The Dark Reality of Sports Betting and Daily Fantasy Games | Hacker News Reader

The Dark Reality of Sports Betting and Daily Fantasy Games

nytimes.com

57 pointsprostoalex59 comments

> “People would argue that it’s a victimless crime, and it’s not,” said Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, who has successfully prosecuted several gambling rings with Mafia connections. “Those who participate in it often use threats and intimidation.” Profits from these illegal rings also fund other criminal enterprises.

Funny. Likely, the ONLY reason the Mafia and threats and intimidation and shady deals and violence are involved is because it's illegal. Legalize the activity, and all that goes away overnight. MGM Grand and Caesars replace sketchy-web-site.com, and VISA and MasterCard replace paper bags full of cash. Lots of parallels with the war on drugs here.

Agreed. That's a very law enforcement specific view which is unsurprisingly circular logic.

> Likely, the ONLY reason.

No way. People who enjoy shady deals and violence will likely find a way to enjoy life despite their circumstances.

I also bet illegal enterprises run more efficiently.

It has been interesting to watch this play out in Colorado since the legalization of cannabis for recreational use. I haven't seen any analyses of data attempting to answer this question, but my sense is that, although it is more expensive, it is better in every other way and more than justifies the cost. There are certainly inefficiencies involved in regulatory compliance and taxation, but there are also plenty of inefficiencies involved in running an illegal operation.

Not sure MGM Grand and Caesars would swoop in so easily to replace them, as both have filed for bankruptcy recently.

Which kind of bankruptcy? I was just in Vegas and both of those properties looked to be making money.

not super sure about MGM Grand but Caesars was just chapter 11 right?

I wonder if the "Queens district attorney" has a skewed, or biased view of the gambling world. If you're living in rural America miles away from the city/organized crime and you gamble online - how vulnerable are you to threats?

I'm not sure how payment works, but wouldn't the idea of "shaking down Johnny" for failure to pay his gambling debts be reduced due to the use of digital currency? As in, there shouldn't be a way to bet and then "stiff" your bookie?

Who do you think were the largest backers _AGAINST_ online poker? The brick-n-mortar casinos.

When it comes to arguments for/against legalization, MGM Grand/Caesars are the mafia aspect of it. "We want to continue our racket, and continue to 'help you out,' so it would be a terrible thing, Senator, if this bill were to pass."

I wonder who he thinks the state lotto victimizes?

I have friends who are very into this and it is something I simply cannot understand. No one I know has ever won money in the long run, they all lose. Usually when you ask "How much have you won?" they will tell you "Oh, about $x" but what they mean is not how much they are up net in the long haul. They will get on a streak and keep betting until they are up about 1000 or so, then start losing and keep betting until they have to put more money in the account. That doesn't count as a loss to them though, they add that 1000 to the total. These people are both in denial to themselves and others about how much they have lost, its like they don't understand the concept that when you lose the money you won, you aren't "winning" at all. There are some of them who understand that they are losing but they don't care, they say that they bet because it makes sports more interesting, and these people seem to have the habit in a reasonable amount of control. The other's don't seem to realize it's never going to be "the next bet" that lets them cash out.

I made about €250 from €20 with a series of bets relating to Euro 2012, and that's where I stopped.

The only remaining slight interest I have in betting is possible automated "exploits". For example, some bookies will give you 1.01 odds in live betting even when the outcome is almost certain. So with a little luck and a clever algorithm, you could increase your money by 1% each time, making several bets per day.

Unfortunately, they'd ban you pretty quickly. They ban anyone who wins too much. My bwin account was locked shortly after I cashed out.

Laying 1.01 shots can be a very profitable business, as far too many people think a near-certainty is the same as a certainty. You won't last long backing all of them. If you want to try it, sign up with Betfair and share your money with the world :-)

Bookies and betting exchanges will take commission too. This kind of betting is not particularly lucrative.

