> A 2024 Wall Street Journal report, for example, found that 70% of the profits from one online gambling company came from less than 1% of its users.
Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts.
For most, a lottery ticket or an online bet is just buying entertainment - not much different from a movie ticket or steam game. Turns out, though, this majority isn't the target customer; we're just the top of the funnel as these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy.
>Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts.
this isn't new. a relative is an MVP at a casino she dumps cash into. The pit bosses comp all of her meals and call her on days that she doesn't show up. It's all sold to the customer as friendly-people-who-care and the people eat that up, especially lonely elderly folks.
She fell at one such casino and ended up suing them, she wondered why all her friends stopped calling her, so she moved casinos and low-and-behold she was able to make friends there, too!
To be fair, like another poster mentioned, they do this everywhere people spend a lot of money, not just gambling. Car dealerships are lousy with this kind of 'concierge'-ness. They, too, take advantage of elderly folks who have the money for a new car that they don't yet realize they need.
To be fair, what you’ve describing strikes me as closer to hospitality than gambling per se. I live in a ski town. There are absolutely regulars at the Four Seasons who tip well in exchange for being “friends” with the staff. The fact that they never hang out outside work hours doesn’t seem to bother them.
This seems instructive for considering when a difference in degree makes for a difference in kind. Let's call this "whale potential": the amount of money that a power user can naturally funnel into a casino over a single visit is multiple orders of magnitude more than the amount of money that a power user can funnel into a ski resort over a single visit. For a casino, the act of a customer losing money is not merely a side effect of the activity, it is the primary effect of the activity.
There’s only so much you can spend at a ski resort. Casinos there is literally no limit. The high roller salons can have games with 10k+ per hand/game or more.
We always tip everyone generously and send notes to management about especially helpful staff. My wife was on a first name basis with our normal housekeepers, who have watched my kid grow up. We spend at the property with events, amenities etc. The management tends to cycle through the company but the local staff does not - they flag us as VIPs directly.
Most people don’t do that and don’t or can’t throw money around in a resort setting. But in a casino, it’s easy to measure the lifetime value of a guest and price the interaction cost. In a beach setting, the financial benefit of a happy customer is less certain. Point being, i would guess that Wynn does 50x the hospitality outreach than Relais & Châteaux, despite both offering a high quality product.
You're spot on (ex casino worker). There's no conspiracy. Speaking for myself, I was nice to people because it made me more money in tips (also, because I am not an a-hole). Made a lot of "friends" when I worked in the casino, employees and patrons. It's not any different than folks I work with in tech (i.e. some you connect with and have genuine friendships and some are work friends). They likely stopped calling her due to upper management telling staff to not engage due to legal liability (or they lose their job).
edit: Additionally, there are whales and there are folks who's job it is to get them in the door (we had game managers for the big games).
A friend of mine worked at Disney, and it is insane how much data they capture on their players/spenders and how they use it for the sole purpose of triggering a popup at the right time, at the right price, that would maximize spending/gambling on loot boxes.
The first time I heard "whale" mentioned in the video game space was at a GDC panel around a game called Puzzle Pirates, where the dev noted that the bulk of their in-game purchases were made by a small group of "whale" players. In 2003 purchasable skins, pets, hats, etc were pretty new.
That’s like saying cigarettes are the same as scented candles because both involve flame.
The difference is that gambling, like cigarettes, delivers a dopamine fix. The playbook is well aligned with cigarettes — you target brands to the population. Draft Kings is like mass market cigarettes, targeting low income males, soldiers, old people.
The “most profitable customer” metric is misleading - you need mass adoption to lure in the whales. My son is 14 - sports gambling is a routine conversation among his cohort and many kids are actively gambling in school with accounts provided by parents.
> these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy
With the AI progress, there will be no need in a search for personalities - algorithms will make you one. And this can be applied to any company producing entertainment (e.g. social networks), not just gambling.
> not much different from a movie ticket or steam game.
Movies require an investment of your time so it's somewhat hard to become "addicted" to them.
There are "steam game library" addicts though.
> this majority isn't the target customer
Of course they are. They just aren't prioritized for high cost user enticements. The company only exists if the majority lose. They have big losers and little losers. They aren't here to "entertain" you. Which features of their service are designed to heighten "entertainment" I wonder?
and the idea of advertising gambling on television wasn't even something conceivable?
and, even more so, the idea that sports entertainment channels would be directly involved in the operation of gambling of was just completely beyond comprehension?
> All those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned.
That is certainly on the table... as long as they have a couple of million stashed away to put into World Liberty Financial and the charges are federal.
If it does, I’m more open to it. I don’t think it does. It’s a minuscule industry, macroeconomically spwaking, with massive negative externalities. I think regulating the marketing and conduct of industries proximate to addiction is something productive societies do. (On the other side of the spectrum we have the Qing.)
But it captures a truth. States see lotteries as a funding source. Kalshi and Polymarket are combined valued at the GDP of Iceland (or alternatively, 13 Greenlands).
Casinos are run as a productive part of Nevada’s economy. Lotteries, too, on average, at least in some places. Our liquor and now cannabis industries are economic engines. It isn’t ridiculous to expect gambling apps to wind up in a similar place.
Depends. I imagine the opportunity cost of alcohol and cannabis outweigh their benefits from lost productivity. So likely those industries merely give an illusion of positive economics
The economic windows are less broken when people smoke themselves stupid than they are when we send state violence after those people. This goes for most "bad" things. (State) violence is just that destructive to productivity. See also: prohibition.
It's obviously a joke, but joking that a bad thing is actually good because of some surface-level benefit does raise the question of whether it even has that surface-level benefit.
I don’t really gamble. But I agree with you. Prohibition is never the answer.
Our current regime, however, is one where bartenders face zero liability for their patrons’ drunk driving. Making gambling companies liable for problematic gambling is a good start. Banning gambling ads, within apps and without, is a great end. I’d also argue for a cap on bet sizes, but I’m open to being talked out of that.
