Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 311 posts

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#131

Post by sickofparadox »

adw wrote: post #93
sickofparadox wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being compensated in kind with housing, food, and education (not to mention significant "grants" from boosters clubs and brand deals) is not the same as wage theft and it is verbal slight of hand to suggest otherwise.

If the players aren't employed by their teams, provided with healthcare and pensions and all the rest, then it absolutely is. The NCAA (for revenue sports) is a scam and everyone involved with any of it is morally bankrupt.

>If the players aren't employed by their teams, provided with healthcare and pensions and all the rest, then it absolutely is.

Why? They are being paid, fed, housed, and educated in exchange for playing sports at nearly the highest level. Where is the injustice? They live lives of opulence and leisure that kings of previous ages could not even dream of.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#132

Post by jairuhme »

georgeecollins wrote: post #123
bentt wrote: post #53

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 ma…

It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport. When you can bet a lot of money on how long a college players plays, or how many points they get in a particular game, what's to stop them from having a relative make a bet and they just fake a cramp? The stock market is heavily regulated. I don't think you should ban sports betting, because like many vices it's easier to control if it is legal. According to Nate Silver,…

That's not new, RIP Pete Rose

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#133

Post by gojomo »

Unironically, "blockchain fixes this".

Decentralized prediction/betting markets, on public consensus ledgers (blockchains), can't exclude the best bettors. And, match bettors and clear markets with far less overhead/"vig" – resulting in fairer, market-set odds.

That leaves less room for a small clique of enterprises whose profits are driven by problem betting, and thus capable & incentivized to engage in manipulative marketing, and misleading product offerings, to find and drive the vulnerable to "extinction". (That's a term of art in gambling design, see https://alum.mit.edu/slice/play-extinction-research-reveals-....)

The regulation and licensing of privileged franchises to state-approved entities has made such entities more able to exploit compulsive gamblers than a free and open system would.

Many states have even gotten into the business themselves, with lotteries offering atrocious odds, promoted with deceptive advertising, overwhelmingly patronized by the poorer & more-innumerate.

Go figure!

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#134

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

highwayman47 wrote: post #105
bentt wrote: post #53

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 ma…

[flagged]

HN sides with money at every opportunity, outsources their own morality to the govt, and complains that the govt shouldn't legislate morality.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#135

Post by WorldMaker »

bluGill wrote: post #104
WorldMaker wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't there rules about anyone in a sport (players, managers, referees...) not being allowed to bet? I work with people who are not allowed to trade commodities because they are in a division where people who make those commodities store data that isn't yet public knowledge. The SEC knows who those people are and the list is sent to every broker to ensure they can't trade. If sports betting isn't checking on this and…

As far as I know there's no central regulatory authority like the SEC. Every sport has its own Commission or Committee in charge, and many of them are profit motivated in weird conflict-of-interest ways that a government regulatory agency shouldn't be.

In college sports alone the NCAA has been (badly) wandering from scandal to scandal for decades and dealing with the repercussions in increasingly baroque individual judgements (some schools are too big/make too much money to punish; other schools seem to be punished too much as scapegoats in their place), and increasingly strange forfeits and legislation-impacted regulations (such as the NIL system [Name-Image-Likeness] reshaping a lot of what used to be illegal in college sports ten years ago into a game [lit.] changing new sluice of money). Given how much the NCAA is dealing with all those scandals and the fresh regulatory burden of NIL, sports betting is probably not even on their radar until someone with too much power at the FBI says it is and picks a scapegoat school to suffer for the rest.

It gets back to why there's so much debate that the MLB should either clean up its current act, or reverse older decisions against sports betting players. There's no right answer, and it is as much a question of how much of a regulatory body does the MLB want to be against sports betting in a year where most states have now made it legal in one form or another.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#136

Post by bostik »

sickofparadox wrote: post #131
adw wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the players aren't employed by their teams, provided with healthcare and pensions and all the rest, then it absolutely is. The NCAA (for revenue sports) is a scam and everyone involved with any of it is morally bankrupt.

>If the players aren't employed by their teams, provided with healthcare and pensions and all the rest, then it absolutely is. Why? They are being paid, fed, housed, and educated in exchange for playing sports at nearly the highest level. Where is the injustice? They live lives of opulence and leisure that kings of previous ages could not even dream of.

