are not going up against the house but instead trading contracts with other users on the opposite side of the proposition.
> "We are simply an exchange. So we sit between people that are buying contracts on a yes and a no side. We don't win by people losing. And we don't lose by people winning. We simply sit in between that transaction."
I don’t know what else would you like to be told. That’s an exchange, with one user taking one side and another taking the other side. No brokers are involved when end-users connect directly to the exchange.
Wikipedia mentions that they would like other platforms to give access to the exhange, and the existence of market makers (one affiliate company, one independent company) that may provide liquidity. But the basic exchange is user-to-user.
OK makes sense, thanks for clarification.
on edit: so the problem is that of course the other user can default, but that is not the exchange screwing with you because it is to their benefit.
The other user can't default, the money is all put in up-front.
Aren't the payouts purely user funds so they aren't actually risking anything? They do charge commission.
If that were the case though they would be prone to the same problems that any bookie is, an upset where a few high bets wipe everything out.
It's an exchange. You offer to bet X and wait for a matching offer. If no one wants to bets that much your order waits in a queue - same as on a stock market.
There is 0 risk for the exchange and the bettors can only use what they put in front.
Bookies run some risk because they accept the bet first and try to hedge (or got more people to bet on the other side) later. The exchange doesn't have this problem.
Exchange doesn't even need to charge commission cause they make money on float.
It’s even worse with parlays: the events are potentially negatively correlated. There may be a 70% chance that Giannis has 3 or more turnovers and a 70% chance the bucks win, but the odds of both happening are less than 49% because more turnovers directly reduces the likelihood of a Bucks win.
I won't bother asking how this is legal because it's clear there are no rules to any of this stuff right now. But it's absolutely insane that as a business you can just take your 20 most unprofitable customers and then just ban them.
In the US, a business can refuse service to anyone, generally, as long as it isn’t because the person belongs to a protected class (e.g. you can’t ban all black people or all Jewish people). You could refuse to do business with someone because you didn’t like the way they looked at you, or because you were grumpy the day they came in.
Famously, for example, James Dolan bans all sorts of people he doesn’t like from Madison Square Garden and any of the other venues he owns. He notoriously bans all lawyers who work for any firm that sues him (which happens a lot). He even uses facial recognition to catch them, and kicks them out without refunding their tickets. People have tried to sue him for this (many of them are lawyers, after all!) and so far no one has won against him for it, so he keeps doing it.
Here is an article about it: https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/45949758/new-york-knicks...
IIUC, that article is written in 2025 and cites stuff pre-2023.
IN 2023 the city threatened them with violating the terms of their liquor license [1] (which doesn't prevent you from refusing service to anybody short of actually illegal behavior). I can't really find any follow-up about this.
[1]: https://nypost.com/2023/12/06/business/msg-could-lose-its-li...
Doesn't prevent you from refusing short of illegal. Incredible sequence of negatives there.
The doesn't doesn't belong.
> a business can refuse service to anyone
In Colorado, such service refusals are illegal. The civil rights agency prosecutes them and their legal rationale is that historically every "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" has only been used to discriminate against non-white customers.
> Rule 20.4 – Discriminatory Signage in Places of Public Accommodation.
> No person shall post or permit to be posted in any place of public accommodation any sign that states or implies the following:
> “WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.”
> Such signage implies that management may rely upon unlawful discriminatory factors in determining access to a place of public accommodation and thus is prohibited.
https://www.sos.state.co.us/CCR/GenerateRulePdf.do?ruleVersi...
Just because it is unlawful to display certain signs does not mean that refusing service to customers is unlawful.
Interesting. I’m surprised about that rule. To me, it seems like a first amendment violation.
Not my world, but I respect this. Imagine how fun it would be to own, say, Disneyland and keep AI-enforced ban lists for your every whim.
Glasshole 2.0? No Mickey for Meta!
Good to see Dolan is not the only one corruptible by power
Generally most businesses are allowed to refuse service to customers for any reason, or no reason at all (there are certain legal exceptions to that principle for protected classes). As a practical matter, banned online bettors often sneak back in with strawman accounts.
Companies outside of betting do this regularly. I know a guy who is banned from returning stuff at Best Buy.
Likewise. The guy bought two laptops to compare for a week and returned the one he didn’t like, then later that year did the same thing between two TVs. When he went to return the TV he didn’t want, he was told he was banned from returning any other good to Best Buy and it’s monitored against his credit card.
He now pays with cash.
Perhaps after just two events that might seem a little harsh, but I definitely understand the store's reasoning here. You've got a guy that is pretty much guaranteed to lose you money in the form of his regular auditioning of big ticket items (can't sell that returned item for full price anymore). Why would a store want to keep a customer like that?
Even if you pay with cash, they still check your ID when you return things and keep track of how much you return.
Can you explain how you see this as the same thing? And not returns fraud?
It’s not returns fraud - he was operating entirely within their policy, just returned too much stuff too often and BB eventually figured out they weren’t making money off him.
I don’t think he was even intending to return things when he bought them. Dude just had high standards.
A brick and mortar casino down here banned a guy for some bathroom activity. But made him agree that it’s to everyone’s advantage if they agreed it was because he was a sharp.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. I've definitely seen my fair share of people on Reddit who seem to regularly have the misfortune of opening video card boxes only to find rocks inside. Multiple times -- just a coincidence, I'm sure. Not saying the person you know does this, but return scamming is definitely a thing.
This dude wasn’t doing that, he was just using Best Buy as an extended trial period for whatever new gadgets looked cool. Eventually they decided they weren’t making any money off him.
What kind of arbitrage makes money returning things to Best Buy?
Years and years ago I had the misfortune of knowing someone that bragged about how he'd buy a video card at best buy, swap a dead card in it, then redo the shrink wrap at his job (an indie computer place) before returning it. There's lots of banal scummy scams you can do like that.
I specifically know of people who abuse the Best Buy membership alongside the return policy to essentially rent equipment for periods of time.
Something stupidly easy to catch, like putting a different TV in the box.
Fraud
There are absolutely companies that “stack rank” their customers and cut the bottom N%, or even just keep the top N, period.
I have always found this to be maddeningly counterintuitive, because surely at least some of these customers yield a net profit. But I have to admit that I’ve seen it done to very profitable effect.
I think the problem isn't banning per-se, because I can "ban" companies as well.
The problem has something to do with the asymmetry of information or bargaining-power. Unlike card games, the house has quite an advantage in data-mining.
I'm pretty sure they actually use their data-mining advantage to make their betting offers as attractive to regular users as possible, and therefore maximise profit.
It's so easy to just ban any user who gets "too lucky" (simply ban the top ~0.1% of your userbase every week) why waste resources on offering actually fair bets? And the requirement for "fair bets" probably interferes with the requirement for bets to be as attractive to "regular users" as possible.
> And the requirement for "fair bets" probably interferes
Don't forget the possibility of promotions, which is a major thing for marketing and distinguishing yourself from the pack.
A world of fair bets would be a world where you would need to market your superior odds (e.g. what pinnacle does).. which is directly at odds with fleecing your under-educated customer base.
How does the house not have a data-mining advantage in card games?
They would know whether you make bad choices on Tuesdays, how people of your nationality and consumer preferences react to seeing an Ace, they can deal the better card to the person they’d like to have win, or the opposite, they know what effect the equivalent of a hot waitress bringing you free drinks will be on you specifically as well as on people statistically similar to you and at what moment in time…
Do you just not play against the house when you play cards? And do you 100% trust the house to deal randomly? Does the house not care at all who wins at cards?
Sorry if these are stupid questions, I don’t gamble, but it seems like they have lots of actionable data if they want to use it. Even if they only use it to get you to play more (or less).
I know few mathematicians that work in betting world and model data (both odds as well as user profiling).
It is not true that you get banned if you win too often, but it is true that you get banned, and flagged, if your winning patterns are suspicious.
It's essentially like in a casino. You can win more than once and big, good for you.
But if patterns emerge, you get banned.
E.g. Betting small sums on football and suddenly betting very big on a specific baseball game and winning. Do it few times and you're banned as it's obviously strange.
In these cases one should apply the cybernetic principle. The purpose of the system is what it does.
The intention of the mathematician friends of yours may be to prevent money laundering and match fixing from being profitable (and thereby providing a public good). However, so many genuine sharp and/or plain lucky bettors are caught in these AML & Match Fixing cross-fires, it would be very naive to assume these are all just unfortunate false positives.
Sportsbooks are however legally hamstrung in what they can admit to of course. By doing so they would also admit to completely ignoring and even violating one of the core duties imposed on legal sportsbooks: the duty of care (in EU countries at least this is supposedly an important aspect of the legalisation).
By kicking someone off your platform, you definitely no longer have any way to nudge their behaviour into something less self-destructive. Some players might quit, but for those that do not: Illegal sportsbooks will try to take even more advantage of their players, and now you have also indirectly caused the financing of all kinds of other activities that AML regulation is specifically designed to prevent.
My hot take: your mathematician friends looking at suspicious betting patterns are a way for sportsbooks to greenwash and "legalize" their exploitative practices.
> My hot take: your mathematician friends looking at suspicious betting patterns are a way for sportsbooks to greenwash and "legalize" their exploitative practices.
I have no clue, but I'm sure that it's meant to make money, not be a charity. If someone does show some suspicious alpha he gets banned.
Users with non-suspicious alpha are generally kept on the platform but they get limits (how much can they bet).
I absolutely believe that the betting industry is exploitative in any case. It's not a business where I would want to be involved.
Of course I don't expect these businesses to be charities, but I do expect them to uphold their side of the bargain.
The basic bargain of sportsbetting legalization is that sportsbooks are allowed to legally operate (retain a license) in this lucrative market if they 1) ensure taxes are paid, 2) the money involved is not flowing to bad actors (e.g. through match fixing and other methods of money laundry), 3) the sports themselves are not corrupted (imo an impossibility, but a different discussion) and 4) gamblers are taken care of properly (i.e. nudged away from self-destructive behaviours).
Point 1 is one of those unavoidable things like death. Point 2 is actually in line with their own incentives: match fixing directly hurts their bottom line by paying out on essentially highly mispriced odds. Point 3 is a much bigger discussion, which I feel they are already failing on (for me as a sports viewer with the incessant ads, but also in protecting the athletes that are not in the top 0.01% of any sports).
Point 4 however is something they are claiming they are doing, but in actuality it is complete reversed: the illegal sportsbetting market is, by all measures, out-growing the legal one. In the current environment, the major thing sportsbook legalization did is to provide a gateway drug for the illegal market. Limits and bans in order to (POSIWID) protect margins are the strongest nudges gamblers experience to move from legal to illegal sportsbooks.
> It's not a business where I would want to be involved.
Good :) The fewer competent individuals involved in any way, the harder it is for (owners of) sportsbooks to claim they are upholding their side of the bargain, as this will stand or fall with the competent execution of the AML/Match fixing & duty of care controls. Now to actively discourage others from working there as well...