You actually want to ban bet maximums. Regular people get destroyed making small stupid bets on nonsense like freethrows for benchwarmers. Apps only offer those because they put a low max bet so they have little risk on a wager that is impossible to price accurately. If they couldn’t set such a low max then they couldn’t offer those nonsense wagers.
These are systems completely designed to prey on vulnerable people, addicts who can't control their impulse to gamble. That's their purpose. I think it's worth regulating intentionally predatory and harmful industries.
When making decisions like this, one should consider not just the desired consequences of the policy, but the difficulty in actually implementing it. Alcohol and narcotics prohibitions fall short here.
It's hard to fully prohibit gambling (because you can play poker around a table, and it's better if that's legalized). It's much easier to prohibit banks from interacting with casinos and TV networks from letting them advertise, as those are large businesses who want to be compliant. That doesn't make gambling itself illegal, but cuts off most of its oxygen.
The problem though is that technically, legally most of this stuff is no longer classified as "gambling". It's now a "prediction market" of which team will win the game.
That's a specific problem of corruption in the current administration. It's not even clear whether this obviously absurd theory of classification will hold up in court, Arizona is already fighting it.
Let's combine the idea of hyper-targeted advertising based on mass data collection with custom tailored addicted substances.
If I design a chemical that will specifically make you fasterik so dependent on it that you'll do any sexually depraved things that a line up of random strangers want so that they'll give you pocket change so that you can get another hit of that chemical should it be illegal for me to surreptitiously give it to you in a product that you buy from me?
That's quite a straw man. Drunk driving is and should be illegal because it puts the lives of others at risk. Alcohol is legal because it only puts the health of the drinker at risk. Generally in a free society we accept that adults should be free to make decisions that harm only themselves.
It's interesting to be arguing that gambling doesn't put others at risk in the comments to a post about a broad trend of collective harm associated with loosened controls on gambling. Do you think these people exist in a vacuum?
On top of that, sports betting inevitably leads into match fixing, threatening of players etc.
I believe most of the negative impacts you're referring to are covered by existing laws concerning fraud and consumer protection. I'm in favor of making truly fraudulent and predatory behavior illegal. I don't see any evidence that the "collective harm" you mention from the article is anything other than individuals making bad financial decisions.
I believe that I, as a responsible adult, should be allowed to gamble for entertainment if I want to, and my right to do that shouldn't be taken away because a small minority of the population has low impulse control.
> I don't see any evidence that the "collective harm" you mention from the article is anything other than individuals making bad financial decisions.
Legalized gambling establishments do very little besides extract money from visitors and project negative externalities into their surroundings.
> I believe that I, as a responsible adult, should be allowed to gamble for entertainment if I want to, and my right to do that shouldn't be taken away because a small minority of the population has low impulse control.
You can believe that, and be correct in theory. In practice, the "small minority" doesn't appear to be small enough under the current regulatory regime.
It's no different than the regulation of controlled substances and other vices. Or do you have an issue with that as well, and feel you should have the right to consume as much heroin as you want?
I'm pretty liberal when it comes to drugs. I think it's a case by case basis, but I do believe that heroin and most other drugs should be legal and regulated. As long as there's demand, prohibition just leads to black markets, funnels money to cartels, and consumers ultimately get a less reliable and more dangerous product.
I don't consider those off limits for recreational consumption in safe doses. If fentanyl were legalized, I would see a strong argument for restricting the sale of large amounts of pure fentanyl. Fentanyl lollipops with small doses, I think would be fine.
Regardless, I don't think we should stretch the metaphor between gambling and drugs too far. They are fundamentally different things.
They aren't that different, in that they are addictive, provide no value to society other than entertainment (which is not worthless by any means, but not something that is very heavily weighted in a cost/benefit analysis), and the resulting behavior of addicted individuals is highly negative and has an impact well beyond the addicted individual.
You are on an extreme fringe to put it mildly. It is your right to hold that opinion, but it also means that there's no real point in discussing this with you from what I can tell.
There's a fine line between prohibition and all-out attack, everywhere all at once, from TV internet and sports, trying to get everyone addicted to gambling, from 9 to 99 years old.
Like... cigarretes aren't prohibited. But you're hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't agree that we're MUCH better off now with full advertising bans, indoor smoking bans, bans on sales to minors, steep tax, etc, than what we were in the 70s with disgusting cigarrete smoke everywhere.
And yet you can't do a quick Google search to understand that "expecting adults to act like adults" is a ridiculous idea when 80% of people have NPC agency
Prohibition was a mistake and it goes a long way of sorting how people will act stupid regardless
> And research shows young people are particularly at risk of sports gambling problems, lured in by splashy advertisements often featuring celebrities and promises of low risks and high rewards. The Fed study found that the sharpest drop in credit delinquency rates were among people under 40 years old.
There are so many portions of the post Muprhy vs NCAA world that bum me out, but this is by far what makes me the most annoyed. There seem to be so many objectives being achieved while hiding behind the guise of protecting the children. Yet we just let these advertisements slide by and infest broadcasts that children largely consume. Not like getting an older person to buy you a GTA game when you are 12 or something either, this is just watching any sort of sports broadcast, aimed at all ages.
I see some other people here mentioning how we gave into legalized state lotteries and its why we arrived here, its such a stark difference though. There was a ton of back and forth for state lotteries, the results were tons of advertising restrictions, and the profits largely benefited the education system.
Murphy vs NCAA was passed in 2018, we have legal sports betting now in 38 total states after ~8 total years.
New Hampshire legalized state lotteries in 1964, from that point it took 32 years to reach 38 total states with some form of a state lottery.
When I was in college I got lured into one of those pyramid schemes advertised in the middle of the night hoping to make extra money. I wonder how much money I would have lost if I had instant access to betting on a "sure thing" back then.
> the profits largely benefited the education system.
