I don't really have much problem with gambling, but I am well aware of how difficult it is to cut back on video games when they are just a click or tap away. There is a fine balance between banning all vices and having an everything goes policy regardless of the toll on society. Leave sports betting to casinos and off of phones to help recovering addicts.
The rising human cost of sports betting
301–310 of 337 posts
Re: The rising human cost of sports betting
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are a business open to the public, you can't discriminate based on gambling skill the same way you can't discriminate against other types of customers.
Gambling skill isnt a protected class
This was a reply to the parent comment about how such a law would work, not what the status quo is.
And Atlantic City casinos can’t legally kick out card counters
Re: The rising human cost of sports betting
#303Promotion of gambling should be likened to promotion of cigarettes. It should be illegal to advertise gambling, but I don't think it should be outlawed to gamble. People should be able to choose how they live their lives, but we should do all that we can to prevent mass manipulation through adverts in industries that are known to be harmful. I also think that alcohol and e-cig advertising should be outlawed as well.
Why stop at vices? At this point, given how much it destroys everything it touches, I'm almost willing to back outlawing advertising in general.
I agree, though clearly some forms of advertising is fairly natural and nearly impossible to eliminate completely. Basic business signage is advertising, but it provides reasonable value at low cost to society (assuming the signage is reasonable, not giant McDonalds arches). The most harmful advertising seems to be third party advertising where one party is paid to show advertising to someone else.
Re: The rising human cost of sports betting
#304People smoke cigarettes, they drink alcohol, they bet. All are losing propositions in multiple ways. There is no scenario where you can stop any of it. You can make it harder and more costly but they will do it anyway. Some gamblers have discovered the stock market (especially call options) as a way to bet. The nice thing about that is your downside can be limited and nobody is going to "shut you down" like a casino if you win too much. I'm not a big casino gambler but I know how to play blackjack (not counting) and have won enough to be shadowed and proofed every 5 minutes in a casino to bother me when I was young. They send a clear message - your loses are unlimited but your gains are capped!
Re: The rising human cost of sports betting
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every movie, series or other thing where people grab the bottle to handle their heartache, happiness or socializing is an advertisement that you should drink. It's going to need a huge transformation in society to change those advertising channels. Just like the movie cig industry was a long term process.
So you’re saying artists should be regulated on their expression of the human condition? Are people so dumb that they see a movie and think “oh I should drink to handle stress”? Or is it because it works short term?
Censorship is a thing in every society.
Re: The rising human cost of sports betting
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly what the exchanges are e.g. Betfair. More popular in UK/Europe though.
Oh, then I’m not sure how the parents points (about “betting against the house”) are relevant, because sports betting (unlike casino games) doesn’t do that.
When sports betting, unless using a betting exchange such as Betfair mentioned above, or a totaliser agency, you'll likely use a bookmaker. The bookmaker is effectively the house. The bookmaker will set a market (make book) of prices on a certain event. You can choose to take the price offered and make a bet, or not. Essentially the bookmaker is pitting their skills and knowledge against yours.
The bookmaker will want all prices offered on the event to be in excess of 100%. The over round is where the bookmaker makes their profit. As an example, in a horse race, the percentage probabilities of all odds offered might add up to a total of 115%. That 15% is the bookmaker's margin.
Now, of course, the bookmaker doesn't necessarily profit in every race, but they should be trying to balance their book before the off, to insure that whatever the result they profit. They can do this by laying off liabilities with another bookmaker, shortening the odds on some runners, or just closing the book.
As a bettor, one should be trying to not just find the winner of races, but also prices which are wrong. If you assess the true odds of an event happening (let's say a horse winning) are better than the prices offered by the bookmaker, then it should be profitable to bet those prices in the long term. For example, if you think a horse has a 25% chance of winning the race, but the bookmaker is offering a price of 6/1 (7.0 or roughly 14%), then you have the odds in your favour and should make decent margin over time.
Re: The rising human cost of sports betting
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.theringer.com/2019/6/5/18644504/sports-betting-b... This is a long read, but is really insightful on how the industry really works. If you're a consistently winning bettor, you're going to get blocked pretty quickly when you're betting against the house. Why would a casino want to play a game where they don't have odds in their favor when they can just ban the sharps and feast on the casuals? With parimut…
Sports betting isn't exactly being against the house. In sports betting the house takes bets on both sides and then charges a percentage. Oh wait, you seem to understand this. The op was talking about making sports bets but being against the house.
I worked as a trader for a UK based bookmaker and in reality it wasn't like that. You were betting against the house and it was very rare for us to make money on any outcome.
Re: The rising human cost of sports betting
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, few friends gone through the same thing. Seems like a coder-finding-betting rite of passage, 'oh right i can automate this process and earn whilst I sleep!' Nope, bookies only want to keep profitable customers, or provide some other upside to them. In the context of bookies they have limited other ways to make money but sometimes their are weird edges that pop-up, like legislated restrictions. In Australia those…
Do the people that run the tote make a loss? I thought they kept 10%-15% of the pool regardless.
Nah they generally make a loss on just the pool seeding bets (made by the nominated lucky few) and make it up from the rest. Generally the seeding bets end up as a small percentage of the overall pool.
Re: The rising human cost of sports betting
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.theringer.com/2019/6/5/18644504/sports-betting-b... This is a long read, but is really insightful on how the industry really works. If you're a consistently winning bettor, you're going to get blocked pretty quickly when you're betting against the house. Why would a casino want to play a game where they don't have odds in their favor when they can just ban the sharps and feast on the casuals? With parimut…
Why can’t they switch to a user driven system where they don’t place bets at all but just receive bid/asks from users, like the prediction markets do? Then they don’t have to worry about bettors being better predictors than they are and can just take a cut of the flow.
Some bookmakers (Pinnacle, Sbobet, ibcbet etc.) do just that and their odds are controlled by the amount of money being bet on either side of the handicap, but it's a completely different model and most bookmakers don't have the liquidity to do this.
Re: The rising human cost of sports betting
#310I can confirm that sports betting is also slowly eating away at what is left of the game of football (soccer, for US HN-ers) over here in Europe. We’ve got the English Premier League and the Champions League that are (maybe) still free of this cancer, as in (maybe) their results and general play are as close to 100%-fair as one can get, but outside of that it’s the Wild West. The second leagues in most of Central and…
Betting on footie seems like a long term loser. The bookmakers cut guarantees you will lose over the long run.
Tony Bloom would disagree! [1]
[1] https://www.legalsportsbetting.com/famous-sports-bettors/ton...