You're right that people don't get directly banned for winning too often, but they will get their maximum bets limited to something like $10 if they consistently place bets where they get a good deal on the odds (i.e. placing a bet at +100 when the odds closed at -200). This is one of the worst aspects of legalized sports betting IMO, and why I think it should be regulated. The companies running the sportsbooks are free to make errors on their odds without consequences because they're allowed to identify and ban anyone who takes advantage of the mispriced odds. This means they get to limit their customer bases solely to people who don't understand expected value, which turns the whole industry into a mechanism to take money from the stupid/uneducated. If you have an account at a sportsbook that's more than a few weeks old, and it's still in good standing, it's because the sportsbook knows you're a loser and that even if you win big a few times, you'll be profitable to them long-term.
>And if you are consistently winning they will ban you! They can legally back off (reduce max bet to a tiny amount) or straight up ban people who bet smart.
I'm not from US, I'm from EU but I'm still paranoid of that so I only sports bet at state owned lottery/betting company.
Gambling debts are unrecoverable by law in Ireland. Casinos are under no obligation whatsoever to pay out under any circumstances
If you happen to be too lucky while placing a bet or gambling, the person can simply say ‘no you’re not entitled to the money’. That is simply the law in Ireland”. https://www.thejournal.ie/court-gamblers-not-paid-d1-casino-...
The hilarious thing is that if a Betting Company allows you to beg on margin/credit, then they can't subsequently sue you for the money either https://www.algoodbody.com/insights-publications/high-court-...
State run bookies charge commission so high you will not win anyway unless you have insider info and then your risk is bigger with a state run bookies.
Big bookies won't have you so easily. Multiple small ones will but you will get your money back. They not paying is a very small risk even if they decide to not do business with you later.
How do you know they would not also ban you if you were exceptionally “good” at betting?
Is there some specific EU regulation guaranteeing the right to place bets even if the house is losing?
Company is owned and run by state and I doubt they would allow themselves to have any shenanigans with their customers. You can always sue them, you can sue private companies too but private ownership is just an extra worry. That's why I also have a bank account at the state owned bank not the private one.
That’s probably a good intuition and definitely smart about the bank — I was dropped by Commerzbank in Germany without explanation — but if I were so good at betting that I worried about a ban, I’d want to double check the actual rules.
I mean state is probably the better custodian of your money and your interests than the private investors unless you live in a rogue state run by criminals.
Leaving aside the question of whether it has to be a rogue state to be run by criminals, I think that operating a gambling syndicate is never in the interest of the citizenry, and that includes the Lottery, which is functionally a tax on the poor. For very gaudy spectacles of that exploitation, turn on the TV at Christmas in Spain.
why not bet till you get banned, then switch to state owned?
I mean technically stock trading platforms can ban you if you trade too well. Usually happens with options, not buy and hold positions. Retail trading platforms need users that are statistically no different than random to sell their order flow to HFT firms.
The hot new interview question for 2025-2035 will not be:
- How many golf ball fit in a school bus?
Or the like that dominated Google hiring for nearly a decade. No the hot new interview question will be:
- Do you have an account with any of the major sports bettors in good standing?
The Goofus answer to this is : Yes, I can bet whatever I like with them (they are an idiot that doesn't understand how money works. Hire appropriately)
The Gallant answer is: No, I don't do sports betting. (This shows they at least know to lie about it)
The Galaxy answer is: No, they banned me (only sharps get banned, meaning they are either very lucky or very good with probabilities and numbers)
There exists now the potential for a small service company that can help interviewees and the spouses of gambling addicts: We'll make you look like a sharp to the sports betting companies. You sign up for the service and a big-time sharp takes over your accounts (or directs you personally) and tells you what to bet and where. They then give you the money to bet, making you effectively a mule for them. It's win-win. Real sharps get a mule, you get to look like a sharp and you have the proof. This also works for the family of addicts (probably the larger market), as their affected loved-one gets banned/downgraded and all the money stops flowing out of their accounts.
> (This shows they at least know to lie about it)
Or they just don’t do it? I don’t enjoy gambling at all. I don’t do it in casinos, I don’t do it online, and I don’t even do it with friends where there’s no “house” to pay off. I think the worst night gambling I’ve ever experienced, I lost $20. I still remember it.
Was I not clear here? My parentheses would include people that don't gamble with the 'at least' there, I thought.
Ah, I took that to mean “everyone does it but at least these people are smart enough to lie about it”.
'Proper' gamblers use exchanges like Betfair rather than Sportsbooks, where the host takes a rake off the spread with individuals laying against you. The only major issue with this is not being able to do things like place betting accumulators.
FOI in EU means you can get the notes attached to your account - the insights can be staggering, down to friend and family connections with Jockeys or Racing Stables, Sports Personalities or High Net Worth individuals.
Isn't mule or proxy betting incredibly illegal in the US? It would seem to violate every known money laundering law I can think of
Any modicum of research will show how dangerous this is. Despite warning against addiction, sports betting websites engage in dark patterns because whales are where the money is at. Your local bookie isn't engaging in AB testing to see how long before sending you free credit promotions will bring you back to their platform.
I have only ever bet on sports once (a fantasy football thing at work that I was required to join), and I was very lucky because I lost and had zero fun in the process. I don't like sports anyway, so the odds were never very high, but the fact that I didn't enjoy losing $50 made it so I've never had the temptation to do it again.
I think about the alternate universe where I won and started betting more a lot; sort of a "there but for the grace of god go I" situation.
I don’t like gambling, but I love sports. I will very occasionally engage in “emotional hedging”, where I bet AGAINST the team I want to win.
If my beloved team wins, I’m ecstatic and don’t really care I lost $50. If they lose, well, at least I have $50.
I tried this but I'm also hopelessly superstitious so I could only do it once. But I think it was I who ruined Arsenal's chance to win the prem when Leicester took it
Was it a fantasy league? I guess it’s gambling, but not what most people would consider sports betting. I know lots of people who play in a fantasy league with friends every season and do no other gambling.
Drafting players and then fielding a team every week for a season can be fun if you like the sport.
It was a fantasy league, and yes I am sure if you liked football it could be fun to figure out players and the like and having a small amount of money on the line might even make it a bit more exciting.
The problem for me is that I had no idea with regards to anything about football, so my picks weren't radically different than a random number generator, and unsurprisingly I lost. I had absolutely no fun in the process and I would have rather spent that $50 on a video game or something.
It’s unfortunate you didn’t have fun. We often do leagues at work and it’s great team building. People have won who just used the auto draft feature and a woman won one year who picked all her players based on uniform colors.
You don’t have to know much about football, and it gives some common ground for small talk.
I think a large part of it was the fact that it was mandatory, and I didn’t like my coworkers very much, but I don’t have fun with the selection process.
I signed up for one of those first time deposit offers and made a bet on the Super Bowl once, as I was going to a watch party and find it to be unbearably boring, so I figured this would make it somewhat interesting. I ended up winning, I think I tripled my money when including the bonus. Even though I won, I had zero interest in ever betting again. I got so much spam texts and emails from that Sportsbook over the next few years trying to get me to bet again it was insane.
My brother jokes and says I am in the top 1% of sports bettors now
I'm the same.
I am very very careful around activities and substances which could become addictive, because I know from benign life experiences that I sometimes lack the self control to stop.
It would probably be fine but there are no upsides risking it.
That and ever since my undergrad statistics class I hate the thought of playing games which are staked against me from the beginning. The thought of betting or gambling feels like voluntarily signing up to be swindeled.
In the UK I've seen lots of "first bet: win or your money back", or "make another bet free" sign-up deals. They're poorly disguised dopamine sharks.
Well aside the organised criminal element that goes hand-in-hand with legal gambling, it destroys people's ability to make rational choices.
But yes, I'm also lucky enough to have never won.
I won nearly a grand on one of these. Pretty blindly. I came out on top after a year of using the platform but not by much. It's definitely predatory. I'm fine with it being legal as with drugs it's going to happen either way but the promotions should go.
I think —as with drugs— if we are going to allow it, it should be taxed enough to provide cessation services, counselling, rehab to anyone who needs it.
Even then it's hard to ignore that both these things destroy people with precious little informed consent. If you're the sort of person who gets hooked, you're stuffed.
Yes but your local bookie is also not sharing revenue with the state. This is purely another of funding states revenue at the cost of vulnerable.
So what? those malicious advertising practices should be illegal. not just for sports betting but for any website or business. Gambling is a person's natural right.
If gambling should be legal, then so surely should malicious advertising right?
Predatory advertising, gambling, they both prey on people.
Cards on the table, I think both advertising and gambling should be heavily controlled.
In a capitalist system, gambling has a lot of negative externalities that go far beyond the individuals participating. It must be carefully controlled. In some countries like Monaco, citizens can’t gamble, but foreigners can do so freely.
My position is that every country should do what Monaco is doing, except if a citizen want the foreigner treatment, they can abandon whatever social benefits that would be harmed by gambling and be allowed to gamble or partake in activities that harms themselves only.
Many developed countries are struggling with birth rates for example. Should that be regulated? It is harming countries much more than gambling could ever have. The whole right-wing resurgence happening across western democracies is a direct consequence of lower birth rates demanding offshoring and immigration.
Yeah let's do some forced births!
Thanks for understanding the absurdity.
Reminds me of some proposals to pay people for having kids.
The kind of folks who will take that offer are more likely to be terrible parents.
Why is gambling your natural right, but advertising not mine?
advertising is your right, so long as the venue of advertisement is owned by you or you get the owner's permission. What isn't your right is being deceptive and fraudulent with your advertising. It is just free speech otherwise. I'd say you have an even stronger right to advertise than to gamble, just not advertise deceptively.
Let's also legalize crack and heroin. Getting addicted to fent is a person's natural right.
Yes, I sincerely agree. But the person that sells them the poison has to make sure they are of sound mind and fully understand the consequences. So long as a person is well informed and of sound mind, I don't see the problem. I'm even for putting their names in a registry so that they won't receive any social welfare benefits in the future if they go down that route. But outright jailing people, that's insane. Imagine eating something unhealthy and suddenly you're serving 25 years in prison for it. What is happening is only mildly less absurd.
Oppression is not the only alternative to legalization. Just because your country's policy on drug addiction is very misguided and does more harm than good doesn't mean the solution is to legalize everything.
Anyway, my point, that you seem to have completely missed, is that some rules that Americans would reflexively dismiss with a thought-terminating cliche like "nanny state" are in fact necessary. You wouldn't want the road to be a free for all, would you? Well, I don't want psychological warfare to be legal and used to trick my neighbor into losing vast sums of money to online platforms. Poor, addicted citizens make the country worse for everyone.
Also, "But the person that sells them the poison has to make sure they are of sound mind" made me laugh. When has it ever been in the business owner's interest to vet his clients? Legalize fent and in a year, half the superbowl ads will be selling you drugs in rainbowy attention-grabbing displays of decadence.
False equivalencies. Roads are shared, gambling is not. psychological warfare is against the masses and is being done under deception against targets, gambling is not, and despite that, it is your neighbors problem,not yours in that example.
The bit about poor addicted citizens (if it actually is the cause,instead of welfare and similar things), it sounds like your priority is improving the economy despite its effects on people's rights?
> When has it ever been in the business owner's interest to vet his clients?