Better systems involve looking for unusually high odds by comparing across exchanges/bookies, backing/laying, waiting for them to swing back into favour, and backing/laying to lock in a profit regardless of the outcome. You can back/lay to minimise your losses if the odds don't swing as much as you thought. Other systems involve backing all possible outcomes (Team X wins, Team X loses, and draw - for example) across multiple bookies such that you guarantee a profit.

A good way to start and dip your toes in the water is matched betting. Place bets at bookies and LAY the same outcome at an exchange - do it right and the net loss will be a few pennies/cents. Use this technique to syphon money out of bookies offering free bets for new accounts. How much you make is limited, but I made a few thousand doing this at university.

edit: Matched betting isn't useful only for free bets mind. You can use this techinque to take advantage of some promotions too. One story that comes to mind is a friend who matched bet on horses. The offer was that if you bet £X for Y horse to come in 1st and the horse actually came in 2nd - you get a £X free bet up to a limit of £350. He did four or five times that day. Two times his horse came second. The other times, since the bet was matched, he only made a small loss (less than £5).

Just seen this on Twitter:

@BetfairRacing: After taking an early lead Marmalad traded at 1.01 for over £18K before getting get beaten on the line by Brasted. http://t.co/ht4mo7suyj

It's popularized (il)legal gambling, you don't understand it because you aren't justifying an addiction to yourself.

BTW you've pretty much explained the thought process of everyone who gambles at anything regularly.

To me this just mirrors what people would write about drinking in the prohibition era[1].

There are some people for whom gambling is a profitable profession (I was one such person), some for whom gambling is a reasonable recreational activity, some for whom it is a life-crushing addiction, and there are many shades in between.

And prohibition only makes things worse for all the actors. Professionals and amateurs alike have to play on sketchy sites that fund criminals to make their living, and people end up being exploited by the lack of regulation similar to how you might die of alcohol poisoning from moonshine you drank in a speak-easy in the 20s[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_can...

[2] Here's one example where a poker site stole millions of dollars from its players. There were many such cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cereus_Poker_Network

I don't think he has. You've equated regular gambling with losing.

Casino games, against the house, and computerised "slots" are gambling games which can't be beaten long term.

Sports gambling is very different, and can be beaten. There are many, many sports bettors and traders who make steady, serious income from their bets. This is true especially when using betting exchanges, where one is betting against other people, rather than a single bookmaker. Individual bookmakers are notorious for closing winning punters' accounts. On the betting exchange, the house just take their commission from all your winnings. The successful trader factors into their strategies the platform commission.

The key for successful sports betting is the concept of value. The bettor needs to find prices which are incorrect, and over what they believe the true odds should be. If the strategy is correct, continually placing value bets will lead to long term profit.

http://formbet.co.uk/value-betting-101/

http://formbet.co.uk/saturday-review-6k-banked/

I think you are drawing a distinction between games where the odds are constant and built into the game, (eg roulette), and games where there is a degree of skill involved but still an element of chance, eg. sports betting where a person with extraordinary insight or privileged information will win more often in the long run than a person who just bets on their favorite team every Sunday. Arguably stock trading and poker fall into this same category.

For some people though this is just plain betting. They don't have a strategy or an angle, they just believe they might get lucky and for these people this form of behavior equates games with skill to rote gambling.

Some people just gamble because it's fun. Odds in blackjack are about 1% in favor of the house, which means you're (probabilisticly) paying 10c/hand at a $10 table. If you enjoy it, like meeting people, and take advantage of the complimentary drinks it's pretty inexpensive entertainment.

Sports gambling's primary purpose is not to make money. It's not the stock market. There are professional gamblers who make steady and good income but for the majority it's about the fun of having some juice on a game you're watching.

Like all forms of gambling there are those who take it too far and it becomes a problem in their life, but for the majority it's just lottery ticket they play every week while they watch games with their friends.

People get hurt whenever a vice becomes so easily done in secret. Going to the pub to drink is one thing, drinking at home another, and ordering bulk vodka online a third. The more private certain vices become, the easier it is to fall into the trap. That's why I seriously dislike online gambling.

There is something to be said for the physicality of location-based betting. It is more healthy to at least walk from your hotel room to the casino floor than play the same games via an iPad alone in your room.

