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Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

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Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#151

Post by jgalt212 »

jogjayr wrote: post #110
jgalt212 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet, somehow, the NCAA (which is wage theft on a truly industrial scale) is morally okay. It's weird. Outside of top men's basketball and football programs, there is no real wage theft occurring. These minor sports are avocations for student athletes, and not businesses for the universities.

Outside of the places where money is being made, money is not being made. Edit: but even when money is being made, the athletes don't get it.

I'm trying to frame the problem--not say there isn't a problem. Athletes is too broad a term. You're engaging in tautologies.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#152

Post by rsync »

bluGill wrote: post #82
HDThoreaun wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bookmakers can always lay the odds so that there’s equal money on each side. Then they’re just taking a 10% rake with zero risk. If they start getting killed by pros they’ll just move to the low risk strategy.

> Bookmakers can always lay the odds so that there’s equal money on each side No they can't. Large ones can, but the small ones sometimes cannot because they have to match the large ones but in a smaller pool. If everyone knows which team is going to win, diehard fans of the losing team will still bet on their team - large players capture that in their odds and break even. Small players don't have the same mix of cus…

Forgive me… This is not an area. I have much knowledge of…

… But I thought even a small sports book could balance things properly by setting an appropriate pointspread?

my parent has described a risk for the sports book that seems too assume the simple picking of winners and losers and not a pointspread?

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#153

Post by tombert »

JohnMakin wrote: post #127
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

So is alcohol - there are plenty of people who gamble responsibly and get enjoyment out of it. Taking away the entire thing rather than simply making sensible regulation and dealing with scumbag behavior by corporate bookies is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, not to mention extremely moralistic. And, in the end, prohibition never works - bookies still and always will exist.

Sure, but if people, for example, started to declare bankruptcy due to gambling addiction, doesn't that mean that taxpayers like you and I are effectively subsidizing these gambling institutions?

That goes beyond moralism; most people don't want to pay higher taxes. I think that it's good that we have a safety-net for people who get into impossible levels of debt, but that does mean that we have an interest in figuring out ways to minimize how often bankruptcy is actually invoked.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#154

Post by jerf »

ronsor wrote: post #61
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…

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.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Those who do learn from history learn that we never learn from history.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#155

Post by astrange »

grecy wrote: post #129
georgeecollins wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport That ship sailed a looping time ago. Sports teams in the US are franchises. Like McDonalds. They exist to make profit. Lots of it. It has nothing to do with sport.

Nothing to do with sports except for all the time and effort they put into playing games?

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#156

Post by jhbadger »

michaelt wrote: post #94
bionsystem wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's such a problem getting people to continue accepting your bets if you are any good. Why don't they just use those people to adjust their odds faster for everybody else ? Or do they limit the size you can bet rather than just banning you ? > I also 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, no…

> Why don't they just use those people to adjust their odds faster for everybody else ? The logic of bookies is simple: Don't do business with people who win more than they lose. It doesn't matter how the customer is getting an edge. A brilliant algorithm? A complex arbitrage system? Deep insight from years studying the sport? Cheating? Time travel? The bookies don't care. The only thing that matters is, if you win m…

Same for casinos. That's why they kick you out if you win too much or too often. They don't need to prove you did anything wrong like cheating. If you aren't making them money you're out.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#158

Post by glenngillen »

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…

They've existed in other jurisdictions for decades and seem to be doing very well financially.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#159

Post by vundercind »

wnissen wrote: post #137
vundercind wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s where a ton of the money in the overall sector comes from, and why a lot of the viewers are watching. There’s a large audience that wants anything to gamble on, and gaming’s very convenient for streaming and stats-collection and such, plus it has frequent matches. There are sponsorships and all that, but I doubt those would be as big as they are without the gambling, either (the audience would decline significantly). Lots of the tournaments are funded wholly or in part by gambling.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#160

Post by bodhiandphysics »

SoftTalker wrote: post #139
vharuck wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fu…

no... if she's losing a steady 5% of $1000 bucks, she's paying 50 dollars to the casino. That's not enough for the casinos... her room costs more. The casinos want her to spending a lot more money. That's the really big problem of gambling... most people can do it in a relatively healthy way. But problem gamblers make the house most of their money. The house is strongly encouraged to find the problem gamblers and focus on keeping them.
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