When not doing so could mean serious consequences, like capital punishment or life in prison.
>> So long as a person is well informed and of sound mind, I don't see the problem
Someone high on heroin or going through withdrawal from heroin is not of sound mind.
But they were of sound mind before their first hit of heroin, were they well informed then? if not, punish the seller not the user.
I don't find it hard to believe at all. Here's an incredibly unscientific way of looking at it:
I'm 27. Among me and a hastily-assembled list of 14 of my male friends, 7 of us definitely have at least one sports betting account, 4 definitely don't, and I'm not sure about the other 4. I'd bet (heh) at least one of them has an account.
It might be more informative to see how many men actually use their sports betting accounts. Technically I have an account, but I haven't used it in over 2 years. Won a bet that the Heat would beat the Celtics in the conference finals, realized I was now net-positive by several hundred dollars, cashed out, and uninstalled the app. Never looked back.
>It might be more informative to see how many men actually use their sports betting accounts.
A sibling poster posted a link to Siena survey that has related betting statistics. For males the percentage that "have accounts" vs those who "had accounts" is 30% and 6% respectively. You see similar ratios in the age breakdowns. Therefore it's safe to say that around 40% of males below 50 "have" betting accounts.
Then you have people like me barely qualify as below 50 and somewhat male, who didn’t even know sports betting was now legal.
It would be difficult to loosely follow any major league sport and not know it was legal, regardless of age. The ads have been everywhere. These companies have user acquisition costs well over $100.
If you didn't know it was legal, you're probably well outside the target audience.
https://sri.siena.edu/2025/02/18/22-of-all-americans-half-of...
Even with that link I have trouble believing it myself.
Like how was this data/survey gathered/administrated? Sample size ect...
Also I don't understand how sports seem to get so much attention. Like they are just games why?
Another post I was reading a bit ago was how Spain what basically suffering internet outages to stop pirate streams of games on the weekend: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
Like why is a game considered so important that even internet traffic has to suffer. It boggles my mind.
>Like how was this data/survey gathered/administrated? Sample size ect...
If you read to the bottom they explain their methodology.
> Like why is a game considered so important that even internet traffic has to suffer. It boggles my mind.
Because that game makes 1.8 billion dollars a year in TV licensing rights [1], and pirates undercut the pay-TV stations' ability to recoup these expenses.
Add in a ... questionable legal system, club and league presidents with friends with very very deep pockets, cloud providers that don't care what they host as long as the legal system of their host country absolves them of liabilities and that's how you get inane rulings like this.
[1] https://www.salaryleaks.com/prize-money/spanish-la-liga
> Like they are just games why?
Because they are fun.
There's a difference between having an account and actually using it.
I suspect the amount of US men who regularly bet on sports is much, much lower.
That being said: I find sports extremely boring. If I had a lot of social pressure to watch sports, I'd probably gamble, just to keep the game interesting.
To be fair, at some point I registered in one of those sites because a bar had 50% discount on the tab or something similar for first time account registration. I don't even live in the states, was just visiting.
Yeah, I registered with every single one I could find when they all had $300 bonuses, just took the bonuses, made 99% sure bets on everything (bet $300, win $300.01) and cashed out about $3000 and never touched them again.
I'd have just gone to a different bar.
50% off for punching a lewd name, some bigco support phone number, a made up birthday and your spam catchall email into a web form seems like a pretty good deal.
Sure, but then suddenly "50% of all men under 50 have a betting account", which they use to justify more ads, more lobbying, more gambling.
I'd rather not contribute to this as well.
As well as...what?
As well as GP
I'm definitely skeptical of this. When my state legalized sports betting there was around 6 or 7 books that came online and they ALL had pretty juicy sign up bonuses, like "bet $5 and get $250 in free bets." Damn right I signed up for all those books to get the free bets and converted those into cash by doing safe moneyline bets.
Off the bat - I wouldn't be surprised.
I don't bet at all (excluding the financial markets), but I'm often surprised at how many of my relatives and people from all walks of life pull out their phone and fire up an online betting app. All men.
I hate betting but even I can't avoid taking a chance on the big new year's lottery. Chance of winning is virtually nil of course.
Wonder if this counts Robinhood's "predictive markets" for sporting events that somehow gets around California's ban on online sports betting.
Note that the article uses an outdated name for the Supreme Court case: Christie was replaced as governor while it was ongoing and the final name was Murphy v NCAA. That will make it easier to search for later coverage of the result instead of just early blog posts from when it was brought to court.
I don't think that straight up banning things is the best answer, but clearly, legal sports betting comes with a high cost - to individuals and to the society as a whole. So barriers should exist.
You may stop short of making sport gambling illegal, but you should at least make it annoying. Completely ban advertising it, for one. Set harsh legal limits on user spending - so that the betting companies aren't incentivized to burn through their users and extract the entire life savings out of them.
Harsh legal limits seems obvious to me. If society benefits at all from sports betting, all that benefit happens in the first few hundred bucks of spending. Meanwhile all the biggest harms to society are happening when people spend a lot.
The fact that these limits don't exist seems like evidence that the lawmakers didn't care about the effects on society.
> The fact that these limits don't exist seems like evidence that the lawmakers didn't care about the effects on society.
The lawmakers care primarily about the wants of their corporate donors, which is why this legalized gambling situation arose, and also why you have many geriatric congress people on both sides of the aisle suddenly very interested in legitimizing crypto with soft "regulation".
Unfortunately it appears that advertising is covered by the first amendment in the US and cannot be banned.
No? Show me some cigarette ads.
The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969, which is still in effect, bans all commercials for cigarettes on TV and radio in the US.
Cigarettes and alcohol both have advertising heavily regulated/banned. The government just needs to make a public health argument which is easy enough here
They would have to stop pushing their own gambling sites to accomplish that. 45 States have lotteries they aren't going to give up, and one of the other five has legal casino gambling.
I think betting needs to work like credit cards. When you get a credit card the bank does a risk assessment to evaluate your line of credit and you won't be able to spend over that limit.
Well, sports betting could have the same mechanism, where you are only allowed to bet an amount proportional to your line of credit.
If the banks don't trust you to spend over that limit and honour your debt, why should betting houses be any different?
The problem is that the incentives are exactly reversed. Banks limit your credit because they don't want to lose their money. Sports betting/casinos/etc want you to place bigger bets because they want you to lose your money.
I agree, banks have in their best interest that they don't loose money and bet houses have in their best interest that you lose yours.
So if there aren't any natural incentives you just make up artificial ones. One such mechanism is regulation, just like with the tobacco industry.
It's the same for casinos. If you buy $50k of chips, lose them to someone else in poker and they redeem them. If your $50k purchases bounces the casino loses money.
Wait whose money do you think is in the bank? Banks are funded by depositors' money and they absolutely play fast and loose with it when not regulated.
That is not true at all. Banks are not funded by depositors money. Banks create money when they make loans, and destroy money when loans are repaid. Deposits in current accounts are liabilities from the bank’s point of view.
Just to e clear is net 0. Not just liability.
——
Yes, deposits in current accounts are *liabilities* from a bank's point of view. This may seem counterintuitive, as we typically think of deposits as the bank's money. However, in accounting terms, a liability is something a business owes to others.
### The Bank Owes You Your Money
When you deposit money into a current account, you are essentially lending that money to the bank. The bank has an obligation to return these funds to you whenever you demand them, whether by withdrawing cash from an ATM, writing a check, or making an electronic payment. This obligation to repay the depositor is what makes the deposit a liability for the bank.
### How it Works on a Bank's Balance Sheet
A bank's financial health is represented by its balance sheet, which must always balance. The basic accounting equation is:
$$Assets = Liabilities + Equity$$
Here's a simplified breakdown of how your deposit fits in:
* *Liabilities:* Your current account deposit is recorded on the liability side of the bank's balance sheet. It represents a debt the bank owes to you. Other liabilities for a bank include savings account deposits, certificates of deposit (CDs), and money borrowed from other financial institutions.
* *Assets:* When you deposit cash, the bank's cash holdings (an asset) increase. The bank then uses the funds from your deposit to generate income by making loans to other customers or by investing in securities. These loans and investments are considered assets for the bank because they represent money that is owed to the bank.
*In essence, the bank takes on a liability (your deposit) and creates an asset (a loan or investment).* The bank's profit comes from the difference between the interest it earns on its assets (e.g., the interest rate on a loan) and the interest it pays on its liabilities (e.g., the interest paid on a savings account, though current accounts often have very low or no interest).
Therefore, from the bank's perspective, the money you have in your current account is not its own money but rather a debt it must be prepared to repay at any time.
> Banks are not funded by depositors money. […] Deposits in current accounts are liabilities from the bank’s point of view.
“Banks are funded with deposits” = “Deposits are liabilities for banks”
The conversation is credit cards, in which case you are absolutely paying with the bank's money, and if you don't pay it back (particularly if you can't and declare bankruptcy), they lose their money.
No. Don't make it different per person. Make it a blanket "maximum." Sure, one could just have multiple apps or accounts with multiple companies... Either way would be hard to regulate.
If we truly believe that sports betting (at this scale, at our fingertips on our phones, unlimited) is bad... trying to band-aid it won't work.
I do believe the more money you have the more money you should be allowed to throw away irresponsibly. I mean, that's true for all other products...
Maybe you get a maximum based on your tax return or something?
It could work, but I think it'll have a hard time passing legislation, because it's restrictive for upper classes.
Maybe we could have a system in which your vote gets less power, the more money you have. Based on your tax return or something?
Not sure I get it. Voting on what? I'm confused.
For those who scroll, it’s become obvious how much energy the gambling platforms have expended to get their name in front of youth. These ads are cleverly embedded in the content, a simple bet to cover lunch or to give a tip. They typically win and make it look as simple as pressing a button to win some money. I believe that these ads should be more prominently labeled and upfront, given the target audience.
It starts with gacha. I find that far more problematic than regulated gambling.
A significant difference with gatcha games compared to traditional cash gambling is that you cannot chase your losses. You either get the skin/item or you don't, but there is no false hope that you could recover the money you gambled with if you spend even more. Obviously, that's not true when the game allows you resell the skins individually for real cash (eg. CS skins). Chasing losses and borrowing money to earn back the money you lost and getting even more in debt is what makes people kill themselves in casino parking lots.
Yes the best examples of chasing is probably TCG, followed by Valve.
With young people, not sure that it matters. They will become gambling age eventually. The psychological affects are there. See Genshin and Monopoly Go.
They left out the UIGEA which specifically legalized fantasy sports for money and the fact that FanDuel was not the first daily fantasy sports site (went through YC with one myself in 2007) but good primer nonetheless.
Yeah, as someone who lived through this entire saga first-hand as well, it's...an OK article but it's really missing a lot of things.
DFS, in particular, was and is very legitimately a game of skill. (In fact, looking at it from an Elo perspective and from the perspective of "Who should win?", it's more of a game of skill than the sports themselves!) There was absolutely no reason for it to be made illegal, other than to protect the tribal gaming interests in California and Florida. They pushed back so hard and with such little justification that the tide really, really turned against them in a much more broad way than they ever anticipated.