Do you have the same opinions for stock market investing at your house?

Yes. The line between daytrading and gambling is slight. It can become a vice. And trading from home is far more dangerous than driving to the floor or trading via a human broker. It's the speed, the potential for instant gratification, that ups the addiction risk.

The speed and instant gratification of using a search engine to find information online is becoming a problem for me. I'm only going to conduct information searches at a public library from now on.

Almost everything we used to physically undertake can now be achieved online, with perhaps the exception of physical stimulation by a third party, and that's probably not too far away. Society needs to realise that if there's gambling at bookmakers on the high street, there's going to be gambling online. As another poster has suggested, the US should consider legalising and then regulating the activity, not continuing with prohibition.

Of course there will be people who suffer addiction and financial issues due to online gambling problems. In the same way, there are people who can't stop surfing porn, who can't stop messaging/texting/updating Facebook while driving, who basically now never leave the house because they're on their arse surfing the Net at home. It's not going to stop.

There are many, many positive aspects to modern connectivity. It is how society deals with the negative aspects of online culture that is important.

I've suffered gambling problems. Of all the times I've gambled, Casino's hurt the least. I generally had the most fun, lost an amount I was in control of and didn't feel too bad afterward and generally was in good company.

In a Casino, at some point you have the cold hard cash in your hands. This makes a big difference. Secondly, there are lots of barriers in your way, for example maximum withdrawl on debit cards, actually having to queue up for cash for the nth time as supposed to just clicking a button, actual time to mentally prepare (you need to get there, plan your money - it's harder to 'impulse' gamble from location x) etc etc.

Stock market by far was the most damaging, and the most exciting especially when you get into leveraged forex plays or options. The big barrier here for joe public though is the order of magnitude higher complexity to actually make a gamble over an easy to understand proposition (like a horse).

For now stock market gambling is probably OK due to it's general inaccessibility, but there is a big move into making it more accessible: so called "Social trading" for example.

The platforms are significantly more accessible to average punters who I believe are going to increasingly start using these services for gambling, because these places are actually thinly disguised gambling houses. The spreads they offer are ludicrously expensive, the promotions they offer are aggressive (and borderline scam), and the marketing message sucks people into a false sense of security about what activity they are actually engaging in. This is in my opinion the big danger in the future. It's hard to lose your house at a casino in one go, or with online poker. Plausible to lose your house in one single bet gone wrong in Forex/Options and the social trading platforms look pretty and friendly.

'Social trading' in my experience and opinion is pretty damn irresponsible, and is executed pretty damn unethically. What benefit the offer society and their users I've yet to see apart from getting a nice adrenaline fix.

> In a Casino, at some point you have the cold hard cash in your hands. This makes a big difference.

That's not what i've seen in modern US casinos. It's been a few years, but I remember people using cards for slot machines. The image I remember most was a man in a wheelchair with his card on a lanyard around his neck. The card was in the slot machine. He looked physically tied to the machine, never moving except for one finger on a button. It looked like something out of the matrix.

That was almost certainly a rewards card that tracks peoples playing for comps. Every slot machine I've ever seen still requires you to insert either cash or a ticket cashed out from another machine.

The cards are for rewards like free rooms and meals. I used to make enough playing positive expectation video poker to pay for my flights and as many trips as I wanted as long as I played 8 hours a day. I got many free rooms and meals as comps using cards with a girl I'd take with me. Sadly too many people figured out how to play positive expectation and make money and the paytables have changed to where it's not as easy as it was 15 years ago.

> Do you have the same opinions for stock market investing at your house?

Look at Uli Hoeness, former manager of FC Bayern. He fucked up big time with leveraged deals, lost all his gains and had to pay taxes on gains which no longer existed, netting him a stint in jail instead.

I don't see why his theory would treat stock investing differently. Trading in public would still be harder than doing it through your computer.

The expected value of trading stocks is at least slightly positive. If you invest totally randomly, you will, on average, win more money than you lose. You still lose money in fees and stuff though. But you are at least starting from a positive sum game with a positive expected value.

