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The rising human cost of sports betting

nytimes.com

201–210 of 337 posts

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#201
post #133
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.

In this scenario, I’m proposing that you rig it. Hire some of the best loot box designers from the gaming industry to replicate their addictive mechanics, but for the welfare state.

You’d think the state would embrace virtual scratch offs to better understand the amount of addiction they’re causing…

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#202

Promotion of gambling should be likened to promotion of cigarettes. It should be illegal to advertise gambling, but I don't think it should be outlawed to gamble. People should be able to choose how they live their lives, but we should do all that we can to prevent mass manipulation through adverts in industries that are known to be harmful. I also think that alcohol and e-cig advertising should be outlawed as well.

I spent some time in Montana and was shocked to see how many businesses have "casinos" attached to them. I never got to look inside but I think these are basically a small room with a few slot machines. They were everywhere. For example, I ate at a chinese restaurant and there was a side room advertising poker and keno. I came away feeling like there was a web that would catch every single person in the state who had…

Oregon and Louisiana too

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#203
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly my point. I'm not against outlawing casinos (i think you should be able to do pretty much whatever the eff you want with your body and money). BUT if we are going to allow them, should we allow them to only let people play when they lose? The decision to let them exist is as arbitrary as the decision to allow them to only play when they when.

>([I] think you should be able to do pretty much whatever the eff you want with your body and money). ... The decision to let the exist is as arbitrary as the decision to allow them to only play when they [win]. How do you square that with giving people autonomy? You can do what you want with your money, but you can't play if you don't feel like you are gonna win... there is an inherent contradiction there.

> How do you square that with giving people autonomy?

The Libertarian Free Market answer is that both parties need to be fully informed. Casinos would be required to post maximum win rates and otherwise fully detail their "we throw out anyone that wins" policy up-front, in a clear and easily understood format. If the casino writes a bad, exploitable policy, they go bankrupt being exploited and this encourages future casinos to do better.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The gutting of campaign finance reform means politicians are effectively owned by PACs and corporations now. Whoah now, you're saying that documentaries critical of Hillary Clinton shouldn't be able to be legally distributed? Because that was the origin of Citizens United

It’s a non-sequitur to lead from the cause of the case to the decision handed down. The Court always has the ability to moderate its opinions. One can simultaneously believe that a documentary should be able to be distributed within range of an election and also that money is not a form of speech, or that corporations do not have the same speech rights as people.

Pace people who believe oral arguments don’t make any diffence because justices just read the brief (ahem Thomas), Paul Clement’s terrible performance in the oral argument for the government pretty much sealed the fate of Citizens United.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#205
I travel a lot on Europe (at least pre covid) and one of the worst social trends has been the spread of betting agencies, especially the aptly named Ladbrokes but a number of others too. They shoele up mostly in the poorer parts of big cities and suck the money out of poor people hoping for a break. I saw them largely first in England, then Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and noe pretty much everywhere.

They even look sad, just a bunch of screens showing sport, with machines to punch in your order. Often bars on the windows, or at minimum lots of cover so you can't see who is inside. Floors covered in dirt and betting slips, and mostly young to middle aged guys hanging around and looking absolutely always absolutely miserable.

Good public policy bans these places or at minimum taxes them so hard (and closes all the loopholes) that it isnf profitable anymore to fleece the poor addicted fools.

Shame on anyone perpetuating these businesses, buying stock in these companies, allowing them to rent their shop front, etc. At least national lotteries fund culture or other worthy causes, but nothing good at all comes from these places. Just miserable bankrupt families and heartbreak.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sports betting has been legal in Europe for a very long time and we have yet to see a UEFA Champions League thrown.

You sure about that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calciopoli

That's not the Champion's League.

At the highest level there is so much money involved in playing the game straight that it's probably not worth it.

Look at the comments here on lower levels and College sport in the US. Where people are not getting paid much then even small bribes (say $5K) can work easily.

In the Premier League and what preceded it there was a betting scandal about people betting on the first thrown in of a game.

FWIW drugs at the highest level soccer is quite probably a thing. Quite a number of the drug doctors from the Tour De France wound up at top European Clubs (particularly Spanish ones). Modern pressing uses heaps of running and fitness.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#207
post #176

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?

I point is that you say "drug dealer", when that's an arbitrary label that's dictated be laws and societal norms and acceptance, and then talk about it like there's well known harm from "drug dealers". The fact of the matter was that until a few years ago people selling weed were treated like those selling much harder drugs, and Federally they're still not in the clear. The fact that the label you're using is so loosely defined and applies to such a disparate set of people, and the crime they are saddled with is often so arbitrarily decided should give you pause when using it in a general statement about reducing harms.

Saying "drug dealers" and "drug users" without quantifying which drugs and how harmful they are is just an easy way to ignore real aspects of the problem so it can be reduced to a simplistic model that is easy to make statements about, even though we all know that to actually follow through on the suggestions is folly, because the real people and real specifics of their problems make that untenable. So why bother with the simplistic arguments that we all, even you, know are bullshit and can't be followed through on?

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#208
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>casinos doesn't have high returns to be nice to you but because it ultimately nets them a lot more money.

As far as I can see casinos do have jackpots in the millions for slot machines, and those are legal. Overall those slot machines also offer you better odds per bet than lotteries.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/7-biggest-vegas-payouts-time-...

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#209
post #68

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…

My totally inexpert understanding is that the bookie sets the line to attract bets such that he has equal exposure for both outcomes of the event and books guaranteed profits off the vig. Also there's the occasional jackpot (for the bookie) like, for example, the Canelo vs. GGG fight that ended in a split decision. In that case they got to keep the money from all the Canelo and GGG fans and only had to pay the curmudgeons who bet the coin would come up edge. For which, if I recall correctly, the odds were about 14 to 1.

Re: The rising human cost of sports betting

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sports betting has been legal in Europe for a very long time and we have yet to see a UEFA Champions League thrown.

That you know of. How does anyone know? Edits: Imagine the NFL learns that yesterday's NFC Championship game was fixed. What would they do? Make it public and destroy their entire enterprise? My guess is that many would hide it if they could, and the people involved certainly wouldn't want to talk about it. And imagine if they learn about it in 6 months, long after the Super Bowl. Just in terms of on-field results, h…

What if the best player of all time was involved in side betting on games and got caught?

Perhaps the League would even suspend him and make him retire for a few years before he could come back.

But they would keep it very quiet.

https://lastwordonsports.com/basketball/2019/11/29/michael-j...

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