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The rising human cost of sports betting

nytimes.com

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Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#291

Post by bruce511 »

renlo wrote: post #106
slap_shot wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly my point. I'm not against outlawing casinos (i think you should be able to do pretty much whatever the eff you want with your body and money). BUT if we are going to allow them, should we allow them to only let people play when they lose? The decision to let them exist is as arbitrary as the decision to allow them to only play when they when.

Found it amusing reading this thread, thinking of gambling companies paying their lawyers to argue that gambling is "skilled based". Then, after gambling is legalized, they'd ban all of the skilled players so we'd go back to "luck based" gambling that their lawyers just argued was skilled based.

You don't go back to luck based, you stay skilled based, but the only skilled player in the room is the house.

Baseball is a game of skill. So assume the Yankees could ban every skilled player who beat them. They make bank beating little-league rookies. It makes sense to keep the competition at that skill level.

Obviously we're referring to games like Blackjack here, not roulette, which are not purely random.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#292

Post by Manuel_D »

rdtwo wrote: post #269
slap_shot wrote: post #46

I'm pretty Laissez-Faire about things, but a recent interaction with gambling is making me reconsider: My friend got a lot of free credits from the major sports books and wrote some code that he felt could generate a profit. We all threw in a little bit of money and let the program do what it does. Within a month we started doing 1k a day in profit on 3k wagered. Right as we approached 30k in profit, every major book…

I don’t get it you guys are smart enough to do this but not smart enough to bypass a simple ban? If your system is that good it should be simple to recruit proxy betters in mass to use their accounts to beat the system. Like there are whole discord communities of resellers that do that and sell their tools for really good money

It's hard to bypass a ban when you have to supply your banking information. Not to mention, going through intermediaries of proxy betters likely starts to venture into the realm of things that can land you in court.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#293

Post by mod »

UncleMeat wrote: post #271
Raidion wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly agree with you, but am worried about the precedent it would set. If you start banning stuff because of addiction, does it apply to things like soda or fast food? Would it apply to things like baseball cards or other collectables? This is a really tricky problem, as there is clear evidence that these things hurt society as a whole, but it's hard to draw the line who is making deliberate choices about their…

I actually think it should be illegal to advertise soda.

Do you really think it should be illegal?

Or do you just think that making it illegal would probably show some benefit to the average person's health?

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#294

Post by robotresearcher »

Spivak wrote: post #230
lapetitejort wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having read horror stories of people winning the lottery, I can't even daydream about being rich. I would much rather be an average wage-earner than have my life be destroyed by money.

Can't you just do literally nothing with the money? I think my "being rich" dream is just having my current life but instead of working living off the interest.

Not working would not be your current life.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#295

Post by gostsamo »

vkou wrote: post #196
gostsamo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most likely this is betting arbitrage. check the odds on different bookmakers and try to find an opportunity where you can bet on both sides and win regardless.

Shouldn't the bid-ask spread eat all of that profit, and more?

No, you don't do it on random. Let's say you are looking at basketball game X vs. Y.

Bookmaker A is giving odds X win 2.5 and Y win 1.33

Bookmaker B is giving odds X win 1.55 and Y win 2.10

What you do is bet on X in A and on Y in B. Let's say that you invest $2000 ($1000 in each bookie). If X wins, you loose $1000 on Y, but you win $2500 from X. Total profit = $500. If Y wins, you loose $1000 on X, but you win $2100 on Y with net profit of $100.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#296

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

babypuncher wrote: post #79
shipman05 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my position for a while on so called "vices". Prohibition is ineffective and often does more harm than good, but allowing companies to advertise these products to young people and those who are susceptible to abuse is a net negative for society. Worst of all are government run lotteries. A state run lottery may be preferable to one run by organized crime, but running millions of dollars worth of ads wit…

State lotteries are a means to shift tax burden from the wealthy to the poor. Every time one is implemented to "support education", it is always followed by a tax break for the upper class, resulting in a net 0 increase in school budgets.

I can't speak for all of this, but my wife is a teacher and in the last decade she has seen pretty much no correlation between ballot initiatives with claims about giving schools money and meaningful improvements on campus. Usually nothing changes. Other times the money has so many strings attached that whatever changes didn't need to change, and is adjacent to something that obviously did.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#297

Post by slaymaker1907 »

willis936 wrote: post #288
User23 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most strip casinos don't care at all about individual counters. They will cool you though if they see you wonging or other evidence of team play. But an individual? They really don't care. I've counted playing two hands and swinging my bets by a factor of 8 at the Bellagio. I might has well have been wearing a hat that said "Make Counting Great Again" I was so obvious. And the pit boss only asked if I'd like somethin…

I've sat at $5 tables where an old dude was openly discussing the count with the dealer. I bet when he bet and made out okay. Counting theory is really simple stuff. Everyone does it subconsciously. Almost everyone can learn the concept of sampling without substitution. Banning such basic math seems ridiculous, but highlights that the average player is not there to win. Gambling institutions are sad places.

I think almost any card game is going to have some element of card counting unless card counting is completely impossible. It's like trying to play poker while ignoring the psychological elements of the game.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#298

Post by wolverine876 »

asdff wrote: post #249
wolverine876 wrote: post #102

An interesting question (to me) is how legalization of gambling happened politically? For a long time, there was a strong political consenses against it. Where is the religious right, for example?

It happened simply because the rich wanted to gamble. Vegas was built into what we knew it because organized illegal gambling was pushed from the city of LA to the unincorporated sunset strip in what is currently west hollywood, and then out of california entirely. The very people that were prosecuted for gambling in LA found politicians in Nevada who had water and electricity from the hoover dam, but no people or in…

I meant, why has gambling recently become legal in much of the country, not why did it become legal in Las Vegas.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#299

Post by slaymaker1907 »

selimthegrim wrote: post #202
tonystubblebine wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent some time in Montana and was shocked to see how many businesses have "casinos" attached to them. I never got to look inside but I think these are basically a small room with a few slot machines. They were everywhere. For example, I ate at a chinese restaurant and there was a side room advertising poker and keno. I came away feeling like there was a web that would catch every single person in the state who had…

Oregon and Louisiana too

I was just visiting Louisiana this weekend and it was insane to me that they have so many ads (and news piece advertising) for online sports betting on broadcast television.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#300

Post by wolverine876 »

noxvilleza wrote: post #240
wolverine876 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you know of. How does anyone know? Edits: Imagine the NFL learns that yesterday's NFC Championship game was fixed. What would they do? Make it public and destroy their entire enterprise? My guess is that many would hide it if they could, and the people involved certainly wouldn't want to talk about it. And imagine if they learn about it in 6 months, long after the Super Bowl. Just in terms of on-field results, h…

One of the best ways of knowing is by analyzing a large number of bets made punters from multiple sports books - it's easier to spot irregular betting patterns in this regard.

Interesting and it seems powerful, but there is plenty of fraud in the securities markets and they are much higher stakes and more closely regulated than gambling.
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