The ironic thing is, Matt King at FD and Jason Robins at DK probably would have been perfectly happy if the outcome had been that they be allowed to merge and that DFS is legalized and regulated. Instead Robins is a billionaire and Flutter made the best corporate acquisition of the 2010s.
The article itself is garbage and I strongly believe it's AI generated.
But even on top of that, the coverage of this issue is severely lacking. There were already many online sports books "legally" HQ'd in the Caribbean or other offshore locales. They were pointed to as proof of how much money could be made and money won. That's the story. We allowed greed to addict millions of young men on sports gambling because we lost our spines in this country.
It doesn't matter if it's a game or skill it not. It's still gambling and it's still terrible. You can even argue that games of skill for money are worse than pure chance game because there is one more mechanism for people to get addicted: delusion of having an edge.
If DFS is legal roulette should be legal as well because it has fewer negative consequences for society.
I know it's popular narrative among pro gamblers that games of skill deserve a different (better) treatment but it's just self serving nonsense in my view (I've spent most of my adult life in a gambling world as both a pro player and software developer).
How is it being a game of skill better for society than random chance?
It's not a moral argument. Skilled games don't typically fall under gambling laws.
Much lower risk of people getting addicted to games of skill, and much less expensive for people who do get addicted?
It's the opposite on both counts. There is additional mechanism to get addicted - delusion of having an edge. If you're a bad addicted player you will also lose more (cause others have an edge over you bigger than casinos at their games).
Chess is the biggest game on Twitch, but getting addicted to it is pretty rare, and you certainly don't hear of people losing their house over their chess addiction.
Chess is a great game but it is rare to play for money because you have a very accurate rating system and no luck, so you know to a high degree of certainty who is going to win before the game starts unless the players are very close in rank. You can’t fool yourself easily.
With games of skill that also have a strong luck element (poker, fantasy sports, betting horses, etc.) you can fool yourself very easily into thinking the odds are in your favor when they are not. If you won you thought it was because you played better, if you lost you got unlucky, and if you don’t track it (even many professional players don’t) you may have a hard time even knowing after a long sample size where you stood.
Gambling relies on the ability of anyone to get lucky and win on any given day mechanisms rely on inconsistent rewards.
People don't play it for money. I mean specifically they don't bet on outcomes of their own games. This is what gambling is.
Chess wouldn't be as addictive anyway. You need a bit more luck ingrained in the game mechanics to trigger the addiction mechanisms. In games of skill like poker people get deluded all the time because they see lucky wins of their opponents and unlucky losses of their own. People are very bad at making judgements about probability so a lot of them get deluded into thinking "if only unlikely X didn't happen 3 times recently I would be ahead".
This happens in both poker and sports betting. In both games you can always pick some unlucky events (ball hit the post, referee gave an unjustified penalty, the only card falling on the river) and point to them to say "if only" while missing all the small lucky events on your side.
> 97% of users lose money on sports betting.
This is the worst thing about sports betting.
A close second is being shown the odds for every little thing during the live broadcasts.
Apple TV is the worst offender. Their coverage of Major League Baseball was already bad, but they found a way to make it even worse by constantly showing the odds of this, that, or the other.
What I've always found odd about this is slot machines that are awful typically return 90+% to the players. In this case, we have the opposite.
A 90% RTP will typically (typically - lots of exceptions and caveats) be quite volatile - offering big wins but long losing streaks. Exactly the kinds of game behavior designed to extract long playing times and really peak the dopamine response.
The casino will be accounting/forecasting a 5% take across stakes made as it's super complicated with jackpot contributions/payouts and stuff.
These machines are there to be always accessible and to train the human in just the right way so as to get you addicted.
I don't know what slots you play but the ones I've been at you can play the game at any speed you want. A single tap of the button places the bet and plays the animations, etc. A double tap does that and skips the animations, immediately showing your winnings. If that isn't enough there is usually an option to increase your bet by a multiplier or to make multiple plays on one "spin". The play speed is effectively up to that player.
I used to work with a guy who had a long stint at IGT. He said the most popular game he ever "made" was to take his previously most popular game and just have one set of controls play 4 of the same game all at the same time on one screen.
I don't play slots, but I did manage an online casino for 3 years. Auto-spins allow users to play without "interaction" but, at least for my players, the animations and chirps were all part of the "fun".
All go towards the same thing - dopamine addiction as an activity.
I think I just wanted to say that the perception of a 90% "success rate" v's all or nothing with sports betting felt like a troublesome comparison, for me at least. These games arent safer or fairer at all - they are both doing the same thing - in different doses to different audiences.
Many of my slots players didn't consider what they did "gambling" at all.
That 90+% has nothing to do with the 97% in the other comment. Betting platforms also return 90+% to players.
Wouldn't that imply that 3% of players win huge on sports betting?
The 3% have either won a decent amount early and haven't averaged out yet, or they're a sharp who is carefully betting skillfully on winning bets. I don't think those people actually win too much since the platforms are always hunting to ban them. The missing money of 97% pretty much overwhelmingly ends up in the house's hands.
Even if sport bets or slot machines returned 99% that’s for one play. Play 50 times and the aggregate loss is 40%.
Slot machines typically keep 3% and returns the rest to the player. They do many things to keep people play to empty their deposit. Bonuses, wins on every spin (but amount is usually less than stake). Use internal coins to hide actual value etc
It's the arcade games that will really get you. At least they're more fun.
Most sports bettors arent trying to make money. A ticket to the game is $100+, is that money wasted too?
> Most sports bettors arent trying to make money.
This is totally disingenuous. Why else are gambling providers forced to include addiction recovery phone numbers with their ads?
> A ticket to the game is $100+, is that money wasted too?
No, and this is equally as insincere as your first statement. Gambling takes money without offering a fair return in goods or services.
> Why else are gambling providers forced to include addiction recovery phone numbers with their ads?
Some people are sick and cant control themselves.
> No, and this is equally as insincere as your first statement.
Neither comments were insincere.
> Gambling takes money without offering a fair return in goods or services.
It provides entertainment, same thing tickets to the event provide. A lot cheaper than seeing the game in person too.
> Some people are sick and cant control themselves.
If people being sick and not being to control themselves required an intervention phone number in general, we'd run out of 10-digit numbers faster than Elon lasted in the government :)
> It provides entertainment, same thing tickets to the event provide. A lot cheaper than seeing the game in person too.
This 100% is the reason most if not all of my friends put money on the games. Not sure why this is so hard for A LOT of people to understand, putting money on the games gives many people I know more of a rush than sky diving
My cheeky answer to "how should this be regulated?" is that sports betting isn't materially different from other high-risk private investments, so it should only be available to accredited investors. Imagine if fanduels/draftkings had to verify assets and income before taking a single bet?!
A casino is a machine that transfers wealth from poor, foolish, gullible, sad, unfortunate people directly to the pockets of casino owners.
It's a tax on people that don't understand math.
And when they lose all their money it becomes a tax on society.
Lest us not forget the origins of prohibition where women were collectively extremely upset about their husbands constantly going out and spending their salary on drinking instead of actually buying food and etc for the family.
I went to a casino once with a bunch of engineering students. The amount of superstition was eye opening.
Understanding math isn't enough I think it is largely emotion driven. Like a fun thing to do, not work.
I play low stakes poker occasionally, there is nothing better than a bunch of students sitting at the table :-) As an aside I think poker in casinos is the only game that you have a chance of winning at.
Ye if you play bad players or the house rakes you down.
There are also some games with accumulating jackpots that might turn ev > 1.
I know quite a few casino addicts. They all understand the math just fine. Some are actually very good at math but still can't stop themselves from betting on a spinning wheel.
My grandpa, a World War II Veteran, lived in Kansas City his whole adult life. He saw ballot measures come up over and over to legalize river boat gambling, and it failed for decades. Another initiative would always crop up a few years later.
In 1992, when the innocuously named “Proposition A” finally passed, these monstrous “riverboat casinos” were built all along the Missouri riverfront.
He said before he died, “it’s funny, once it passed, there weren’t any more votes on it”.
And that’s how this stuff becomes legal.
The original “ask me later” dark pattern
TFA doesn't make it clear to me how the line is drawn from "bunch of mates playing a pro-sports seasonal drafting game and spice it up with a buy-in pot" to "you sit alone in front of an online skinner box and lose money on opaque spot wagers on ongoing pro sports events".
One thing is very different from the other.
Michael Lewis has an excellent podcast about this in his against the rules series.
Seems like this article is mostly just a rehash of that podcast. At least it's linked in the piece but for anyone not on Spotify, here's a link to the actual podcast page: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules
I came here to say exactly this. It's excellent. I loved when he gave his kid $5k and hoped he would lose it and learn a lesson, but things didn't turn out as he expected. But, all the episodes are incredibly interesting.
The funny thing is the platforms are barely profitable if at all. The earnings all get funneled to ads as that's the only way to differentiate, aside from maybe a slightly better UX.
You seem to be telling a tale of two industries, sports-betting and advertising. The sports-betting industry lobbies for reduced regulation, while the advertising industry sits on its hands, ticking along providing advertising for other businesses.
Eventually the sports-betting industry wins its lobbying campaign. But what did they win? The different sports-betting companies are in fierce and unprofitable competition, while the advertising industry walks off with all the profits.
That tale is at its most ironic when the advertising industry is consolidated and makes monopoly profits on advertising on behalf of sports-betting companies.
As with alcohol (and I say it as someone with alcoholics in the family), there are the vast majority of users who are doing nothing wrong; sellers who are generally not doing anything wrong (ok, banning sharps is wrong, but that is not core to the service and could be regulated at the cost of higher fees for everyone). And then there are few alcoholics/whales who ruin their lives.
It is bizarre to me personally that what we want to regulate/stigmatize are sellers and even recreational users (50+% of men who have an account or whatever), and not the over users. Instead, we try to protect over users from themselves, and society from them, by making life worse for everyone else doing the pass time. That to me seems deeply immoral. By cracking down on abuse or consequences of abuse we could protect the society, and abusers themselves deserve everything they get - although if we treat them like children "you are demonstrably not responsible so like a 13 year old you don't get to drink/manage your own money anymore" that would also be accomplished.
> In 1992, New Jersey Senator and former basketball player Bill Bradley sponsored a Federal law called PASPA, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. This law banned most states from legalizing sports books: businesses that set odds, accepted wagers, and paid out winnings on sports games.
Federal laws (i.e., laws of the United States rather than the individual states) derive their authority from the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reads: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ No part of the Constitution delegates power to the United States to regulate intrastate sport or gambling; no later amendment repeals the Tenth with respect to sports gambling.
So Congress had no constitutional authority to pass the law in the first place.
I detest sports gambling with a passion, but that doesn’t matter: PASPA was never constitutional. The federal government has legitimate power to regulate interstate gambling and the states each have the ability to regulate intrastate gambling. I don’t think that it should be illegal, but I do think that it should be regulated like other addictive and dangerous things.
On the contrary, from what I gather, the Justices were amenable to the federal government regulating or even banning intrastate (non-cross-border) gambling as well!