Gambling is the exact opposite. It's all a zero sum game. For everyone that wins something, someone else is losing something. At best it's exactly break even.

I suspect you're mixing up cause and effect. Individuals drink at home alone because they have a drinking problem not the other way around.

It's true if you outlaw drinking and gambling etc then there are people who would become addicted that never do because they never have the experience. But that creates all sorts of other issues (organized crime, corruption, higher costs for those who partake thus destroying lives more rapidly) Best to make it legal, tax it and ensure you take those tax proceeds to try and offset the costs.

Good thing all those guys are drinking at 10am every day in a bar, if they were doing it in the privacy of their homes they'd have a drinking problem!

It's mentioned in the article that the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA) this was tacked onto a must-pass safe port bill hours before adjournment for 2006 elections. It doesn't go into much detail. From wikipedia:

"... the SAFE Port Act (H.R. 4954) as passed by the House on May 4 and the United States Senate on September 14, bore no traces of the Unlawful Internet Gambling and Enforcement Act that was included in the SAFE Port Act signed into law by George W. Bush on October 13, 2006. The UIGEA was added in Conference Report 109-711 (submitted at 9:29pm on September 29, 2006), which was passed by the House of Representatives by a vote of 409-2 and by the Senate by unanimous consent on September 30, 2006. Due to H.RES.1064, the reading of this conference report was waived."

The legislative branch is broken.

I was a professional poker player at the time this bill was passed, and it caused a lot of pain for a lot of people. Players' funds were frozen (and a lot of professional gamblers kept essentially their entire net worth online at the time). If you want to learn more about that story, there's an excellent documentary called "Bet, Raise, Fold (2013)". Many of my friends from that world who were also into sports and sports betting have now moved over to professional fantasy sports betting.

It kills me that it makes exceptions for the brands of gambling in bed with the Republican party (NFL, horse racing), and was passed without an actual vote. A friend of mine who works for the casino lobby told me that it would have been included, but because American casinos were late to the game (by 2006 the industry was dominated by two companies: one started by an Israeli group and the other by some big-name professional poker players from the USA) they wanted those companies to get squeezed out of the American markets first, so that they could come mop the industry up themselves (which hasn't worked very well, beyond some state-specific cases).

My opinion on policy is that prohibition is the wrong approach, but that maybe there should be some type of regulation to protect people with gambling problems from ruining their lives. There absolutely needs to be regulation about making it clear how much of your bet is being raked (the bookmaker's vig). Many online casinos intentionally obfuscate these numbers and are able to run absolutely insane margins based on the fact that many people don't understand what they're paying to play.

On the other hand, I don't hear people clamoring for regulation of Day Trading, which is exactly the same.

Another painful part was that companies sought to obtain legal clarification on how it impacted their operations. The industry essentially split in 2006 into firms willing to take the risk that poker was legal, and those who didn't want to take that risk.

I believe people in government took advantage of this ambiguity to allow business to continue so they could later confiscate funds from payment processors to boost their careers and budgets. I permanently lost money in at least two instances where payment processors were shut down.

I also think there should not only be a clear communication of how much is raked, but there should be a mandatory minimum % that is returned back into the pool (or a cap on the rake) so that it can be demonstrated as in fact a game of skill.

Tell our friend from Australia I said HI.

My father was heavily affected by this. He went from making thousands of dollars a month from online poker to making about fifty bucks a month on average in the online poker memberships (playing almost as much as he used to, but not quite). He follows the sloooow news of getting it legalized again on a state basis, which for the past several years a few states have been on the verge of doing (a couple might have already as far as I know).

He went from a staunch Republican to anti-Congress pretty much overnight with the passage of this bill, and I've probably heard him complain about fifteen times about how Congress is so corrupt and a lobbyist representing Harrah's casino apparently "bought" a senator to get him to slip this into the SAFE Port Act (which in the aftermath of 911 was guaranteed to pass) for only $50,000.

No one's money was frozen.

