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

The rising human cost of sports betting

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 337 posts

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#181

Post by sidewndr46 »

slap_shot wrote: post #46

I'm pretty Laissez-Faire about things, but a recent interaction with gambling is making me reconsider: My friend got a lot of free credits from the major sports books and wrote some code that he felt could generate a profit. We all threw in a little bit of money and let the program do what it does. Within a month we started doing 1k a day in profit on 3k wagered. Right as we approached 30k in profit, every major book…

Isn't this how every major betting operation works? I'm not counting lotteries because although you could argue that you are "betting" on some numbers anyone with a 6th grade education that there is no difference in expected outcomes if you choose different numbers.

Why would bookmakers ever take bets from someone they don't expect to make money from?

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#182

Post by allturtles »

mdoms wrote: post #6

What an oddly written article. So Delany, the flagship character in the narrative, bet a bit of money and then his wife caught him so he stopped. Is he the best example they could have found? Sports betting and gambling in general is incredibly destructive and unbelievably difficult to kick for full-on addicts. Gambling addiction is no joke. For some far more compelling journalism on the terrible consequences of gamb…

Where do you get "bet a bit of money"? The article says "he was gambling away the family 401(k) on his phone." It also says "I started doing it compulsively. I would win $5,000 and say, ‘Now I know what I am doing.’" So he was making individual bets of thousands of dollars. Since he as doing it "compulsively" that probably means more than one such bet per day. Doesn't sound like a "bit of money" unless this guy was extremely wealthy.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#183

Post by nsxwolf »

margalabargala wrote: post #139
bregma wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State lotteries are just a tax on the stupid.

People like to say this because it's a nice sound-bite that lets people feel like they themselves are not among the stupid. It ignores the reality that poverty is a causative agent for lacking the appropriate math skill to recognize that playing the lottery is not a good financial choice, and self-perpetuates that poverty.

Most people buy lotto tickets so they can spend a few minutes in blissful daydream before they come crashing back down to their financial reality. It's like a very cheap drug. It makes them feel good, so it serves a purpose. Feeling good is good.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#184

Post by SilasX »

vgeek wrote: post #68
slap_shot wrote: post #46

I'm pretty Laissez-Faire about things, but a recent interaction with gambling is making me reconsider: My friend got a lot of free credits from the major sports books and wrote some code that he felt could generate a profit. We all threw in a little bit of money and let the program do what it does. Within a month we started doing 1k a day in profit on 3k wagered. Right as we approached 30k in profit, every major book…

https://www.theringer.com/2019/6/5/18644504/sports-betting-b... This is a long read, but is really insightful on how the industry really works. If you're a consistently winning bettor, you're going to get blocked pretty quickly when you're betting against the house. Why would a casino want to play a game where they don't have odds in their favor when they can just ban the sharps and feast on the casuals? With parimut…

Why can’t they switch to a user driven system where they don’t place bets at all but just receive bid/asks from users, like the prediction markets do? Then they don’t have to worry about bettors being better predictors than they are and can just take a cut of the flow.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#185

Post by crubier »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #181
slap_shot wrote: post #46

I'm pretty Laissez-Faire about things, but a recent interaction with gambling is making me reconsider: My friend got a lot of free credits from the major sports books and wrote some code that he felt could generate a profit. We all threw in a little bit of money and let the program do what it does. Within a month we started doing 1k a day in profit on 3k wagered. Right as we approached 30k in profit, every major book…

Isn't this how every major betting operation works? I'm not counting lotteries because although you could argue that you are "betting" on some numbers anyone with a 6th grade education that there is no difference in expected outcomes if you choose different numbers. Why would bookmakers ever take bets from someone they don't expect to make money from?

There is actually a difference in expected outcomes at lottery if you choose different numbers. Commonly played number will be shared among all winners, so your share will be less than with rare numbers.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#186

Post by [deleted] »

babypuncher wrote: post #73
vgeek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.theringer.com/2019/6/5/18644504/sports-betting-b... This is a long read, but is really insightful on how the industry really works. If you're a consistently winning bettor, you're going to get blocked pretty quickly when you're betting against the house. Why would a casino want to play a game where they don't have odds in their favor when they can just ban the sharps and feast on the casuals? With parimut…

I think that should be illegal. If we are going to allow casinos to operate at all, then we shouldn't allow them to discriminate against potential customers on the basis that said customers are better at the game. If that means their business model is no longer viable, then that is their problem.

[deleted]

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#187

Post by matheusmoreira »

slap_shot wrote: post #46

I'm pretty Laissez-Faire about things, but a recent interaction with gambling is making me reconsider: My friend got a lot of free credits from the major sports books and wrote some code that he felt could generate a profit. We all threw in a little bit of money and let the program do what it does. Within a month we started doing 1k a day in profit on 3k wagered. Right as we approached 30k in profit, every major book…

Yeah. People are supposed to lose. They get cut off if they're too succesful.

Even worse is the addictive nature of it. Making money like this is like a dose of dopamine straight in the reward center of the brain. There are people who literally lose everything gambling. Even on the stock market people will make a good call on futures, get high on it and lose everything.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#188

Post by mardifoufs »

animal_spirits wrote: post #98
Raidion wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly agree with you, but am worried about the precedent it would set. If you start banning stuff because of addiction, does it apply to things like soda or fast food? Would it apply to things like baseball cards or other collectables? This is a really tricky problem, as there is clear evidence that these things hurt society as a whole, but it's hard to draw the line who is making deliberate choices about their…

Idk people say its hard to draw the line but it doesn't seem like it would be. Here's the line: no advertising for cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, e-cigs. Why this line? these are pretty obviously unhealthy for people. Why not some other line? Well lets take a poll and see what we are willing to do. And then if people think it is important to ban other types of advertising then that can be a new line drawn later.

E-cigs? If you don't use shady THC oil juice from overseas, there is absolutely no proof that they are more dangerous than, say, smoking weed or even obesity. The lung injury incidents that made the news 2 years ago were due to illegally imported juice that was contaminated with vitamin E IIRC.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#189

Post by [deleted] »

PKop wrote: post #176
kbenson wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what, that guy that sold weed before legalization caused more harm from his actions than hanging him would cause, and yet we've legalized it and everyone is fine with it now? Or perhaps It's all arbitrary and decided by laws and the actual harm doesn't necessarily map directly onto illegal activity. If that's the case, maybe we should be careful about statements that hanging a drug.dealer causes less harm than th…

Let's deal with the immediate problem of opiates, meth and other hard drugs, the addiction of which is ravaging cities where drug users are a blight on society with their tent cities, needles, feces, crime, vandalism, assaults, robberies, etc. You don't want to focus on that you want to misdirect to weed and.... water? What the hell does this dumb analogy have to do with anything in reality?

[deleted]

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#190

Post by Jensson »

Tenoke wrote: post #133
kritiko wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

state run gaming, limit the bets people make, allow them to "win back" their UBI everyone's a winner, baby!

Sadly, state run gambling aka national lotteries typically offer you much worse returns than anything in the casino.

That is because high return games trigger gambling addiction. It is even illegal to run lotteries with too high returns in many places for this reason, casinos doesn't have high returns to be nice to you but because it ultimately nets them a lot more money.

With low return games it is really easy to see that it is a bad investment, while the higher the returns the easier it is for people to think they can make money gambling. You might say those are dumb, but the effect of making high pay-out gambling legal is that you ruin their lives, and in my opinion their lives are worth more than your fun.

This is a case of the trolley problem. You think it is fine to ruin their lives since you didn't do it directly, but since you could save their lives by banning it the effect is that you are ruining their lives by keeping this legal.

Post reply on HN