The profits didn't benefit shit. Yes, the money went into education, and that same education system saw commensurate cuts from regular tax revenue.
What it did is shift the state's tax burden towards people who play the lottery... While permanently entrenching the lottery (How can we ban it! It would gut our education budget!).
I agree with your point, its something i kinda didn't really consider how its perversely intertwining itself with the education budget and making itself effectively immune.
I still think its a solid demonstration that comparable sports betting legislation surely lacked any sort of compromise at all, as it was all pushed through so aggressively fast.
>+ C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue
This seems questionable given that covid-19 relief funds from the federal government left states flush with cash, causing them to spend lavishly or even cut taxes. It also makes me suspicious of the other examples. Recessions happen every 5-10 years, and if you count the few years after a recession as part of the recession, it's not hard to pattern match a little too aggressively and think it's tied to economic downturns, when it's really a secular trend.
"Lottos help your school!" they said. Until you're in rural bumfuck nowhere, and your lotto win suddenly drags your community's average income from "dirt poor" to "middle class" by becoming Spiders Georg and you end up costing nearly half a mil in state aid to go up in smoke.
I'm not sure you read that article all the way through... The loss is $450k, but that's only 3% of the year's state aid and an even smaller amount of the district's operating budget. And it only impacted that one year. Inflation and random political feuds usually impact public school budgets to a far greater degree.
The problem in this case is not that the lotto exists, it's that the formula for awarding school funding is (or was?) broken in this state. This is a textbook example of why you almost always use the median instead of mean on things that have a bell curve.
A casino or bookmaker doesn't need to heuristically identify betting behaviour that's 'smart'. They don't need to spot evidence that could be hidden by good opsec. No need to find micro-expressions or hidden cheating gadgets. Nor to do background checks to know you've got a buddy with insider knowledge.
All they need to do is check if you're cashing out more chips than you came in with.
It's not trivial for the casino to track this against a determined adversary. If you're already thinking about "good opsec", you can get someone else to help cash out your winnings.
A buddy from out of town, or a losing regular, or a poker player who the casino doesn't care if they win. In Vegas some casinos' chips are negotiable, officially or unofficially, in other casinos.
They rightfully passed legislation banning such practices. The idea is that if casinos and bookies refuse to cap your downside, they have zero right to cap your upside.
Sports betting is the one place that "prediction markets" make the most sense. Instead of there being a house to win against, the market just skims a fee. The line is set organically by betters, not be the house targeting a profit margin, and the house has no incentive to restrict successful betters because they solely profit on flow, not losses.
You do have to be careful to avoid letting whales manipulate the perceived market. There are ways to con other gamblers with carefully timed bets.
The bigger the market the harder that is, so maybe it doesn't apply at the level of online sports betting. But organized crime could make trouble at horse tracks.
Tony is also super smart in how he gambled. Your average degenerate is nowhere near as intelligent as Tony is.
I have a very small edge in sports betting although I don't really do any of the deep overpriced/underpriced arbitrage or any special types of bets outside of wins/loses. And it's limited to tennis, a sport I've played my entire life and have followed the pro circuit closely for 3 decades. And even then my edge is very small, and the strategy I use when I do bet doesn't make me much in total return.
I used to work for a sports betting company. These people definitely exist. They are few though because they are the ones who understand that the sport/game/match/whatever is irrelevant. They bet the "odd line". They bet on the platform that screwed up and didn't adjust their line quickly enough to follow the market. They don't know baseball, or football, or tennis. They just know the numbers.
We all have the occasional friend that brags about every time he wins money at the casino. If you accompany them a few times, it’s incredible how the “always winning” story just changes.
Gambling is massive in large parts of Europe. For Spain, in 2022 83.9% of the population participated in gambling. Every time I am outside I am confronted with gambling in some sort of way. I don't think society benefits from it.
I strongly suspect if one were to dig a little deeper there would probably be some common factors between loosening financial regulations, community economic problems, credit issues of people in those communities, and impetus to gamble.
Honest question; sorta related: How long until prostitution is legalized in the United States? Sounds crazy, indeed, but when I was a kid growing up in Missouri - if you told me, someday, businesses will be open on Sunday, alcohol will be legally sold on Sunday, and there will be gambling casinos a few miles from my house, I wouldn't have believed you.
Gambling seems like a rational choice, when all the ”traditional” rational choices just lead into a mountain of student debt, not being able to afford a home, and general failure to launch
What's the ev for going to college once you factor in graduation rates?
People that get two or three years of college debt and no diploma have a big hole to fill and a small shovel.
Anyway, I think ev isn't the right tool to model gambling behavior; dollar utility isn't linear. It's more about a small spending for a large potential. But then you get into repeated small wagers and such.
College graduates make over $1 million in their lifetime compared to high school graduates.
> Anyway, I think ev isn't the right tool to model gambling behavior; dollar utility isn't linear.
You're right. The more money you have, the less utility it gives you, which makes gambling for a windfall an even worse decision. Worse still if you include taxes.
I think the issue is a lot deeper than the article suggests.
The problem is, society is fucking broken. The middle class is being decimated. People are going to take their destinies into their own hands, as seen by the growth of daytrading and sports betting. With wages being destroyed, billionaires avoiding taxes, COL skyrocketing for the middle and lower classes, and jobs evaporating, who's going to fucking blame someone for trying to figure out how to use what they know (in this case, sports) to make money?
Plus, this generation has seen another class of gamblers (big banks) get bailout after bailout without any problem.
Sports betting is the symptom, not the root cause that needs to be addressed.
I just don't think that theory of causation works even if we assume the premise for the sake of argument. Both daytrading and sports betting are much larger now than in 2009, when I hope we can agree wages were destroyed and jobs were evaporating on a scale we can hardly imagine today.
Gambling can be a fun way to make a game more interesting. Some people can't stop there, but government lost any moral high ground when they legalized state lotteries.
