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Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

bloomberg.com

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Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#41

Post by orwin »

blitzar wrote: post #38
orwin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, advantage betting is pretty much only against the houses, not against other players. While people who know the sport and manage to bet misplaced lines can be winning over a season, advantage betting is the only way to reliantly have a positive EV. Casinos and now sport betting apps try to prevent professionals to use this, but with the number of shit you can now bet on, and since you don't have to tie an account…

Outside of the US where gambling on sports has been the norm for decades, the bookies tend to run square books and just earn spread + commissions. To the point where pvp exchanges have been the dominant destination for betting for 20 years or so. These article (and others like it recently) just make me think US sports betting operations are operating on antiquated business model.

Yes, this is only because american sports give "line bet" and "prop bets", that anybody can exploit if two apps aren't coordinated. You can do line arbitrage (middling is the easiest, but professionals use props with weird maths and specific knowledge to make a living).

If you only offer to bet on the money line, it makes it way harder for professional gamblers.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#42

Post by gcanyon »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #36
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll. The fact that the pros are simulating problem players because then the betting apps give you more leeway, e.g. by "send[ing] you bonus money" and raising your limits, paints the picture quite effectively in my book. > Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll To what degree is this true? Sure, a…

The aqusition costs are extremly high for online betting and online casinos. If you pay 1000 usd to aquire one customer it is not profitable if they gamble 50 usd / year.

Then online casinos are a bad business and shouldn't exist, just like breweries shouldn't exist if they can't break even selling to casual drinkers and need alcoholics to make a profit, and gun manufacturers shouldn't exist if they can't break even selling to one-or-two-gun owners and need wannabe-commandos and survivalist cosplayers to make a profit.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#43

Post by blitzar »

orwin wrote: post #41
blitzar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of the US where gambling on sports has been the norm for decades, the bookies tend to run square books and just earn spread + commissions. To the point where pvp exchanges have been the dominant destination for betting for 20 years or so. These article (and others like it recently) just make me think US sports betting operations are operating on antiquated business model.

Yes, this is only because american sports give "line bet" and "prop bets", that anybody can exploit if two apps aren't coordinated. You can do line arbitrage (middling is the easiest, but professionals use props with weird maths and specific knowledge to make a living). If you only offer to bet on the money line, it makes it way harder for professional gamblers.

A football game in the UK for example has ~60 markets on exchange for a single game with bets on everything from the result, handicaped result (multiple lines), the number of goals, the times of the goals, scorers of goals, half-time results, yellow cards, red cards, number of corners, number of shots at goal, time of first thrown in etc.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#45

Post by dgellow »

blitzar wrote: post #37
bettringf wrote: post #9

I worked at a quant sports betting trading company, on occasion it would send the employees to place annonymous few grand bets at physical shops because it's such a problem getting people to continue accepting your bets if you are any good. And found out that the more you bet, the more percentage commission you pay to exchanges like Betfair, which is quite contraintuitive - commission goes up with volume, not down. I…

My betfair commission was heavily discounted back in the day, but that was only on volumes of ~£50,000 a day, and a fair bit more on weekends. Nevertheless their commissions were outrageously high, but the scale of the liquidity they had available was amazing.

50k a day, was that money you were betting? Or were you managing a betting service and betfair was the underlying exchange? I know very little about that world

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#46

Post by Yeul »

phs318u wrote: post #40
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still cake! The implied assertion is gambling enterprises need problem gamblers. That if you restrict their ability to prey on problem gamblers, nobody gets to casually gamble. I know nothing about gambling. But I know a lot about market making and the math of being a bookie. And basaed on that, I don't think the claim is true.

Well, I don’t know much about market making but as a member of Gamblers Anonymous since 1998 I’ve seen just about every kind of devastation caused by every kind of gambling. In the last few years I’ve seen a significant increase in the number of very young men coming to us. Here in Australia, the gambling industry absolutely is laser focused on targeting young men using every psychological trick in the book, includin…

It will just be like meth and painkillers: everyone pretends there isn't a problem for years until it gets so bad that the government has to step in.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#47

Post by DrScientist »

dustincoates wrote: post #27
jfoutz wrote: post #17

The article appears to break gamblers into 3 groups. 1) casual players 2) problem players 3) professional gamblers. so basically casual players gamble something like 50 bucks a year. Problem gamblers get money however they can (and although it's unstated and I have no evidence, I think this is where the actual money comes from). And finally, people that can snipe the mispriced bets, and make a lot of money. Feels sor…

> and although it's unstated and I have no evidence, I think this is where the actual money comes from The article links to a WSJ article that says this group of problem players provides more than 50% of revenue to the betting companies despite being just 3% of all bettors. > Of the more than 700,000 people in the SMU panel, fewer than 5% withdrew more from their betting apps than they deposited... The next 80% of be…

> fewer than 5% withdrew more from their betting apps than they deposited... The next 80% of bettors made up for those operators’ losses. And the 3% of bettors who lost the most accounted for almost half of net revenue

That's a deliberately misleading representation - they offset the 80 against losses rather then the 3%. In terms of net revenue the 3% are less than half net revenue - not more.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#48

Post by [deleted] »

DrScientist wrote: post #47
dustincoates wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and although it's unstated and I have no evidence, I think this is where the actual money comes from The article links to a WSJ article that says this group of problem players provides more than 50% of revenue to the betting companies despite being just 3% of all bettors. > Of the more than 700,000 people in the SMU panel, fewer than 5% withdrew more from their betting apps than they deposited... The next 80% of be…

> fewer than 5% withdrew more from their betting apps than they deposited... The next 80% of bettors made up for those operators’ losses. And the 3% of bettors who lost the most accounted for almost half of net revenue That's a deliberately misleading representation - they offset the 80 against losses rather then the 3%. In terms of net revenue the 3% are less than half net revenue - not more.

[deleted]

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#49

Post by llamaimperative »

snapcaster wrote: post #44

These apps should be banned. Gambling is a social ill with such a limited upside and so much harm it can't really be justified

Agreed -- I will continue to shout it from every perch I can: politicians who are actively working to proliferate these apps should be (at least journalistically) investigated. I would bet on this being a well-above-random signal of either a personal gambling addiction or corruption.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#50

Post by hermannj314 »

gcanyon wrote: post #42
victorbjorklund wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The aqusition costs are extremly high for online betting and online casinos. If you pay 1000 usd to aquire one customer it is not profitable if they gamble 50 usd / year.

Then online casinos are a bad business and shouldn't exist, just like breweries shouldn't exist if they can't break even selling to casual drinkers and need alcoholics to make a profit, and gun manufacturers shouldn't exist if they can't break even selling to one-or-two-gun owners and need wannabe-commandos and survivalist cosplayers to make a profit.

I worked at a biotechnology company, we had thousands of clients but five of them were 80% of our revenue. In your world, should that business not exist as well?

I don't understand the princple that revenue should be uniformly distributed as a condition for existing. How would you enforce this?

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