Funnily enough... considering how healthcare in the US is tied to employment, then professional athletes of any age should be covered for it by their employer.

People who do pro sports are constantly pushing their bodies to the very limit of what they can do. With those constraints, accidents and overruns are much more likely to cause extended damage.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#137

Post by wnissen »

vundercind wrote: post #71
hluska wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have known for years - that’s the really terrifying part. Heck, when I was in business school I wrote a paper on the dangers of sports betting. There were many resources available then…and heck, Gmail invites were a rare commodity when I was in school. Edit - I just found a printed copy of the paper - I wrote it so long ago that the term 'sociopathic compulsive consumer' was being used. At the time, I found a…

I was briefly involved with a major sports & esports betting company. It was way grosser than I ever imagined, and they had multiple astroturf campaigns working on legalizing betting in more places. Took me from a generally laissez-faire attitude about gambling, to being entirely on board with simply outlawing at least that sector of it. So very nasty. (Incidentally, this did answer a question for me: “how did esport…

Oh, no, are you serious? I thought esports was fun, maybe a little silly. It's the gambling? That's the big lift? Argh.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#138

Post by consteval »

butterfly42069 wrote: post #116
consteval wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, if we decide to come back to Earth, we simply make the obvious restrictions on a case by case basis via cost analysis. Then we stop when we feel like it. For example, tobacco is now extremely restricted. That's an obvious industry that profits off of addiction. We went ahead and fixed that. The result? Millions of lives saved. Oh, but the spooky hypothetical communism! Come on kids, light up these cigs! They make…

What if I want to grow a plant and smoke it? Who are you to take that away from me? What if your experience of life doesn't align with mine, and my cost/benefit analysis for me personally is that I gain more from smoking than I lose? That aside, I wasn't advocating for smoking to defend capitalism, and think you appear disingenuous for suggesting that. Merely that that is the end route of just dividing everything equ…

> What if I want to grow a plant and smoke it?

That's allowed: again, reasonable and obvious restrictions.

> and my cost/benefit analysis for me personally is that I gain more from smoking than I lose?

All well and good, but that goes out the window when you sell Tobacco.

> I wasn't advocating for smoking to defend capitalism, and think you appear disingenuous for suggesting that

It's not disingenuous IMO, it's obvious. Gambling is addictive, okay so let me draw a comparison to an already existing addictive substance that we've successfully regulated. Oh, look, tobacco!

We managed to do that and not be communist. And everyone is all well and good and we're pretty much all over it. Turns out, only wins! So it can be done, was kind of my point.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#139

Post by SoftTalker »

vharuck wrote: post #84
ronsor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that people seem to just now realize that sports betting is a bad idea. As you said, the worst aspect is the large amount of marketing and advertising these platforms receive; I wouldn't care if they weren't pushed so heavily.

Before it was legal, most people's experiences with sports betting were small wagers between friends. Maybe a few large bets that they'll still talk about to this day. Gambling with friends or even just coworkers comes with natural limits: the size of one's bets is limited by others' aversions to risk, compulsive gambling is easily spotted, and the players' winnings/losings are zero sum. Yes, there were illegal booki…

Yeah, making a small "fun" bet on a game is a way to make it more interesting. I've done it a few times and it really does. I'm talking maybe $20 though, I am far too frugal to put any real money at risk on a bet. I don't go to casinos for the same reason, I'd play a few hands or put maybe $20 into a slot machine and then I'd really start thinking about how I'm flushing my money down the toilet and I'd stop having fun.

My mother in law loves it, she will go to the casino and come home up $1,000 or down $1,000 and it's all just entertainment to her. She loses probably a steady 5% on average, which is exactly what the casinos want.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#140

Post by SoftTalker »

adw wrote: post #111
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not NIL. lawsuit in court right now is reaching a settlement to directly pay players. https://www.npr.org/2024/05/24/nx-s1-4978680/house-ncaa-sett...

22% of revenue, not employees, colleges don't accept employer liability. This settlement should be rejected as unconscionable. Public universities (and private universities which actually care about education!) would be well advised to get out of the business of running professional sports teams, I think.

Big universities make way too much money from sports to ever get out of the business. Not only direct revenue but also alumni and sponsor donations.
Post reply on HN