I think so. If you're going to regulate sports betting (and I think there are good arguments for doing that), but you yourself run a lottery which is a tax on people who don't understand probability, then you are just preaching in a "do as I say not as I do" kind of way.
You regulate other vices (alcohol, tobacco). Limiting gambling to govt owned lotteries or licenced operators is no different, you can set limits on harm, remove the profit motive if the govt operates it, and (at least where I live) the state lottery funds a large number of community grants.
Regulating it also removes demand for underground or foreign online gambling.
The difference between the ability to make bets 2-3 times a week for a dollar or two and the ability to drop $500 every play of a sporting event is dramatic.
That describes someone with maybe an irresponsible but manageable gambling habit, not a gambling addict.
Maybe it's because of pay-at-the-pump popularity now but have you never seen someone standing off to the side of the main gas station counter surrounded by a pile of scratch offs? People exist who will drop their entire paycheck on them in a single day. I've also seen people buy irresponsibly large stacks of Powerball tickets and not just the "oh, I like to fantasize about winning so I buy a ticket each week since you can't win if you don't play". It's gambling all the same.
What about someone buying $50 of scratchers a day? Why conflate a reasonable habit on one thing with an unreasonable habit on the other when both can obviously be done reasonably or unreasonably?
The predominate reasoning for a long time now has been lotteries are addicting and bad but a small demand is guaranteed. Therefore, in the name of maximizing social benefit, only the government should run them and the profit is used to funds something less partisan (e.g. education, parks, conservation, gambling addiction services)
For these private betting firms, it's open season trying to find whales like mobile gaming, and there's no end to their greed and exploitation.
> If anything, doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game?
> Is anxiety interesting?
Yes. Adding anxiety generally makes things more interesting. Think of watching a story or a film or a game play out. Good stories often involve giving the reader some anxiety. Tension. Not knowing what's going to happen, but being somehow invested in it ... to stay engaged.
I am staying away from sports betting, but I have done fantasy football a few times. I was constantly on edge from it all, even when I was winning! Constantly thinking of who I needed to pick up, who to trade, which matchups were good, it was a time sink.
And I ended up losing to my 10 year old nephew for the championship game!
I don’t generally like gambling. On a recent trip to Vegas I socially gambled with friends and won about $5k, but then lost $500 of it and was more annoyed about losing that sum than the net amount gained. Such is my personality.
That said, a friendly game of poker is absolutely more fun with a $10 buy-in or whatnot. So I can see the general idea holding water. What we don’t need are (a) ads or (b) large bets.
There are significant, real differences in betting on a random number generator once a week and betting constantly on the real outcomes of individual behaviors. Most notably with sports, institutionalized prop bets destroy the integrity of the game.
At least with win/loss, the ability to outright manipulate the outcome for financial gain by players, coaches and refs is a lot harder to accomplish without detection. Prop bets? Who knows if a player or ref or coach made a decision on who gets the first 3pt basket of the second half?
Yeah I've never made a prop bet, or even a points bet, that feels too degenerate to me. I have occasionally made a $10 money line bet on a game and that does make it more interesting to me in that now I have a small stake in the outcome. YMMV.
And people do spend stupid amounts of money on Powerball tickets too. I just think if the state is running a numbers racket, that they don't have much of a leg to stand on when they want to regulate other gambling.
> A 2024 Wall Street Journal report, for example, found that 70% of the profits from one online gambling company came from less than 1% of its users.
Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts.
For most, a lottery ticket or an online bet is just buying entertainment - not much different from a movie ticket or steam game. Turns out, though, this majority isn't the target customer; we're just the top of the funnel as these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy.
>Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts.
this isn't new. a relative is an MVP at a casino she dumps cash into. The pit bosses comp all of her meals and call her on days that she doesn't show up. It's all sold to the customer as friendly-people-who-care and the people eat that up, especially lonely elderly folks.
She fell at one such casino and ended up suing them, she wondered why all her friends stopped calling her, so she moved casinos and low-and-behold she was able to make friends there, too!
To be fair, like another poster mentioned, they do this everywhere people spend a lot of money, not just gambling. Car dealerships are lousy with this kind of 'concierge'-ness. They, too, take advantage of elderly folks who have the money for a new car that they don't yet realize they need.
To be fair, what you’ve describing strikes me as closer to hospitality than gambling per se. I live in a ski town. There are absolutely regulars at the Four Seasons who tip well in exchange for being “friends” with the staff. The fact that they never hang out outside work hours doesn’t seem to bother them.
This seems instructive for considering when a difference in degree makes for a difference in kind. Let's call this "whale potential": the amount of money that a power user can naturally funnel into a casino over a single visit is multiple orders of magnitude more than the amount of money that a power user can funnel into a ski resort over a single visit. For a casino, the act of a customer losing money is not merely a side effect of the activity, it is the primary effect of the activity.
I think you might be underestimating how much money can be spent at a ski resort.
There’s only so much you can spend at a ski resort. Casinos there is literally no limit. The high roller salons can have games with 10k+ per hand/game or more.
We’re regulars at a resort we go to annually.
We always tip everyone generously and send notes to management about especially helpful staff. My wife was on a first name basis with our normal housekeepers, who have watched my kid grow up. We spend at the property with events, amenities etc. The management tends to cycle through the company but the local staff does not - they flag us as VIPs directly.
Most people don’t do that and don’t or can’t throw money around in a resort setting. But in a casino, it’s easy to measure the lifetime value of a guest and price the interaction cost. In a beach setting, the financial benefit of a happy customer is less certain. Point being, i would guess that Wynn does 50x the hospitality outreach than Relais & Châteaux, despite both offering a high quality product.
You're spot on (ex casino worker). There's no conspiracy. Speaking for myself, I was nice to people because it made me more money in tips (also, because I am not an a-hole). Made a lot of "friends" when I worked in the casino, employees and patrons. It's not any different than folks I work with in tech (i.e. some you connect with and have genuine friendships and some are work friends). They likely stopped calling her due to upper management telling staff to not engage due to legal liability (or they lose their job).
edit: Additionally, there are whales and there are folks who's job it is to get them in the door (we had game managers for the big games).
