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.
Before it was legal, most people's experiences with sports betting were small wagers between friends. Maybe a few large bets that they'll still talk about to this day. Gambling with friends or even just coworkers comes with natural limits: the size of one's bets is limited by others' aversions to risk, compulsive gambling is easily spotted, and the players' winnings/losings are zero sum.
Yes, there were illegal bookies before legalization, and they had all the problems of legalized gambling plus more. But the law-abiding (or at least casually law-breaking) majority of voters didn't think increasing the prevalence of sports gambling would hurt. Not too mention all the revenue promises (more benefits, cuts to other taxes). It's no surprise legalization was politically popular.
Yeah, making a small "fun" bet on a game is a way to make it more interesting. I've done it a few times and it really does. I'm talking maybe $20 though, I am far too frugal to put any real money at risk on a bet. I don't go to casinos for the same reason, I'd play a few hands or put maybe $20 into a slot machine and then I'd really start thinking about how I'm flushing my money down the toilet and I'd stop having fun.
My mother in law loves it, she will go to the casino and come home up $1,000 or down $1,000 and it's all just entertainment to her. She loses probably a steady 5% on average, which is exactly what the casinos want.
no... if she's losing a steady 5% of $1000 bucks, she's paying 50 dollars to the casino. That's not enough for the casinos... her room costs more.
The casinos want her to spending a lot more money. That's the really big problem of gambling... most people can do it in a relatively healthy way. But problem gamblers make the house most of their money. The house is strongly encouraged to find the problem gamblers and focus on keeping them.
Get off the Strip. In Fremont you can play $10 tables. Most casinos even on the Strip you can play $25 (not saying this is good) but the $50-100 minimums are usually reserved for Friday and Saturday nights.
I lived in Australia for quite a while. It's a terrible example of what can happen. There was recently a very good BBC article on it and the connection between sports, gambling, and marketing: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2yg3k82y0o
Similar to many other toxic things, once the genie is out of the bottle and the government gets used to the revenue it generates, there is a large disincentive to tackling the problem.
For the government, it probably doesn't generate net revenue, because the government has to pick up a lot of the bill for gambling problems. Lobbying corruption, though, is another matter.
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 for the value of sports betting for some people, but it seems that the Sportsball enthusiasts don't like desecration of their Holy Church. I apologize.
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?
Short answer: No, I'm not. People are generally extremely intolerant of others who deviate slightly from the norm. Having friends is a fun fantasy, though.
Out of my entire friendgroup there's perhaps 2 people that are into any sports at all to the level of regularly watching it.
I think what you need is to see a therapist and to rethink your position in life a bit, because it seems very misanthropic without being based on reality. I'd wager that most people don't care about sports all that much, at least anecdotally.
> People are generally extremely intolerant of others who deviate slightly from the norm.
I strongly disagree with this.
A lot of us in the furry fandom have friends who are not furry. You would not believe the number of "normal" people who have seen pictures of my fursuit and thought it was cool. Everyone in my bible study thinks furry conventions look like fun but they would never attend a convention themselves.
And if your difference is not with identity or hobbies, significant number of our group are neurodivergent and/or LGBTQ+(whatever the acronym is today).
Despite what's happening currently, US culture has gotten less uptight about these things in the last three decades. With the internet people have a lot more exposure to things they wouldn't have seen before. And I believe, more accepting as a result.
Finding a friend can be difficult, but with the internet it is not impossible.
> I'm explaining a real, actual reason for the value of sports betting for some people, but it seems that the Sportsball enthusiasts don't like desecration of their Holy Church. I apologize.
Holy hell you stepped on a nerve. I appreciate the perspective though, I've attended sportsball matches with friends and a couple bucks on the outcome would likely have made it more engaging.
Why do you bother even watching it at this point? I think I watched exactly one soccer game in last 5 years (it was a final of something big, can't remember now), there are a lot of other interesting activities in life.
This. There’s plenty of things in society that are similarly bad, legal, but have restrictions on how you can sell them. There’s nothing inherently different about sports betting than options trading on a brokerage platform. But only one of them is advertised in every commercial break during a sports event.
People have known for years - that’s the really terrifying part. Heck, when I was in business school I wrote a paper on the dangers of sports betting. There were many resources available then…and heck, Gmail invites were a rare commodity when I was in school.
Edit - I just found a printed copy of the paper - I wrote it so long ago that the term 'sociopathic compulsive consumer' was being used. At the time, I found a lot of evidence of casinos using terms like 'instant gratification' in their marketing commmunications. This is over two decades ago. Heck, the actual paper is on a 3.5 inch floppy.
I was briefly involved with a major sports & esports betting company. It was way grosser than I ever imagined, and they had multiple astroturf campaigns working on legalizing betting in more places.
Took me from a generally laissez-faire attitude about gambling, to being entirely on board with simply outlawing at least that sector of it. So very nasty.
(Incidentally, this did answer a question for me: “how did esports get so big so fast, financially?”. Never made much sense to me. The money’s in gambling, and it’s a fucking lot of money. Lightbulb went on and I felt dumb for not realizing it sooner)
I'm completely with you, my friend. I was in business school when I studied betting. All the stereotypes of business students are true - I could have suggested putting thalidomide into lollipops and nobody would have batted an eye.
Despite that, my class had a serious problem with legalized gambling. One of the most free market absolutists I have ever met even concluded that gambling should just be outlawed. He was (and I believe still is) completely in favour of all drugs being legalized, but legalized gambling bothered him in a way that legalized crack cocaine never could have. What pushed him over was how they fund legalization campaigns with all these promises for help for addicts - they'll usually even offer to put a portion of total book into rehabilitation. And then as soon as it is legalized, they will specifically target people who could become addicted.
I had a long-haul flight last year and was sat next to a gentleman who worked for one of those betting companies in Europe who I had a chat with during the flight. The guy exuded pure sliminess from the minute he explained his job, and I couldn't believe the kinda crap he was proud of peddling to people.
It's a good grift unfortunately, an insane amount of money is involved in it as is usually the case with these sorts of morally bankrupt endeavors.
It’s where a ton of the money in the overall sector comes from, and why a lot of the viewers are watching. There’s a large audience that wants anything to gamble on, and gaming’s very convenient for streaming and stats-collection and such, plus it has frequent matches. There are sponsorships and all that, but I doubt those would be as big as they are without the gambling, either (the audience would decline significantly). Lots of the tournaments are funded wholly or in part by gambling.
I'm far from an expert in the issue, but I think that most people that support the legalization of prostitution don't support the legalization of human trafficking.
That's a really bad example because prostitution by itself is victimless crime. In fact, it's perfectly legal when money doesn't change hands! With gambling you have a winner and a loser, so all the other issues end up downstream necessarily whereas human trafficking (and other issues with sex work) is an enabling tool for criminals running prostitution operations.
i think in both cases regulation is the key. for gambling there could be max $ per bet/month/year and for SW more testing and background checks to blacklist bad actors