The problem was that PASPA was sloppy and didn’t do that; its mechanism was to tell states what laws they could or couldn’t pass, which is unconstitutional for reasons outside the Commerce Clause.
Per Proskauer:
> Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the opinion was Justice Alito's unequivocal statement that "Congress can regulate sports gambling directly," if it elects to do so. While Justice Thomas, citing an 1867 Supreme Court case, expressed doubt that Congress could prohibit sports betting that does not cross state lines, there appear to be at least eight Justices who believe that Congress has this authority under the Commerce Clause. Thus, Congress could adopt a uniform federal policy that would permit and regulate sports gambling throughout the nation and thereby preempt the various state laws. Alternatively, it could choose to outlaw sports gambling throughout the country, although that approach seems unlikely at this point.
https://www.proskauer.com/alert/us-supreme-court-strikes-dow...
Now, of course, the proverbial cat is out of the bag.
(IANAL, this is not legal advice.)
Sports betting is one of those things that sounds kind of harmless in the abstract, and like something that consenting adults should be allowed to do. But in practice, it causes enormous harm, both by draining the meagre resources of the people who get addicted to it, and by changing the nature of the sports in ways that make them less enjoyable for everyone who isn't betting.
I think this is more a function of the internet than purely the legality. Legal gambling wouldn't be nearly as damaging if it was limited to sportsbooks that only allowed gambling on-site similar to how some places have handled gambling on horse racing for decades. The dangerous part is not simply the ability to bet on a sport, it's having a device in your pocket that allows you to gamble instantaneously at any time and (almost) any place.
I think the same thing applies to most vices. Any friction in engaging in the vice is a moderating influence. Someone is more likely to get dangerously drunk while drinking at home than at a bar in which you have to order every drink from a bartender. It was likely more difficult to fall into a porn addiction if you needed to look another human in the eyes when you rented that dirty VHS tape. It's easier to overeat if you're having the food delivered to your home than if you order every item from a waiter in a restaurant. When we all know an activity should be done in moderation, making it as easy to engage in that behavior as possible is probably a bad idea.
That's interesting, but it's almost the opposite for me. I get way drunker in a bar because the environment is inviting and it's easier to order another drink at the bar than to get up and get it myself. The bartender typically sees when you are getting low and offers another drink.
I would also spend way more money on gambling when at a location to do so. The desire to bet on sports on my phone is really low because it's boring so I won't do more than enough to make a game interesting.
When I used to have to make an effort to get things that are now legal but previously illegal I would be much more compelled to make that effort to avoid having to do it in the future when I wanted the thing. Which inevitably would lead to more doing of the thing. Now that I know I can get it anytime I don't actually care about it.
I think maybe you aren't the target market. Just like I don't understand my friends who somehow sink hours and hours into pay to win games.
There are fake games, and even leagues, made specifically for people to bet on. To me there is no appeal, but I'd expect to someone gamblign there must be some appeal. See this article, there have been cases in cricket, but I know less about that game. https://josimarfootball.com/2024/10/21/childs-play/
I tend to agree with the parent that friction is useful for many 'sin activities' I might extend this to most drive through restaurants. For gambling having to go to a casino, a racetrack, or a bookkeeper who isn't legal all act as points where users drop out of the process. Having it on your phone is always available and the path of a user can be modified to get them to spend/bet more.
I've actually never seen a physical sportsbook where employees walk around asking for bets like a cocktail waitress. I assume there's some good reason because you're right that you would expect doing it that way would encourage more betting.
Horse racecourses have physical on site betting, because that's what the sport is for, but it's usually behind a desk rather than walking around. I'm not sure whether the old ambulatory bookies still exist.
I definitely agree, but I don't think all of those examples are apt. Particularly the drinking one, because I think that's fairly likely to be 50/50.
Some other good examples (I think) are simply watching things. It doesn't need to be porn, think about how many people are chronically watching mindless trash content for hours at a time because we've made constant scrolling an immersive experience available all the time everywhere. I know I am. We've gone so far as to even eliminate the necessity to decide what to watch, the media companies have automated the process of turning what used to be customers into their products and delegated the friction to the telecom companies. When you think about your phone bill, really we should be paying basically nothing for it (and in some places it's nearly that cheap), but in expensive places we're paying like $80/month to engage with 5 free addictions that only take value away from our lives. They're charging us to sell ourselves to each other.
Weed: I agree that it should be legal, but how many new customers have been created since a store opened in every available vacant commercial space within a legal jurisdiction?
The pursuits of car and oil companies have literally re-shaped the built environment in the name of making it as easy as possible to be sedentary when you'd otherwise have to move—most significantly so in places that missed out on dense urbanization in the pre-industrial period—and now all we know how to do is get in our big SUV and drive to Costco, then to McDonalds, because otherwise there's a near-zero likelihood you have access to more economical healthy choices that are persuasively close to not drive to. Most North American cities effectively made it illegal to do anything else but sprawl, and concentrated as much wealth and power as possible in the hands of mega-franchise companies and private equity while we watched our wetlands get paved over for parking lots (we unironically should have listened to Joni Mitchell on this one). Good luck opening up a new corner store, those only go on the main avenues and shockingly someone owns that land already.
Credit Cards: Obvious one, but if you obscure how much you've spent and eliminate the requirement to keep track of what's available to you, maybe even add a nice little ding sound when you tap your phone, you're going to buy a hell of a lot more.
India very recently banned sports betting due to the affect it is having on society - particularly due to gambling on cricket which has been a problem for years.
Here's a list of cricketers that have been banned over the years. Many were even the captain of their respective team:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cricketers_banned_for_...
The list also doesn't include players like Ricky Ponting, Mark Waugh and Shane Warne who got away with a fine from the ACB.
Tobacco style anti-advertising laws for sports betting would reduce harm done to addicts and provide immense relief to everyone else.
Or, just make it illegal.
Australia is trying to make tobacco illegal by taxing it to death (a legal single pack is on the order of $40). It's not going very well.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-04/illegal-tobacco-is-a-...
On the other hand, sports betting and advertising for it are absolutely rampant.
In terms of rates of smoking, it is going well. Australia has the second lowest smoking rate of any country where women smoking isn’t taboo. (I.e., the only countries with lower smoking rates are New Zealand and a short list of countries where it’s culturally unacceptable for women to smoke.
While the article you linked points out that illicit tobacco sales make up a large percentage of the market, it’s a much smaller market. You might as well tell us that most guns sold in Japan are illegal, and therefore Japan has a bigger problem with guns than America.
The article notes that according to wastewater testing, nicotine consumption in Australia is at an all-time high.
I'm no fan of tobacco, I think taxing it heavily is good, and Australia's policies were (IMHO) working well until quite recently. But, as the article explains at length, the price difference is now so extreme and the legal risk of illegal sales so low that drug dealers are muscling in and we're getting drug dealer competition tactics as a result.
The article is about gambling in the U.S., not cigarettes in Australia.
Also, these policies usually fail in getting existing users to quit, but they succeed in deterring prospective users. The idea that these policies are "not going very well" is an incredibly narrow-minded and short-sighted perspective.
Did you read the article? By effectively banning legal vape sales to all (including consenting adults), there's now an explosion of completely unregulated vapes in the illegal market catering to all and sundry including children.
There are countries that let people do fentanyl out in the middle of the road because they're unable to enforce basic laws. Then there are countries that give people the death penalty for having a few grams of a common herb. Whether laws are enforced and enforced predictably and equally to everyone determine the effectiveness of a ban.
Australia doesn't let you bring a bottle of water onto planes going into their country, even if you bought it inside the airport. Allowing people to bring in drugs like tobacco but strictly forbidding a 1 dollar bottle of water is a problem with enforcement. If tobacco were treated the same way dangerous, addictive substances like H2O are, things might work better.
Per TFA, the people of New Jersey voted in a referendum to make it legal by a 2/3 supermajority, for example. Why should it be illegal if most people don't want it to be?
I'd like to see how many would vote the same way again, now that they've seen the outcome. But they probably won't be given the opportunity to vote on it again, now that the commercial interests got what they want.
Sports betting is nothing compared to the massive, state-sponsored gambling enterprise in scratch tickets and lotto.
Biggest scam of all time.
Not a lotto fan, but, in theory, the money collected by state lotteries goes to some sort of public good (scholarships, etc.). Don't get me wrong, I still see them as destructive, but they don't operate with the same intent.
These new sports books are operating purely to enrich the owners of the platform. Ban 'em.
> Not a lotto fan, but, in theory, the money collected by state lotteries goes to some sort of public good (scholarships, etc.).
Problem is, state funding for those public concerns are often reduced by the same (or more) amount lottery revenue generates. For example, Florida pitched their state lottery as funding education (amongst other "who could be against this?" programs), yet failed to inform voters that existing funding would ultimately be reduced in a compensatory fashion.
Only poor people buy lottery tickets. These are the people getting their money from government welfare anyway. It's a terrible cycle.
There's also a difference between people who buy lottery tickets religiously, and who buy them once in a while. I like to play once in a while when the jackpots are high, just in case. Unfortunately, the answer to it is really hard, like most issues society faces today.
Yeah I occasionally will buy a ticket or two. Not often, but sometimes on a whim I get them. I figure it is probably a slightly healthier version of buying the king size kitkat or snickers in the checkout line. The cost is the same, the satisfaction is just as transient, and I'm not jamming a bunch of sugar in my face.
I've been in an online community where some users do a group buy for certain lottos when the prize is big enough. Sending $2 by paypal/venmo is easier and lower friction that going to one of the stores near me where I can but a ticket myself. I still think it's kinda dumb, but I do plenty of dumb things and I buy one infrequently enough to be ok with it.
Yet statistically speaking you're better off buying a ticket when the amounts are low.
I don't think that's the case. Most of the expected value comes from the jackpot, and even if a large jackpot means you should expect to share with 1 or 2 other winners, but the large jackpots are easily more than 3x the small ones.
Probably. But, it's more enticing when the amounts are high, and the amount I (and my partner) spend on it is minimal.
If true, that's definitely a US localized thing. The places I've lived in the big winners in the big lotteries are disproportionately often middle class compared to what you'd expect if the large majority of buyers were poor.
At least they fund the State Park System (in my state as least) -- so much less of a scam than sports betting that funds ... nothing
Nothing? At least you can't play lotto in your pocket.
You definitely can. Many states have lottery apps and "scratch off" games.
The problem isn't so much sports betting in and of itself, I don't think, but the ease of being able to do sports betting from your pocket, at any time.
The idea of “consenting adults” is a libertarian fantasy unsupported by evidence. Between low IQ, impulsivity, addictive personalities, etc., a large fraction of the population needs guardrails imposed by society for the sake of both themselves and the people around them.
Sports betting has significant negative impacts. For every $1 a household spent on betting, it reduced savings by $2. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/online-spor.... This impacts not just individuals, but spouses and children who don’t “consent” to the negative impacts this has on their lives.
> Between low IQ, impulsivity, addictive personalities, etc., a large fraction of the population needs guardrails imposed by society for the sake of both themselves and the people around them.
I find it telling the the people that have this opinion always seem to believe that they are going to be the arbiters of how other people should live, and that they themselves are without the vices that they would regulate.