Yes, I think the grandparent post conflates those whale-attractors with typical service industry behaviors toward repeat customers.
> this isn't new.
Bullshit.
If the person you’re raising kids with starts living at the casino 1-4 days a week, you notice.
The Internet, for better and for worse, masks this.
The same thing happens with in-app purchases.
A friend of mine worked at Disney, and it is insane how much data they capture on their players/spenders and how they use it for the sole purpose of triggering a popup at the right time, at the right price, that would maximize spending/gambling on loot boxes.
The first time I heard "whale" mentioned in the video game space was at a GDC panel around a game called Puzzle Pirates, where the dev noted that the bulk of their in-game purchases were made by a small group of "whale" players. In 2003 purchasable skins, pets, hats, etc were pretty new.
Algorithmic optimisation will be the death of us.
Over-dramatic? Maybe, but this thought springs to my mind more and more.
That’s like saying cigarettes are the same as scented candles because both involve flame.
The difference is that gambling, like cigarettes, delivers a dopamine fix. The playbook is well aligned with cigarettes — you target brands to the population. Draft Kings is like mass market cigarettes, targeting low income males, soldiers, old people.
The “most profitable customer” metric is misleading - you need mass adoption to lure in the whales. My son is 14 - sports gambling is a routine conversation among his cohort and many kids are actively gambling in school with accounts provided by parents.
> these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy
With the AI progress, there will be no need in a search for personalities - algorithms will make you one. And this can be applied to any company producing entertainment (e.g. social networks), not just gambling.
> not much different from a movie ticket or steam game.
Movies require an investment of your time so it's somewhat hard to become "addicted" to them.
There are "steam game library" addicts though.
> this majority isn't the target customer
Of course they are. They just aren't prioritized for high cost user enticements. The company only exists if the majority lose. They have big losers and little losers. They aren't here to "entertain" you. Which features of their service are designed to heighten "entertainment" I wonder?
remember when gambling was illegal?
and the idea of advertising gambling on television wasn't even something conceivable?
and, even more so, the idea that sports entertainment channels would be directly involved in the operation of gambling of was just completely beyond comprehension?
ahhh, the remote, halcyon, bygone days of 2018...
It was a quaint, simpler time. Now we are much more sophisticated and modern.
All those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned.
It would be interesting to make that sort of thing generic. A law couldn’t legalize something without backporting the legalization.
Pete Rose: reprehensible pariah or radical pioneer?
> All those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned.
That is certainly on the table... as long as they have a couple of million stashed away to put into World Liberty Financial and the charges are federal.
The unwashed poors though... they are SOL.
It increases GDP. Also, have you seen the Dow?
> It increases GDP
I want this rigorously studied.
If it does, I’m more open to it. I don’t think it does. It’s a minuscule industry, macroeconomically spwaking, with massive negative externalities. I think regulating the marketing and conduct of industries proximate to addiction is something productive societies do. (On the other side of the spectrum we have the Qing.)
It's obviously a tongue in cheek comment sir.
> It's obviously a tongue in cheek comment
But it captures a truth. States see lotteries as a funding source. Kalshi and Polymarket are combined valued at the GDP of Iceland (or alternatively, 13 Greenlands).
Casinos are run as a productive part of Nevada’s economy. Lotteries, too, on average, at least in some places. Our liquor and now cannabis industries are economic engines. It isn’t ridiculous to expect gambling apps to wind up in a similar place.
Depends. I imagine the opportunity cost of alcohol and cannabis outweigh their benefits from lost productivity. So likely those industries merely give an illusion of positive economics
The economic windows are less broken when people smoke themselves stupid than they are when we send state violence after those people. This goes for most "bad" things. (State) violence is just that destructive to productivity. See also: prohibition.
It's obviously a joke, but joking that a bad thing is actually good because of some surface-level benefit does raise the question of whether it even has that surface-level benefit.
Humans have tried to ban gambling for as long as gambling existed, and gambling has existed for about as long as homo sapiens. Gambling still exists.
Humans have tried to ban murder for as long as murder existed, and murder has existed for about as long as homo sapiens. Murdering still exists.
Ah yea and 1 billion $ or 100billion $ it's all the same
For those who find this appealing: Fires still burn down houses so what’s the point of fire departments?
Remember when alcohol was illegal? Ahh, the remote, halcyon, bygone days of the 1920s.
How about we treat adults like they're adults and let them make their own choices?
> Remember when alcohol was illegal?
I don’t really gamble. But I agree with you. Prohibition is never the answer.
Our current regime, however, is one where bartenders face zero liability for their patrons’ drunk driving. Making gambling companies liable for problematic gambling is a good start. Banning gambling ads, within apps and without, is a great end. I’d also argue for a cap on bet sizes, but I’m open to being talked out of that.
>Banning gambling ads, within apps and without, is a great end.
That's prohibition.
Of what? It certainly hasn't stopped cigarettes.
If gamblers want to gamble, is not seeing the 30 second video ad the only thing stopping them?
You actually want to ban bet maximums. Regular people get destroyed making small stupid bets on nonsense like freethrows for benchwarmers. Apps only offer those because they put a low max bet so they have little risk on a wager that is impossible to price accurately. If they couldn’t set such a low max then they couldn’t offer those nonsense wagers.
These are systems completely designed to prey on vulnerable people, addicts who can't control their impulse to gamble. That's their purpose. I think it's worth regulating intentionally predatory and harmful industries.
We limit alcohol advertising because it also has an addictive quality.
Limiting gambling ads the same way might be a good step.
When making decisions like this, one should consider not just the desired consequences of the policy, but the difficulty in actually implementing it. Alcohol and narcotics prohibitions fall short here.
