Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts • Hacker News Board

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#51

Post by ebiester » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

Yeul wrote: post #35

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…

This is why Vegas is all about entertainment not just rows of slot machines.

Vegas is about entertainment because it brings people to the rows of slot machines. And ideally, from their perspective, traps a handful of whales from every cohort.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#52

Post by WorldMaker » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 2:28 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30

dkrich wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is backwards. Casinos offer huge cross subsidization opportunities like getting people to spend lots of money in clubs and bars or gamble on games like slots that have a huge house edge while apps have near zero cross subsidization opportunities and massive overhead. An app running at draftkings scale costs a lot to operate. I’ve believed for a long time and continue to that the math on these businesses just doe…

Fair enough, I'm not knowledgeable about casino economics. Focussing only on the gambling, however, I'm scpetical they need whales.

They have shareholders expecting massive year-over-year revenue growth and are directly comparing themselves to the free-to-play/mobile gaming space where whales seem plentiful, so of course they are optimizing for whales long-term over sustainably building a low margin overhead product. You can see this almost directly in many of their advertising plans, Draft Kings and the others advertise just like the mobile games space. (They just have fewer places they can show their advertisements from old gambling advertisements laws.)

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#53

Post by bentt » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 2:36 PM UTC

The fact that ESPN itself has a sports betting app tells you all you need to know about the perversion of sports now that gambling is blessed by the government.

I think I can live with the legalization of sports betting if there are strong restrictions against marketing and advertising. If you want to ruin your life that's your decision, and you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market. But the way that advertising has its tentacles in our culture now... it's bad.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#54

Post by WorldMaker » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

nusl wrote: post #34

Sports betting has the side effect of making things surrounding sports themselves more toxic. Betting being as pervasive as it is, and only increasing, causes more people to view and interact with sports with bets or money, and thus can react negatively toward their losing teams. If there's a large number of angry, vocal "fans" jumping down your neck every time you lose a game or make a mistake that caused their bet…

It also infects players and referees. It's harder to trust referees in a sport where you know what the big bets are, whether or not the refs are actually cheating to try to change the outcome it's hard not to feel that they might be.

Baseball alone has had some prominent sports gambling by players in its past change the record books. There's a bunch of interesting arguments for and against that maybe the records for Joe Jackson and Pete Rose should be reinstated now that sports gambling is so generally legal in so many more states than their time. There's a bunch of interesting arguments of how many of today's players might be "on the take" as much as or worse than those historic gambling scandals.

Other sports have their own histories with it. Sports are different when you are wondering if even players are betting for or against themselves.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#55

Post by butterfly42069 » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 3:00 PM UTC

hermannj314 wrote: post #50

gcanyon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I presume one would just continuously uniformly distribute everything till they arrived at communism lmao

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#56

Post by gcanyon » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 3:06 PM UTC

hermannj314 wrote: post #50

gcanyon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m not claiming revenue must be even.

And I’m assuming that the five customers actually benefitted from your company’s work? If so, then they’re not really comparable to gambling addicts, alcoholics, and gun fanatics, right?

We already (poorly) enforce (weak) laws requiring casinos not to prey on addicts.

We already (poorly) enforce (weak) laws requiring bars not to over-serve and alcoholics to get treatment sometimes.

We do almost nothing about gun addicts.

But commenting that something shouldn’t be the way it is isn’t a claim to know how to fix it.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#57

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 3:10 PM UTC

hermannj314 wrote: post #50

gcanyon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#58

Post by hinkley » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC

dkrich wrote: post #28

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…

This is backwards. Casinos offer huge cross subsidization opportunities like getting people to spend lots of money in clubs and bars or gamble on games like slots that have a huge house edge while apps have near zero cross subsidization opportunities and massive overhead. An app running at draftkings scale costs a lot to operate. I’ve believed for a long time and continue to that the math on these businesses just doe…

And if you keep pulling on that thread: are casinos only profitable because they’re laundering money?

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#59

Post by ElevenLathe » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC

hermannj314 wrote: post #50

gcanyon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are those clients addicts who are ruining their lives with your product? If so, yeah you shouldn't exist, or at least you need to downsize and try to get that percentage way down.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#60

Post by hinkley » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 4:02 PM UTC

bionsystem wrote: post #19

bettringf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can't be 28% for the whole state, that would mean a third of the population are degenerate gamblers.

No. Say 100 / 100 000 people are degenerate gambleurs at risk of bankruptcy. +28% would mean 128 are now at risk.

First rule of statistics: don’t compare percentages unless they have the same denominator.