And I even agree on the betting bit: it's bad. But then again, so is voting for criminals and yet, we allow it and arguably that causes a lot more damage than betting.
> and that they themselves are without the vices that they would regulate
Did you ask OP if they think that, or are you just assuming that?
> I find it telling the the people that have this opinion always seem to believe that they are going to be the arbiters of how other people should live, and that they themselves are without the vices that they would regulate
I’ve been blessed not to have addictions to substances or gambling. But I’m a snacker and could afford to lose 25 pounds. (Cardiovascular issues present in south asians at a lower BMI than for others, apparently.) I’d love social reinforcement to help with weight management, e.g. portion sizes when eating out.
I think these issues invariably boil down to the same things: education, self discipline, resistance to peer pressure. Some people have neither of these or only in short supply so there will always be people with problems. Substance abuse (including smoking, alcohol, drugs, and possibly even food), gambling, violence and so on are only - in my opinion - regulatory domains when society has to bear the cost of individual transgressions or when other people (not the people abusing / being violent etc) are directly impacted. Other than that I think live-and-let-live is a pretty good guideline because one person's controlled and self-disciplined pleasure is another persons reason for going after them. And before you know it sexual preferences and other personal stuff are also seen as within the domain of regulators. 'Educate, don't regulate' seems to be a good first principle until you hit the sharp edges.
As for portion sizes: my simple rule is that if I did not put it on the plate myself I don't necessarily have to eat it and peer pressure be damned.
If education was so great we wouldn’t have fat doctors.
I don't think that follows. Doctors are doctors but also they are people and whatever metric you apply to any large fraction of the population will most likely follow a bell curve. A subset of doctors will probably shift the centerline a bit left or right depending on what the subject is but there will still be outliers. So fat doctors will exist, mostly because they can exist, and likewise very skinny ones will exist too.
And this is why I don’t believe secular democracies have any enduring qualities.
Other than being better than the alternatives.
The society is not separate from "those people". Indeed, given the results of referendums, it would seem that the society is in fact mostly those people. So, who should be imposing guardrails on them, exactly, and how do they justify it in a democracy?
Most people know that they could use a little help from society. After all, people voted for gambling bans in the first places. What changed is we went through a libertarian phase as a country where we promoted individual choice as an end in itself and demonized any attempts at social regulation of choices. As we see the effects of that, I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine getting the pendulum to swing back at least partially so people might decide gambling bans were a good idea after all.
I'm generally a libertarian-leaning person and I completely agree. Some things are just too destructive/addictive/etc to allow easy and free access to them.
And it really saddens me to see American children being introduced to gambling at a younger and younger age via things like loot boxes, blind boxes, and trading card game speculation.
I live were gambling machines can be in restaurants and bars. Saddest thing I saw was the 10 year daughter of a nice restaurant taking part. It was one of the owner's daughter play pull-tabs. She didn't even discourage it or try to teach her daughter how you loose in the long run.
> And it really saddens me to see American children being introduced to gambling at a younger and younger age via things like loot boxes, blind boxes, and trading card game speculation.
I wonder if that makes them more or less vulnerable later in life. Are lootboxes a vaccine or a devastating childhood infection?
As normalized as it's become, I think it's more an issue of desensitization than potential "vaccination"
But people being sensitive to gambling mechanics is exactly what puts them in trouble.
> the amount wagered on sports bets has grown from $5 billion to $150 billion annually. 58% of college students have bet on sports. 50% of all men below 50 have an online sports betting account.
If I had my way, everyone who has ever made a "why make it illegal/regulate it? People will just do it anyway."-style argument would be forced under penalty of law to write the above quote 300 times on a chalkboard.
While I have no doubt sports betting is much more popular now, I presume the $5 billion figure does not capture the considerable amount of illegal betting that happened previously.
I was interested in this, so perusing I found https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ngisc/reports/2.pdf which estimates in the late 90s
"Estimates of the scope of illegal sports betting in the United States range anywhere from $80 billion to $380 billion annually, making sports betting the most widespread and popular form of gambling in America."
which seems surprising even at the low end.
similarly from https://www.americangaming.org/new-aga-report-shows-american... in 2022
"AGA’s report estimates that Americans wager $63.8 billion with illegal bookies and offshore sites at a cost of $3.8 billion in gaming revenue and $700 million in state taxes. With Americans projected to place $100 billion in legal sports bets this year, these findings imply that illegal sportsbook operators are capturing nearly 40 percent of the U.S. sports betting market."
I think what would be more interesting to me is estimates on the unique number of citizens betting. Is it up? If so, how appreciably?
If you wanted to bet on sports when I was in college you needed a bookie. Now, you have access to all the legal bookies in the world in your pocket. It's hard to make an argument that something that is now legal and much easier than before is not much more popular than before.
And I'm not claiming that, but I also don't think the amount actually gambled has increased by 30x, as the headline $5B to $150B figures imply.
And the bookie was a guy you’d call up, shoot the shit, and he was basically everyone’s buddy. There were inherent constraints.
He could not advertise. He could not send you push notifications or run AB tests on millions of users.
I remember walking into Powell station in the mid 2010s and the whole thing was plastered top to bottom in DraftKings ads and wondering "why is this allowed". It was like a switch flipped and suddenly gambling was being advertised everywhere.
> style argument would be forced under penalty of law to write the above quote 300 times on a chalkboard
as initiation to your startup accelerator?
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Why make it illegal or regulate it? So what if half of men have gambled on sports? How many people throw away money on casino games, lotteries, raffles, loot boxes, et cetera? It's not my business how they throw away their money.
It is, because we live in a society, have a social safety net that you and I pay for, and our kids go to school with their kids. It’s your responsibility as someone fortunate enough to be graced with intelligence and impulse control to help those who weren’t, and you’re not doing that by encouraging them to do whatever they want.
Something like 3-5% of the gambling population are "problem gamblers". This is a much lower percentage than problem drinkers or smoking addicts.
I'm really not comfortable with the idea that we should only permit activities that are purely harmless. 30-50 people die each year in skiing accidents in the US alone. Those people have families too. Where do you want to draw the line?
It's pretty easy, we draw that line at things that are psychology designed to be exploitative. Well, I mean, we DON'T draw the line, but we should. Skiing carries risk but it generally provides participants enjoyment. There aren't companies that exploit psychological quirks to compel people to ski continuously even when they actively state they don't want to. Even alcohol companies don't generate their revenue on exploiting behavior patterns to compel more drinking.
Gambling and Social media do exactly that. In fact social media has purposely adopted the exact same patterns of gambling to make it so that "scrolling" IS gambling, but it's time and enjoyment instead of money. They don't just show you what you want all the time, they induce FOMO by only occasionally offering rewarding content, which results in compulsive usage.
I see, you want to take away my social media. While I'm pretty ambivalent about gambling, I very much enjoy my media habits. I am glad to have my intuition confirmed - you're a busybody who wants to meddle in my life for my own good.
I don't like these modern temperance movements. Leave people alone.
Are you happy / accepting of the current state of alcohol / cigarettes or do you think they should be less regulated in how they manufactured and market their products? I would advocate taking anything away, only applying standards and regulations to how companies employ algorithms and dark patterns to increase engagement. I think we need to have consumer benefit driven standards and regulations around user generated content platforms.
I certainly enjoy mainstream social media platforms but find it frustrating that the company is motivated to show me what I don't want to see and make it difficult to find the content I prefer. Simultaneously this is done while creating walled gardens to limit open access to information that is only the property of the platform by virtue of anti-competitive user agreements.
First and for most user generated content should be openly accessible.
I have almost zero opinion about the marketing of alcohol or cigarettes. Except that if people want to buy them, someone should be allowed to sell it to them.
They said, watching society go down the abyss.
Have you noticed how things are going? Do you genuinely believe these are non-factors?
I don't trust people saying that "society is going down the abyss" and then using it to justify a crackdown on personal freedoms - ranting about "degeneracy" is how authoritarians destroy democracy time and again.
“Freedom” in the American context means something different than the how people use it today. It’s closer to “freedom to make the right choices.”
John Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He was making an important point that has nothing to do with theology. Society can have extensive individual freedoms when people are socialized to mostly to make the right decisions without government coercion. If we loosen the social guardrails, as we have done, more government coercion becomes necessary to suppress anti-social behavior.
> It’s closer to “freedom to make the right choices.”
Not quite. It means, individuals have to have the freedom to make their own choices, because nobody can be trusted to know what the "right" choices are and dictate them to others.
By "a moral and religious People", John Adams did not mean that every one of those people must agree on exactly what the right thing to do is. He meant that the people have to have the concept of right and wrong as things they are supposed to discern, things outside themselves that aren't dictated by any other authority (or at least not any human one), and to understand that they have a duty to do their best to make the right choices. The problem with our society today is that that concept of "right" has been discarded; instead there is a different concept of "right" that revolves around adherence to whatever political ideology is favored by those in power.
> more government coercion becomes necessary to suppress anti-social behavior
The problem is that the government can't be trusted to do that job. That's what "freedom" means in the American context. That's why the US Constitution doesn't give the Federal government the power to do it. The fact that our government does it anyway is a bug, not a feature.
Your words amount to saying that freedom is only allowed when it's meaningless because nobody is actually exercising it in any way that matters.
Separately from that, I don't think that the original US constitution - you know, the document that explicitly protected the interests of slave owners, i.e. the vilest kind of filth - could be meaningfully said to be made for "a moral and religious People". Or, if we take that at face value, then that tells us volumes about the value of said morals and said religion, and it's deeply negative.
> Your words amount to saying that freedom is only allowed when it's meaningless because nobody is actually exercising it in any way that matters
It’s interesting that you think freedom is only “meaningful” if people actually engage in the anti-social conduct which they’re free to do. I would say the point of freedom is to eliminate the apparatus of control because you can trust nearly all people to do the right thing without it. That’s the highest form of society.
That slavery existed is not some trump card that negates everything else. It’s also a particularly uneducated comment to level at John Adams of all people. The idea that slavery is intolerable, which you easily hold in your head in 2025 without having worked for it—was bequeathed to you by John Adams and his ilk. In 1789, you would have looked the other way at slavery, just like you look the other way at everything you tolerate today. You probably would’ve even called John Adams a religious nut for believing everyone was created equal in the eyes of god, and demanded scientific proof of that.
Still interested in hearing your answer, and your reasoning behind it, as you didn't engage with the question.
I agree that social media is exacerbating a lot of problems right now, and I don't have a ready answer as to how to fix that (or if that is even possible at all - it wouldn't be the first time a society is radically disrupted and reshaped by new tech). One thing I'm pretty confident about, though, is that heavy-handed regulation will not only not solve that problem, but will create many others. Maybe if we had some kind of widespread supermajority social consensus on this, it might have worked, but we don't.
Thanks for taking the time to answer. In my view, it's easy to legislate away at least 50% of the harm. Not perfect, but much better than 0%. This would be banning recommender systems and infinite scroll feeds for platforms above a certain size ("gatekeepers"). I'm sure there's a number of loopholes, and you might still believe that even this kind of measure would create more than it solves.