It's hard to fully prohibit gambling (because you can play poker around a table, and it's better if that's legalized). It's much easier to prohibit banks from interacting with casinos and TV networks from letting them advertise, as those are large businesses who want to be compliant. That doesn't make gambling itself illegal, but cuts off most of its oxygen.
The problem though is that technically, legally most of this stuff is no longer classified as "gambling". It's now a "prediction market" of which team will win the game.
That's a specific problem of corruption in the current administration. It's not even clear whether this obviously absurd theory of classification will hold up in court, Arizona is already fighting it.
Let's combine the idea of hyper-targeted advertising based on mass data collection with custom tailored addicted substances.
If I design a chemical that will specifically make you fasterik so dependent on it that you'll do any sexually depraved things that a line up of random strangers want so that they'll give you pocket change so that you can get another hit of that chemical should it be illegal for me to surreptitiously give it to you in a product that you buy from me?
Why or why not?
I guess you also think we need to stop policing drunk driving? Because the reasons for regulating gambling are similar.
That's quite a straw man. Drunk driving is and should be illegal because it puts the lives of others at risk. Alcohol is legal because it only puts the health of the drinker at risk. Generally in a free society we accept that adults should be free to make decisions that harm only themselves.
Problem gambling has a similar negative outcome profile (in terms of suicide, financial problems, etc.) as an addiction to hard drugs
It's interesting to be arguing that gambling doesn't put others at risk in the comments to a post about a broad trend of collective harm associated with loosened controls on gambling. Do you think these people exist in a vacuum?
On top of that, sports betting inevitably leads into match fixing, threatening of players etc.
I believe most of the negative impacts you're referring to are covered by existing laws concerning fraud and consumer protection. I'm in favor of making truly fraudulent and predatory behavior illegal. I don't see any evidence that the "collective harm" you mention from the article is anything other than individuals making bad financial decisions.
I believe that I, as a responsible adult, should be allowed to gamble for entertainment if I want to, and my right to do that shouldn't be taken away because a small minority of the population has low impulse control.
> I don't see any evidence that the "collective harm" you mention from the article is anything other than individuals making bad financial decisions.
Legalized gambling establishments do very little besides extract money from visitors and project negative externalities into their surroundings.
> I believe that I, as a responsible adult, should be allowed to gamble for entertainment if I want to, and my right to do that shouldn't be taken away because a small minority of the population has low impulse control.
You can believe that, and be correct in theory. In practice, the "small minority" doesn't appear to be small enough under the current regulatory regime.
It's no different than the regulation of controlled substances and other vices. Or do you have an issue with that as well, and feel you should have the right to consume as much heroin as you want?
I'm pretty liberal when it comes to drugs. I think it's a case by case basis, but I do believe that heroin and most other drugs should be legal and regulated. As long as there's demand, prohibition just leads to black markets, funnels money to cartels, and consumers ultimately get a less reliable and more dangerous product.
Is there any drug that you would consider off limits for recreational consumption? OxyContin or fentanyl for example?
I don't consider those off limits for recreational consumption in safe doses. If fentanyl were legalized, I would see a strong argument for restricting the sale of large amounts of pure fentanyl. Fentanyl lollipops with small doses, I think would be fine.
Regardless, I don't think we should stretch the metaphor between gambling and drugs too far. They are fundamentally different things.
They aren't that different, in that they are addictive, provide no value to society other than entertainment (which is not worthless by any means, but not something that is very heavily weighted in a cost/benefit analysis), and the resulting behavior of addicted individuals is highly negative and has an impact well beyond the addicted individual.
You are on an extreme fringe to put it mildly. It is your right to hold that opinion, but it also means that there's no real point in discussing this with you from what I can tell.
Adults can and do become addicted to gambling (and drugs, etc.) and ruin the lives of themselves and those around them.
Recognizing this fact isn't treating them like children, it's treating them like the adults they are.
There's a fine line between prohibition and all-out attack, everywhere all at once, from TV internet and sports, trying to get everyone addicted to gambling, from 9 to 99 years old.
Like... cigarretes aren't prohibited. But you're hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't agree that we're MUCH better off now with full advertising bans, indoor smoking bans, bans on sales to minors, steep tax, etc, than what we were in the 70s with disgusting cigarrete smoke everywhere.
And yet you can't do a quick Google search to understand that "expecting adults to act like adults" is a ridiculous idea when 80% of people have NPC agency
Prohibition was a mistake and it goes a long way of sorting how people will act stupid regardless
> And research shows young people are particularly at risk of sports gambling problems, lured in by splashy advertisements often featuring celebrities and promises of low risks and high rewards. The Fed study found that the sharpest drop in credit delinquency rates were among people under 40 years old.
There are so many portions of the post Muprhy vs NCAA world that bum me out, but this is by far what makes me the most annoyed. There seem to be so many objectives being achieved while hiding behind the guise of protecting the children. Yet we just let these advertisements slide by and infest broadcasts that children largely consume. Not like getting an older person to buy you a GTA game when you are 12 or something either, this is just watching any sort of sports broadcast, aimed at all ages.
I see some other people here mentioning how we gave into legalized state lotteries and its why we arrived here, its such a stark difference though. There was a ton of back and forth for state lotteries, the results were tons of advertising restrictions, and the profits largely benefited the education system.
Murphy vs NCAA was passed in 2018, we have legal sports betting now in 38 total states after ~8 total years.
New Hampshire legalized state lotteries in 1964, from that point it took 32 years to reach 38 total states with some form of a state lottery.
When I was in college I got lured into one of those pyramid schemes advertised in the middle of the night hoping to make extra money. I wonder how much money I would have lost if I had instant access to betting on a "sure thing" back then.
> the profits largely benefited the education system.
The profits didn't benefit shit. Yes, the money went into education, and that same education system saw commensurate cuts from regular tax revenue.
What it did is shift the state's tax burden towards people who play the lottery... While permanently entrenching the lottery (How can we ban it! It would gut our education budget!).
