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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

#321

Post by rdtwo »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #285
rdtwo wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With lots of money on the line you're probably not going to trust strangers with this, and the corporate bookmakers aggressively search for "duplicate" accounts (might vary in different jurisdictions but in Australia at least you need to provide full name, date of birth, address and government issued ID to play and withdraw - you can't fake that and you'll run out of trusted family members before too long).

Right you have to give intermediates a cut and yes they require social security numbers so hard to clone accounts but in age of discord proxy betters are readily available

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#322

Post by UncleMeat »

mod wrote: post #293
UncleMeat wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think that our society is sleeping on the effects advertising has on people and we should take a really hard look at how we permit corporations to attempt to change people's behaviors, in particular for products that are known to contribute seriously to massive society-wide problems like obesity.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#323

Post by vmception »

uwuuwuuwu wrote: post #319
vmception wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh! You might like the Web3 ecosystem! In the Web3 ecosystem (in this context that means Ethereum and Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible, popularized by a library called web3.js), people fork the current state of the blockchain to localhost, this allows you to test your transaction with many iterations to see if it can push the chain/contract to a subsequent valid state, if successful your code switches back to the…

This won't work as the inefficency you found will be found & exploited by generalized frontrunners when you submit it to the mempool (or any transaction that unconditionally generates profit with the current chain state), running these strats now requires cooperating with/bribing miners (as they get to choose which frontrunner won this block).

Then bribe the miners

Caring about that reality is below my line

But with bribery you can skip the mempool these days

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#324

Post by Spivak »

robotresearcher wrote: post #294
Spivak wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ordering a pizza I otherwise wouldn't have with the money would not be my current life. It's a question of degrees. If I win a 100M lottery and do literally nothing except hand it over to my financial advisor to invest at a modest 4% return and draw a generous 500k salary from that I would still be making 3.5 million compounded compounded per year.

This is more or less how retirement works so it's a pretty well-trodden path.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#325

Post by thebean11 »

Jensson wrote: post #227
thebean11 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of countries without reserve currencies have similar or higher rates of drug use..

Are you sure? To me it seems like USA has the highest rate of drug abuse and the higher rate of drug deaths and drug abuse disorders in the world. It is possible more people use drugs in other countries, but in that case they use it more responsibly, or their overdose deaths aren't properly registered, either way there is no evidence that other countries have a bigger drug problem than USA. https://ourworldindata.org…

Look at the map in that link you posted, Greenland, Canada, Russia etc are all high. It's a long page, what exactly are you referring to to disagree with me?

That data probably isn't super relevant to this argument though, since it includes alcohol. I don't think alcohol is more easily available in the US than those other countries because of the USD.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#326

Post by brandonmenc »

vmception wrote: post #320
brandonmenc wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you write a smart contract that knows the outcome of a game? Presumably this means reading the results from somewhere. What happens if the wrong outcome is published and then corrected later? > which is pretty boring after 5 figures Why? What is the limitation? Also, is that five figures of participants, wagers, or payout? Does that five figure limitation ever change? A five figure limitation on payout dollars…

The smart contract gets its state updated by trusted external APIs, in that ecosystem they are called oracles. So they would use the same one they use in their web2 system, just write the results onchain instead of just in their database or just on a tv. And yes the low side of the market is one of the reasons why people start trading in capital markets, other ways to make money with bets are too limiting even if you…

Again, what happens if the oracle gets it wrong?

The problem I have with this scenario re: sports betting is that it decouples the trust of scoring games and paying out bets - which is not a "feature" for bettors.

If I'm using a reputable, "centralized" sports book, they have a reputation at stake. They have more of an incentive to accurately score games than a third party oracle. If they pay out in error, they are likely legally required to eat the loss and pay the true winners.

None of that is enhanced by web3 if sports betting is legal and regulated.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#327

Post by HWR_14 »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #313
HWR_14 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your gut is wrong. Lottery revenues track with tax breaks in most states.

Care to back up your assertion with a citation from a non-idealogue source? PA just had a bridge fall down because the same pattern of funds redirection I described prevented their "fix the roads" gas tax hike from doing more than treading water. The pattern I described is very, very common. My own state had the same problem using cigarette taxes to fund the schools.

Wyoming used that money for a property tax repeal, and NC used that money to get rid of the educational component of corporate taxes. I don't have a good source, sorry.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#328

Post by sidewndr46 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #265
sidewndr46 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this how every major betting operation works? I'm not counting lotteries because although you could argue that you are "betting" on some numbers anyone with a 6th grade education that there is no difference in expected outcomes if you choose different numbers. Why would bookmakers ever take bets from someone they don't expect to make money from?

> Why would bookmakers ever take bets from someone they don't expect to make money from? Well, bookmakers like to minimize their risk. So, suppose Person X is going to bet on team A, but most people have already bet on team B. The bookmaker thinks team A is far more likely to win, but he still takes the bet. Then he goes from being a gambler to having a balanced book and making a known profit regardless of who wins.

But if my goal is to minimize risk and I consistently see a single person making winning bets, why would I take that bet? It's just bad business.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#329

Post by jeffreyrogers »

akiselev wrote: post #261
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singapore wasn't always rich, but it's always had harsh laws with regards to drugs.

"Always" as in 1972 - after nearly a century of suffering the aftereffects of the opium wars. The Singapore Economic Development board predates the harshest drug laws by a decade and when the law came into effect, Singapore was already well into its economic miracle.

Singapore has only been independent since 1959. The date you gave is when the Misuse of Drugs Act was introduced. They still had harsh punishments prior to that through the legal system. Like I said earlier in the thread, whether the benefits are worth the costs is a political question, but prohibition appears to work in Singapore. By the way, since you brought up the Opium Wars, Mao also basically eliminated the production and use of opium by using harsh repressive measures as well. It's why most poppy production now takes place in the Golden Triangle. Just prior to 2001 the Taliban also basically eliminated poppy production in Afghanistan, but the US invasion led to the reversal of that.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#330

Post by AtlasBarfed »

nikcub wrote: post #130
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…

If anybody is further interested in this, a recent YouTube video by Spencer Cornelia went behind the scenes of a similar operation that is still running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N05vGcw_tI They are betting the spread between different books and most of their operation involves keeping accounts live and with placement capacity

Arbitrage of the spread is definitely a pro bettor's goto. You don't need to care about or analyze the game at all.

Groups of them often would try to manipulate the spreads with individual bets and then go big on the arbitrage.

I remember an article where some guy thought he was getting an inside view of a pro sports bettor. I remember he sent him on a bunch of casinos to bet specific games. He didn't realize the bettor was using his budget for the story and him as a gofer to setup the arbitrage.

All the celebrity sports bettors on sports TV can't be trusted. They'll either give "mainstream" views, or are trying to manipulate the spreads in their favor. You really think they have critical insight into Southwest Regional Tech State vs University of Appalachian A&M&T women's basketball?

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