On the supermajority bit, in more and more countries there's already a supermajority for banning phones from schools, more and more for banning it for children altogether, and so on. I think that's a clear sign people would actually be in favour of quite a lot of measures to tone things down, like the one I mentioned. Total bans I wouldn't vouch for.
No, society isn't going "down the abyss", whatever that means. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Temperance worked: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibit.... We just chose degeneracy instead of a better society and lower healthcare costs.
Something that couldn't be sustained cannot be said to have worked. The numbers don't matter if the policy doesn't have genuinely broad and non-performative public approval, and Prohibition clearly didn't, given how many people skirted those laws.
That’s like saying “dieting doesn’t work.” It does work, as GLP-1 drugs have proven. People just lacked the willpower to do the healthy thing.
If people lack the willpower to sustain it, then it's not a working solution in a democracy, as simple as that.
Yeah yeah and Mussolini made the trains run on time. We've heard that stuff before.
Wait; are you saying that as a society we should regulate EVERYTHING people spend money on regardless of their method of doing so? Because, as everyone knows, EVERYTHING is addictive in one way or another.
I don't personally agree with gambling, as I just don't understand how someone could possibly enjoy it; but, I sure as fuck believe that every human being can spend their hard-earned money however they see fit.
Churches, retailers, bars, strip clubs, restaurants, etc. All of these allow people to spend their hard-earned money in questionable ways and many folks go WAY overboard w/them. But, my guess is, you don't really want to regulate all of those; just the ones you disagree with.
> I sure as fuck believe that every human being can spend their hard-earned money however they see fit.
Why? Do these people not live in society next to you? Don’t you subsidize their healthcare, the education of their kids, etc?
> But, my guess is, you don't really want to regulate all of those; just the ones you disagree with.
The only one of those I wouldn’t regulate is churches, and that’s because study after study shows that people who participate in organized religion are happier and healthier, and communities with healthy churches do better in social metrics than ones that don’t. E.g. Mormons live 5-10 years longer than white Americans generally: https://www.deseret.com/2010/4/13/20375744/ucla-study-proves.... (I suspect New England Congregationalists have similarly superlative outcomes, but I don’t have the data.) Imagine how much lower our healthcare costs would be if you could take the social magic Mormons do and apply it to the whole country.
Maybe we don’t have to ban coffee. But is the alternative really for society to suffer the negative externalities of every individual choice with no power to regulate those choices?
You know, I think you'll find people being unlike Mormons is better for the taxpayer.
https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Smoking-and-th...
For example, the study above shows that smokers *are actually a net benefit* to the government's bottom line since they pay taxes throughout their lifetime on tobacco and then they die faster (therefore spending less money in the form of healthcare/ aged pensions).
solid points but why do we “regulate” anything? why is prostitution illegal? hard drugs (well best drugs you can get from your Doc if you are rich but say street-drugs)? we should either stop all the nonsense all together and if we are already “OK” with regulating something, gambling should be close to the top of what we regulate
Because people love controlling other people and making excuses as to why.
I like electronic music and I have a Sweetwater credit card with a limit of several thousand dollars. Why should I be allowed to go into debt to buy electronic doodads that I don't need?
So now what if my hobby is betting on sports? I don't see a difference.
To a degree you aren’t! Many countries take a little out of your paycheck every month (and often make your employer do the same) because the government knows you won’t plan for the future properly.
Just because a relatively few can't handle it doesn't mean we should take it away from everyone. How about we just educate or deal with the few in some way?
Because education doesn’t work. If it did there wouldn’t be fat doctors. Everyone knows don’t eat too much and that gambling is bad. A significant fraction of the population needs more intensive management and supervision.
how does them gambling or spending on things have to do with the social safety net and public education program?
their activity funds it - where taxed - and their activity doesn't strain it either
All of those should be banned. It IS OUR BUSINESS how shitty we allow society to be.
Cause they become gamblers and then everyone else has to deal with the problem. Notably, their wifes are responsible for paying half those debts and their kids suffer. Gambler causes hell including financial one for everyone.
Also, because their gambling asses smart wifes divorced get lonely and somehow it becomes contribution to male loneliness epidemic and then we have right wing using them as argument to stop "no fault divorce" and restrict women so they have no choice.
Vices like gambling are not about one person’s money— they create addiction, crime, and family harm that spill over into society at large.
It's kinda bad for society if a bunch of, let's say, middle class men become economically lower-class men while the upper-class owners of such gambling establishments rake it in.
We as a society should get to decide what "freedoms" and what "constraints" make for a better society as a whole, don't we?
Its for the same reason you don't give a license to someone with a DUI.
They are a harm to others. People with gambling addictions don't just hurt themselves - they hurt families, friends, and also the society at large as they come to be dependent on the safety net for substeance.
I think you dont need to make it illegal to keep it in check. A simple rule saying: IF a person spends more than 20% of the overall W2 or 1099 income on gambling, then the gambling house is liable for every 95 cents of every subsequent dollar paid out. We transfer liability for selling alcohol to irresponsible bartenders - casinos should also take the heat for the malaise they inflict.
You'd see very quickly how things get real.
Could you explain more what you mean? Like after 20% of someone's W2, the gambling house pays out 95/100 times? Trying to understand how this regulation works, I'm intrigued by the idea of progressive levels of taxation against industries but I don't know if this is what you're arguing.
When you think about it, ads for those betting sites is basically what's powering what's left of growth in the ad market.
All the downsides of a crack epidemic without having to source any drugs.
wait till people find out that if you are actually great at gambling you will 100% be banned from all of these platforms
This makes no sense at all. You shouldn't be gambling against the platform, you should be gambling against other users. The platform profits equally whether you win or lose, since they take a cut per bet, not per loss
Poker has the same problem. The casino wants people to keep playing for as long as possible, so they can keep raking in ante/commission. People play longest if they win and lose almost equal amounts.
Having a high skill player at a table/bookie breaks this cycle. People start losing faster, and end up playing less. The high skill player continuously drains money from the table, money that would have been bet again in a later bet if it had gone to an average player.
Can't have that.
makes no sense but it is common practice across all platforms
I find this really irritating, it’s not just that sports gambling is legal, it’s also legal for sports gambling companies to limit their customer base to only the people who are bad at it.
It seems totally unbalanced, predatory, like an overt scam.
I would feel a lot better about the law permitting sports gambling if it also required companies to accept bets from all gamblers. It likely would reduce margins and feel a lot riskier to the companies. Like with poker… you can’t sit down at the table hoping to win big without also risking to lose big.
just like politicans LOVE choosing their voters through gerrimandering the legal booms LOVE choosing their customers. pay off some of these politicians and you got a sweet deal…
Two things have reduced my love of watching football in recent years: 1. The number of injuries 2. The constant gambling ads.
I don't understand why we couldn't at least have put restrictions on the advertising like with cigarettes. Following sports just feels slimy now, gambling promotion has permeated every part of the game, broadcast, talk radio, online forums, etc.
The thing I'm curious about is how much would it impact sports podcasting/etc if they clamped down on the gambling advertising. And to be clear I'm not saying that is a reason not to clamp down, just anytime I watch any podcast about sports there is all but guaranteed to be at least one ad for a major sports betting site. Plus how much of the new TV deals for various major league sports in the US was driven by the expected sports gambling ad revenue during the games.
They do provide numbers you can call if you're addicted to gambling on the ads shown on ESPN. But it feels like that doesn't do very much help.
In small print, that most people don't bother to read or don't have time to read.
It's probably included because some states require it and it's easy to just make one commercial. For example, Virginia 11VAC5-70-240.B "Advertising, marketing, and promotional materials shall include a responsible gaming message, which includes, at a minimum, a director-approved problem gambling helpline number and an assistance and prevention message, except as otherwise permitted by the director for certain mediums such as social media messages. "
Virginia is the worst state in the union.
In other rich states, you can do everything with a little bit of money, just pricy. In poor states, they're often theocratic and tightly regulate things but you can still do everything with a little bit of money.
Virginia on the other hand, wealthy various economic drivers and still regulate everything fun out of existence in the least entertaining way possible. Winning the prize of worst state in the union.
Wow, not one mention of the real reason sports betting became legal - the tax revenue.
"50% of all men below 50 have an online sports betting account"
This might be misleading. Many people created accounts to get promotional credit to play with and never played again. A better measure would be how many people are active.
>This might be misleading. Many people created accounts to get promotional credit to play with and never played again. A better measure would be how many people are active.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45371635
This is disgusting and the bane of Australia as well.
There is just too much money to be made in that space. It's sickening.
And with apps on phones, it's 24/7 for some people. They get sucked in and gamed like babies bums in talc powder.
And it started with Twitch now. Kids get addicted watching these rigged players and believe they too can get rich doing it. It's a form of opioid legalised because the government gets the kick back.
There's some intense opposition to betting here. It's odd because in the UK sports betting is pretty much embedded in the culture. In fact i'm pretty sure the only reason horse racing is even a thing is because posh rich people like to bet on it. It's something which even the monarchy implicitly supports. I'm anti gambling personally which is part of why i hate crypto but i don't get why sports betting in particular is so objectionable.
My charitable interpretation is that it's a way for fans to feel more invested in the game. When their team wins they also do.
I don't want betting to be illegal, but any rational analysis of it makes it clear that it is a net drain on the people involved in it, and when that proportion is large enough society as a whole is affected.
The reason why there's so much fixation on sport betting in particular is partly because it is doubly addictive (because emotions tend to run high around sports, team sports especially, so even people who might not have bet in a casino might be betting on a game by their favorite team, for example). And partly because, on top of all the other problems with gambling, it creates perverse incentives for the teams to fix games.
> It's odd because in the UK sports betting is pretty much embedded in the culture.
I remember being astonished walking around London for the first time 15 years ago after getting off the plane from the US and seeing a place called "Ladbrokes" that really would leave lads broke.
> I'm anti gambling personally which is part of why i hate crypto but i don't get why sports betting in particular is so objectionable.
There's a direct onramp from something very popular (sports) into sitting on your couch and losing all your money on your phone. It also makes sports worse for everyone who doesn't gamble on it too.
> I'm anti gambling personally which is part of why i hate crypto but i don't get why sports betting in particular is so objectionable.
Because, like the article said, 97% of users lose money sports betting.
It's like the lottery (which I also didn't like the states legalizing). You're essentially taxing poor / uneducated people but with sports betting that tax is a profit to some random businessmen.
It's just like a drug. Just because some people like it, doesn't mean we should allow people to monetize the addiction to it.
How did crypto become legal?
I think crypto became "legal" more in the sense that it "failed to become illegal".
When it was just a goofy project only taken seriously by distributed systems geeks and Ancap libertarians, there wasn't much to regulate and it could slide under the radar for quite awhile. Then pretty rapidly it sort of became so big that it wasn't trivial to do actually ban it.
Then we got a president who used it as a streamlined bribery platform.
as designed
I was being sarcastic but even the above analysis is leaving out like 80% of the reason why crypto is allowed to exist
This and also Roblox
The problem is the intersection of two things that have questionable social merit and you could easily see a society making illegal.
One of them is gambling.
The other is modern marketing.