I agree with your point, its something i kinda didn't really consider how its perversely intertwining itself with the education budget and making itself effectively immune. I still think its a solid demonstration that comparable sports betting legislation surely lacked any sort of compromise at all, as it was all pushed through so aggressively fast.
and the US govt often helps facilitate gambling during downturns so we could see even more direct and indirect promotion of the problem. examples:
+ in stagflation of 70s/early 80s - states create state-run lotteries to help fix their budgets
+ 2008 great recession - states legalize casinos to recover lost tax revenue and prevent folks from traveling out of state to gamble
+ C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue
>+ C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue
This seems questionable given that covid-19 relief funds from the federal government left states flush with cash, causing them to spend lavishly or even cut taxes. It also makes me suspicious of the other examples. Recessions happen every 5-10 years, and if you count the few years after a recession as part of the recession, it's not hard to pattern match a little too aggressively and think it's tied to economic downturns, when it's really a secular trend.
"Lottos help your school!" they said. Until you're in rural bumfuck nowhere, and your lotto win suddenly drags your community's average income from "dirt poor" to "middle class" by becoming Spiders Georg and you end up costing nearly half a mil in state aid to go up in smoke.
https://www.syracuse.com/news/2017/07/one_mans_huge_lottery_...
I'm not sure you read that article all the way through... The loss is $450k, but that's only 3% of the year's state aid and an even smaller amount of the district's operating budget. And it only impacted that one year. Inflation and random political feuds usually impact public school budgets to a far greater degree.
The problem in this case is not that the lotto exists, it's that the formula for awarding school funding is (or was?) broken in this state. This is a textbook example of why you almost always use the median instead of mean on things that have a bell curve.
The house always wins.
I don't know of any long term profitable sports gamblers - but that makes sense because why reveal yourself and your methods if you're profitable?
By long term I mean at least 1,000 bets while still being profitable. Even more impressive if they are making a living off of it.
The only person I can think of is Picks Office on Twitter.
If you profit at sports betting they limit your bet size severely
Even if you don’t profit but place what looks like smart bets
A casino or bookmaker doesn't need to heuristically identify betting behaviour that's 'smart'. They don't need to spot evidence that could be hidden by good opsec. No need to find micro-expressions or hidden cheating gadgets. Nor to do background checks to know you've got a buddy with insider knowledge.
All they need to do is check if you're cashing out more chips than you came in with.
It's not trivial for the casino to track this against a determined adversary. If you're already thinking about "good opsec", you can get someone else to help cash out your winnings.
A buddy from out of town, or a losing regular, or a poker player who the casino doesn't care if they win. In Vegas some casinos' chips are negotiable, officially or unofficially, in other casinos.
Not everywhere. Circa wants winners.
You can just jump bookies.
Except in the state of MA.
They rightfully passed legislation banning such practices. The idea is that if casinos and bookies refuse to cap your downside, they have zero right to cap your upside.
Sports betting is the one place that "prediction markets" make the most sense. Instead of there being a house to win against, the market just skims a fee. The line is set organically by betters, not be the house targeting a profit margin, and the house has no incentive to restrict successful betters because they solely profit on flow, not losses.
You do have to be careful to avoid letting whales manipulate the perceived market. There are ways to con other gamblers with carefully timed bets.
The bigger the market the harder that is, so maybe it doesn't apply at the level of online sports betting. But organized crime could make trouble at horse tracks.
How would that work?
Tony Bloom, the billionaire owner of Brighton & Hove Albion FC seems to be managing it.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/dec/05/brighton-ow...
Tony is also super smart in how he gambled. Your average degenerate is nowhere near as intelligent as Tony is.
I have a very small edge in sports betting although I don't really do any of the deep overpriced/underpriced arbitrage or any special types of bets outside of wins/loses. And it's limited to tennis, a sport I've played my entire life and have followed the pro circuit closely for 3 decades. And even then my edge is very small, and the strategy I use when I do bet doesn't make me much in total return.
I used to work for a sports betting company. These people definitely exist. They are few though because they are the ones who understand that the sport/game/match/whatever is irrelevant. They bet the "odd line". They bet on the platform that screwed up and didn't adjust their line quickly enough to follow the market. They don't know baseball, or football, or tennis. They just know the numbers.
We all have the occasional friend that brags about every time he wins money at the casino. If you accompany them a few times, it’s incredible how the “always winning” story just changes.
What about Frank Rosenthal? Admittedly these guys are extremely rare, that's why the handful of successful ones are famous.
Never heard of him
The movie Casino was loosely based on him. Worth a watch, but also actually looking the real guy up.
Gambling is massive in large parts of Europe. For Spain, in 2022 83.9% of the population participated in gambling. Every time I am outside I am confronted with gambling in some sort of way. I don't think society benefits from it.
> For Spain, in 2022 83.9% of the population participated in gambling
Does that include the Christmas lottery? If so then that’s not really comparable.
It does. A large part of the country participates in that one.
I strongly suspect if one were to dig a little deeper there would probably be some common factors between loosening financial regulations, community economic problems, credit issues of people in those communities, and impetus to gamble.
Is there a causal relationship? If so, in which direction does it flow?
Honest question; sorta related: How long until prostitution is legalized in the United States? Sounds crazy, indeed, but when I was a kid growing up in Missouri - if you told me, someday, businesses will be open on Sunday, alcohol will be legally sold on Sunday, and there will be gambling casinos a few miles from my house, I wouldn't have believed you.
I’m a pretty right leaning libertarian. That said there are some hills I’ll abandon like smoking bans and this being legal.
Gambling seems like a rational choice, when all the ”traditional” rational choices just lead into a mountain of student debt, not being able to afford a home, and general failure to launch
Summed up very nicely in https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy
How could it possibly be the rational choice if the ev doing so is so ridiculously negative?
Having student debt doesn't justify throwing away the rest of your residual income
What's the ev for going to college once you factor in graduation rates?
