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Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

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171–180 of 311 posts

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#171
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I didn't do that, did I ?

It does, indirectly. The percentage of people going bankrupt is X/100, but a percentage increase in that percentage is (X/100)*(Y/100).

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#172
post #167
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.

Gambling is the only way for some of us to make Sportsball interesting, and attempt to fit in with the absurdist normie culture in which we live. Realistically, there's nothing particularly interesting about the Dallas Frackers versus the Washington Rentseekers. But if you have money on the outcome, watching a game (with a sufficient supply of alcohol) is actually bearable. Edit: I'm explaining a real, actual reason…

If you loathe sports that much why are you forcing yourself to watch them? "Fitting into absurdist normie culture" is ludicrous. Are you not capable of making friends without drunkenly feigning interest in their hobbies?

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#173
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]

hmm, what post did you get that impression from?

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#174
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I didn't do that, did I ?

Say I've got a building full of people. 48% are male. 35% have blue eyes, 50% are over 50, and 22% are balding.

You can start speculating on the relationship between age and hair status because they're both based on the same population: the inhabitants. Older people are more likely to be bald is a fair hypothesis.

But if you start trying to make guesses about how many bald men are in the building, you have a problem, because you're making a common bad assumption that all bald people are male, but also now you're comparing a stat about the whole population to one about 48% of the population, which you don't do.

When you're doing scientific experiments and you want to know these things, you set up the cohorts ahead of time to test your hypotheses. For instance a test group that's 100% men or 100% women. Or only people with blue eyes. That way any two correlations you're looking at are based on the exact same number of samples.

And in this case as someone else already explained, the % is relative to total bankruptcies not the entire population, and the other is about the entire population.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#175
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,…

It gets bad enough and I’ll offer odds on who’s throwing, how long until they are busted, and how severe the consequences.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#176

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? Or get assaulted or murdered, internet death pool style? All kinds of really fucked up incentives are created by these legalized betting apps.

I wonder how many people out there would take an assault charge to win a bet. Since there’s a market you could even get investors. Get $10million together, bet it with high odds, take 25% cut, spend 10 years in jail, live out the rest of your life in comfort. Is any of that illegal besides the assault itself?

Very much so. Even planning it, without carrying it out, would be subject to criminal conspiracy charges. Recruiting people to the scheme (even the investors) would be soliciting a crime. It's illegal to interfere in the outcome of the game once the bet is placed. Finally, once it was proven you rigged it, you'd probably be forced to return the winnings anyway.

I'm sure an actual attorney could come up with even more reasons this is illegal.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#177
post #152
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

This is sort of an "assume a perfectly spherical gambler" type problem.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#178

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.

No, but many of them are getting a free or discounted education. Is that not something of value?

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, but many of them are getting a free or discounted education. Is that not something of value?

It's non-zero value, but we can't say it's the market-clearing price for their services. And anecdotally the quality of that education is compromised.

Student-athletes in the serious football and basketball programs spend a lot of their time at practice. During the season, travel to away games eats up much of their free time. They're "encouraged" to take only easy courses. There are reports of grading corruption so their GPA is high enough to remain eligible to play.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#180

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. 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.

They aren't being educated. Outside of Stamford and the Ivies, I'd wager that most players, especially in football, are taking easy classes (and in some cases having tests taken for them) and even then, things are quite easy for them. They aren't taking physics, economics, etc.. that actually prepare students for the real world. There's not enough time for that. I saw it for myself at a big D1 football program. You t…

Elite football and basketball athletes at major programs are tiny, tiny minority of all student athletes in this country. I went to a decent regional state school (DII at the time) and I had advanced economics and math classes with a number of athletes, including football players. It's just not correct to generalize from the programs that are NFL feeder programs.
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