Combined, they represent a substantial harm.
With nearly all of our social agency - which in our society means money - already in the possession of a tiny fraction of the country, with the bottom half of the country having approximately zero savings and spending at least as much as they have income? Any revenue gleaned from their dysfunctional attitude becomes a collective hardship, money that needs to be replaced by some form of subsidy to maintain our quality of life and avoid spillover problems like property crime.
The third thing is smart phones and being able to gamble 24/7 anywhere.
then why US people cant vote a politician that would bring a betterment for their country??? like every other country??
we literally see an anti government protest around the world in past few month from UK to Nepal to Australia
because they got divided between left vs right political spectrum that ignore massive issue that is happening right now
if there is a protest from other country, it labelled as anti government protest but if there are protest on US, it called an left/right protest
Out of the two I'd be even more inclined to ban marketing because without marketing, betting is vastly unattractive, you just see yourself and all your friends lose every time you try. It's the marketing that spins the lies that result in addiction.
innumeracy is widespread. Sad but true. A fool and his $ are soon parted.
But you know what? The bulk of the players are not degenerate gamblers. Most even know the odds are against them.
Yet they play anyway. Why? They LIKE to play. They enjoy the games. They enjoy the environment. They’re not all there trying to get money for rent on their trailer or for more cigarettes.
Hanging out at a Vegas sportbook on Super Bowl Sunday is fun. Going to a track, nice day in the sun, couple bucks on some ponies — it’s fun. Spend some time at a crowded, loud, hot crap table. It’s fun, it’s exciting.
Most folks have their head on their shoulders. Most folks have a budget.
Yes, it’s predatory. History and the media is filled with stories about the dark side of it. I, as a rule, don’t support it. If it shows up on a ballot, I vote it down. I wish the local tribes were renowned for their light industry and engineering firms instead of gaming.
But to characterize anyone who enjoys the play as a fool is painting with a very broad brush.
I wonder if the author has heard about Polymarket ...
treat it like alcohol and cigarettes, tax the hell out of it
unlike youtube shorts, the effect on society is immediately measurable
both are iq tests
Corruption. That's how.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxvfy4qQRog John Oliver did a good episode on it
Ted Olson: who America listens to. Olson is a prominent constitutional lawyer who argued the case to repeal PASPA in the District Courts and Supreme Court. He was central to cases involving legalizing gay marriage, upholding the second amendment, and the landmark campaign financing ruling in Citizens United.
If we assume that these are all cases that he was on the winning side of, then good on him for the first one, but dude sure has a lot to answer for with the other ones and the case under discussion in this article.
It all comes down to: there was a ton of money to be made.
But wasn't that also true in 1979 when the ban was first put in place? Obviously, yes, money is the main force driving this country toward sports betting, but I argue that there used to be a counteracting force called morals, and the loss of that counter-force is what led us to where we are now.
Well, in 1979 the people who had the money were the existing casinos, operating in the 4 states that had legal sports betting. This was a way to close the rest of the market, so they could continue to have a monopoly on gambling and wouldn't have to compete with other states.
Then FanDuel and DraftKings arrived with a lot of investor capital, and had the money and power to push through the legalization.
It was never morals that kept gambling from being legalized elsewhere, it was protectionism.
I don't gamble but it is batshit insane how it is regulated. Deceptive and fraudulent advertising I get that. but it is a most natural right for a person to be an idiot and ruin themselves by gambling away all their money. Governments have no right or authority to stop us from being idiots if we want to be idiots.
This isn't even about democracy and liberties. Even monarchies and communist regimes have no right. First, it is tax revenue, second it does not harm or directly affect anyone other than the gambler in a negative way, third anti-gambling laws incentivize and enable criminal enterprises. Secret betting rings are usually operated by organized crime.
"You might be homeless or dependent on welfare if you lose all your money"... ok but society helping homeless and impoverished people does not give it the right to police everyone else. Don't help those people if you think they're gambling addicts or don't help them at all. Needed help that comes with sacrificing freedoms is slavery.
"People gamble away their family's money"... ok, then their family sounds like it has a problem that doesn't need governmental meddling. How about we regulate people that aren't ambitious enough to support their family as well. Money left on the table is money lost after all.
Even if less gambling is better for society as a whole, it still does not give society the right to infringe on individuals' ability to be idiots. It is better if people get married for example, that's why tax breaks for that exist (which i disagree with) but society doesn't go around regulating unmarried people or people who refuse to have children (much more harm to society that way than any gambling outbreak could ever cause!).
> Governments have no right or authority to stop us from being idiots if we want to be idiots.
This sounds fine in theory but it ignores the fact that gambling today isn’t just about individuals making free choices in a vacuum. There’s an active, systemic push to get people hooked. Millions (billions?) are spent on ads, algorithms, and dark patterns designed to keep people hooked. That's not freedom - that's exploitation.
With modern tech like gambling apps on your phone, 24/7 internet access, social media tie-ins the problem multiplies. You don't have to go to a casino when you have one in your pocket. The same tricks that make people lose hours on TikTok are being weaponized to make them lose their money.
Freedom matters. But if the entire system is engineered to trap people in endless dopamine hits, then society has to step in. Not to ban choice, but to create a framework that tilts people away from predatory addiction loops and toward things that actually build resilience and meaning. Otherwise “freedom” just becomes another word for “you’re on your own while other people drain you dry.”
This article https://www.rosloto.net/en/how-vs-and-big-tech-investments-a... is very much on point — it shows how VC funds and global tech giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple are directly or indirectly investing in the online casino market
Those same traps and dark patterns you mentioned are used well beyond gambling. those things themselves should be regulated, not gambling. You're arguing against something unrelated to the topic here. It's fine to trap and addict people into gambling, and then punish them for getting addicted and trapped? how does that make sense? let people gamble if they want, but ban malicious and hostile practices of capitalism. Whether it is gambling,shopping addiction, social media addiction, porn or political influence campaigns, the practice and trappings are the same and should be heavily regulated. No argument there.
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What do you think should governments get involved with?
I think it is the government's responsibility to protect those who can't defend themselves. Women beat by men. Employees being abused by their bosses. People getting robbed or conned.
I happen to be a somewhat big guy, at least compared to the average around where I live. Partially as a result of this I have never been mugged in my life. But that doesn't mean that I think that when someone gets mugged they don't need "government meddling". I know that other people are not like me. I don't call them "wimps" and say that "it's their right to be small" or that "they should have hit the gym more often".
Mental health issues are a bitch. Compulsive behavior issues suck. You sound like someone who doesn't have them. That's great! But hopefully you can understand that other people can have them. Calling them "idiots" is just a trick your brain does so that it can put a label on a problem so you don't have to think about it more deeply. I invite you to spend the 2 calories that it takes to look behind that label.
Hopefully you will find that gambling companies are naturally be incentivized to predate on people with mental health issues, who are a vulnerable group.
And that is why gambling needs to be heavily regulated, if not banned outright.
Can you please be any more dismissive and condescending?
First, I chose "idiots" carefully, if a person has a pre-existing condition or some other weakness, "idiot" excludes them as you've so obviously noted and they should be protected. However, if they chose to enter a life of addiction, fully being informed that even gambling once will addict them, they fall under the "idiot" category, although there are better terms to use and I'm being lazy with my wording there.
Your rant about the government protecting people and you not getting mugged has nothing to do with what I'm saying,that's false equivalency.
I have every right to enter a life of addiction and ruin myself, as do you. i have every right to get addicted and live a miserable and short life. it isn't a great idea, but it is none of your business either.
As I stated very clearly, banning and regulating harmful and deceptive practices by gambling companies is something I support fully. What insane is you thinking you have a right to prevent me from doing something that doesn't affect you in the least because you want to force yourself to being everyone's caretaker. There should be a term for this sickness, perhaps "hostile and performative empathy"?
Help those who can't help themselves and ask for help! You don't get to decide who can't help themselves unless they can't make decisions or communicate on their own. Sane adults can speak up for themselves and tell you if they need help. And your idea of help? what is it? throwing people in prison? that's what you're advocating, you understand why that's insane right? Short of murdering a person, that is the worst thing you can do to them, do you get that? When you say "banning" it must be enforced somehow. Or perhaps you think it will be a small fine, even if that was the case, what happens when gamblers who lost all their money can't pay a fine, other than imprisonment? Loan sharks to pay your fines, and a life of crime to pay the loansharks? Either way, it ends up in people being forced to participate in worse and worse crime and thus causing actual harm to others because of your unending empathy.
I return your invitation to spend a little more than 2 calories and think about what we're discussing here. Your nanny state beating people until they die for their own good.
> "idiot" excludes them as you've so obviously noted and they should be protected
Ok. Glad that we have some common ground there, then. If not by regulating gambling companies, how do you propose these people should be protected?
I think having some data would help. Here's my first hit from a google the first hit I got:
https://worldmetrics.org/online-gambling-addiction-statistic...
From there, I highlight 2:
- 2% of global population suffers from gambling disorder
- Approximately 25% of online gamblers are classified as problem gamblers based on clinical screening tools
> You not getting mugged has nothing to do with what I'm saying,that's false equivalency.
Why, exactly?
> I have every right to enter a life of addiction and ruin myself, as do you.
Yeah here is the thing. You don't know if I have a mental health disorder. Assuming that I do, gambling companies will use any trick they can to hook me into giving them all my money.
> A right to prevent me from doing something that doesn't affect you
I agree the government doesn't need to "prevent you from anything". What I'm saying is that I want them to prevent gambling companies from doing things to me - a hypothetical gambling addict.
I, as a potential person with compulsive behavior, will have gambling companies showing me ads on the street. Tagging me up and showing me adds in Youtube or any other website that uses ads. Offering customized "free samples" to entice me. I don't want them doing that to me and I can't make them not do that to me - only the government can.
So going back to my first question, which you didn't answer - what do you think the government should get involved with?
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I don't have problems restricting and regulating gambling companies and their practices. I do have a problem with the government preventing or banning gambling companies which is effectively preventing individuals from gambling in groups. The government should absolutely do something about malicious and hostile business practices, but not on just gambling but every other business as well. If you have food addiction, how should mcdonalds filter you out? Plenty of diabetics and heart-attack risks out there thanks to that, and I hope you don't think that's less of a problem. Don't pick and choose vices.
If we agree on that last point and you agree that gambling companies should exist and sane people who are well informed have the right to gamble at those places, then we agree on all important points.
Glad that we see some common ground. I think we agree on the essentials.
> If you have food addiction, how should mcdonalds filter you out?
Debatable. Let's go back to this statistic:
- Approximately 25% of online gamblers are classified as problem gamblers based on clinical screening tools
That is not insignificant. I don't know how it is at McDonalds, but I doubt 25% of their customers are food addicts. What is a tolerable range? We do have rules and restrictions for alcoholic drinks and tobacco.
Uh. Money?
can't fell sorry for US citizens when their government exist but didn't serve their own people
US gov exist to serve corporate, and their people let them do it
A bunch of mobbed-up northeastern politicians funded by illegal offshore betting concerns hammered the system for 20 years until it broke? Basically the same way as every financial scam became legal, I think.