People that get two or three years of college debt and no diploma have a big hole to fill and a small shovel.
Anyway, I think ev isn't the right tool to model gambling behavior; dollar utility isn't linear. It's more about a small spending for a large potential. But then you get into repeated small wagers and such.
College graduates make over $1 million in their lifetime compared to high school graduates.
> Anyway, I think ev isn't the right tool to model gambling behavior; dollar utility isn't linear.
You're right. The more money you have, the less utility it gives you, which makes gambling for a windfall an even worse decision. Worse still if you include taxes.
> What's the ev for going to college once you factor in graduation rates?
Very positive (IRR ~9%). It's been studied extensively: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstrea...
If I borrow a lot of money to start a business and then don't start the business I would also be in the hole. So, don't do that?
you can always go back and finish later...that's what I'm doing.
My school expires credits after 7 years.
Seeing gambling as rational choice is spectacular fail of logic. It is an emptional choice of action.
Was "emptional" intentional, or a typo? Apparently it's a real word.
> From emption + -al Adjective (obsolete, rare) Capable of being purchased
I think the issue is a lot deeper than the article suggests.
The problem is, society is fucking broken. The middle class is being decimated. People are going to take their destinies into their own hands, as seen by the growth of daytrading and sports betting. With wages being destroyed, billionaires avoiding taxes, COL skyrocketing for the middle and lower classes, and jobs evaporating, who's going to fucking blame someone for trying to figure out how to use what they know (in this case, sports) to make money?
Plus, this generation has seen another class of gamblers (big banks) get bailout after bailout without any problem.
Sports betting is the symptom, not the root cause that needs to be addressed.
I just don't think that theory of causation works even if we assume the premise for the sake of argument. Both daytrading and sports betting are much larger now than in 2009, when I hope we can agree wages were destroyed and jobs were evaporating on a scale we can hardly imagine today.
American citizens have willingly given up their freedom and allowed themselves to be captured by corporate control.
Gambling can be a fun way to make a game more interesting. Some people can't stop there, but government lost any moral high ground when they legalized state lotteries.
>but government lost any moral high ground when they legalized state lotteries.
What's the implication here? "In for a penny, in for a pound", so might as well legalize every other form of gambling?
I think so. If you're going to regulate sports betting (and I think there are good arguments for doing that), but you yourself run a lottery which is a tax on people who don't understand probability, then you are just preaching in a "do as I say not as I do" kind of way.
You regulate other vices (alcohol, tobacco). Limiting gambling to govt owned lotteries or licenced operators is no different, you can set limits on harm, remove the profit motive if the govt operates it, and (at least where I live) the state lottery funds a large number of community grants.
Regulating it also removes demand for underground or foreign online gambling.
The difference between the ability to make bets 2-3 times a week for a dollar or two and the ability to drop $500 every play of a sporting event is dramatic.
That describes someone with maybe an irresponsible but manageable gambling habit, not a gambling addict.
Maybe it's because of pay-at-the-pump popularity now but have you never seen someone standing off to the side of the main gas station counter surrounded by a pile of scratch offs? People exist who will drop their entire paycheck on them in a single day. I've also seen people buy irresponsibly large stacks of Powerball tickets and not just the "oh, I like to fantasize about winning so I buy a ticket each week since you can't win if you don't play". It's gambling all the same.
What about someone buying $50 of scratchers a day? Why conflate a reasonable habit on one thing with an unreasonable habit on the other when both can obviously be done reasonably or unreasonably?
The predominate reasoning for a long time now has been lotteries are addicting and bad but a small demand is guaranteed. Therefore, in the name of maximizing social benefit, only the government should run them and the profit is used to funds something less partisan (e.g. education, parks, conservation, gambling addiction services)
For these private betting firms, it's open season trying to find whales like mobile gaming, and there's no end to their greed and exploitation.
Does it really make games more interesting? If anything, doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game?
Is anxiety interesting?
And if you only bet a negligible amount of money, then the outcome of the game doesn't really matter all that much.
> Does it really make games more interesting?
> If anything, doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game?
> Is anxiety interesting?
Yes. Adding anxiety generally makes things more interesting. Think of watching a story or a film or a game play out. Good stories often involve giving the reader some anxiety. Tension. Not knowing what's going to happen, but being somehow invested in it ... to stay engaged.
I am staying away from sports betting, but I have done fantasy football a few times. I was constantly on edge from it all, even when I was winning! Constantly thinking of who I needed to pick up, who to trade, which matchups were good, it was a time sink.
And I ended up losing to my 10 year old nephew for the championship game!
> doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game?
I don’t generally like gambling. On a recent trip to Vegas I socially gambled with friends and won about $5k, but then lost $500 of it and was more annoyed about losing that sum than the net amount gained. Such is my personality.
That said, a friendly game of poker is absolutely more fun with a $10 buy-in or whatnot. So I can see the general idea holding water. What we don’t need are (a) ads or (b) large bets.
Fun turns to disaster when you lose. Sadly, many can't control it, destroying entire lives in the process.
(Not passing judgment)
There are significant, real differences in betting on a random number generator once a week and betting constantly on the real outcomes of individual behaviors. Most notably with sports, institutionalized prop bets destroy the integrity of the game.
At least with win/loss, the ability to outright manipulate the outcome for financial gain by players, coaches and refs is a lot harder to accomplish without detection. Prop bets? Who knows if a player or ref or coach made a decision on who gets the first 3pt basket of the second half?
Yeah I've never made a prop bet, or even a points bet, that feels too degenerate to me. I have occasionally made a $10 money line bet on a game and that does make it more interesting to me in that now I have a small stake in the outcome. YMMV.
And people do spend stupid amounts of money on Powerball tickets too. I just think if the state is running a numbers racket, that they don't have much of a leg to stand on when they want to regulate other gambling.
"Someone did a bad thing, now we must do all the bad things."