If you had money on "NETELLER" or "Moneybookers" (Skrill), they forced you to cash out and that was it. Party Poker also stopped offering play to US citizens, but they too also sent you a check. If you were on Full Tilt or Pokerstars, you could continue to play (assuming you weren't too shellshocked from the news).

Agree with the rest of what you said though.

I don't get something : if this is an algorithm who determines the outcome of a match, it is really easy to fix a match. What is preventing it ?

The fantasy sports competitions are all based upon the real-world performance of players in actual matches. What you're thinking of is something called virtual betting, popular (for some damn reason) in legal betting jurisdictions where bookies offer odds on entirely computer-generated horse races, motor races, football matches and so on.

The vague (non-existant?) boundary between fantasy sports and 'real' betting is that fantasy sports are never directly based on one match, so you can't directly bet on one team beating another. The competitions (i.e. betting) is on the performance of player-selected team members across a range of teams.

It is basically betting under a different name, but because the events are more abstract, they have succeeded for now from being categorised as betting.

In traditional betting, you have an observable outcome that is external from the bookie (let's say most of the time, unless the match is fixed). Here, if I understand correctly, the bookies are also simulating the match or rather the season without any external control, or third party auditing. It would be pretty easy to tip the odds in their favor if they have too much to lose. Either I am missing the obvious, or this is a mind boggling stupid way to bet on something.

When it comes to fantasy sports(and in this case, daily fantasy sports), it sounds like you're missing something.

Using football as an example, players(gamblers) select professional players from across all the teams playing in an upcoming set of games. As those games are played, the players they chose score points for a variety of different actions in the game. The person with the team with the most points at the end of the series is 1st place, though the prizes are divided in various ways depending on the game.

On sites like Fanduel and Draftkings, the scoring system is viewable by anyone(look for rules & scoring in their footers) and as a result, totally auditable. You can look up detailed records of every single action by every single player in a game and match it with the fantasy points scores.

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Draft Kings is simply stock market day trading redux.

Some people win, some people lose...for the life of me I can't see any difference between the two, so either let both continue or (somehow) eliminate them.

Oh well, time to burn some hard earned karma :)

I am currently teaching myself Python, going through the "Learn Python the Hard Way" book. About half way through I wanted to work on a real project, to get a feel for the limitations of the language, find the best resources etc.

I decided to make a football (soccer to my fellow Americans :) betting analyzer. It came to me after seeing a comment on HN from one user whose side income comes from a site he runs giving betting tips. After visiting his site, I read one of his betting strategies and decided it was something that could easily be automated with a Python script. Also, because I hate football with a passion, I saw it as something which would force me to use the data, strategy, analysis and empirical results instead of my "intuition"

Wow, what a rabbit hole I dived into. As a learning experience, I have to say it has been very enlightening. I've learned about:

-the awesomeness of iPython for "code brainstorming"

-the messiness and unreliability of web scraping. $DIETY bless try: except

-the absolute horror of dealing with unicode and names like D'Angelo in csv files.

-the joy of getting to experiment with Big Data! (19 million football matches in 1 year!)

-the deeper joy of bug hunting (hint: variable in the wrong part of an additive loop and 100K matches turn into 19 million)

-the ins and outs of various data structures.

-the pain of dumping MySQL for postgresql (only because I was trying -get this- to get postgres running under vagrant and accessing it via a Windows based graphic frontend)

And that is just the programming side.

On the motivational side, I though it would be a good idea to "dog-food" my software. So I started to wager real cash on the predictions my system was throwing up. Dog-food and throw up are a quite acceptable description of results to date. (BTW, for anyone worrying, I had a gambling problem as a teen which I licked, and I have kept to my original $100 bank to use, which is now down to about $20, was up to $150 at one point, but as another commenter said, a lot of gamblers only seem to remember the wins they have, not the re-buy-ins. Part of my system involves bankroll management, which includes cash-flow, PnL and other measures.)

But as this is HN I do have a startup idea!!!

I have already bought the domain betopian.com. I reached out the the CTO of quantopian.com as I want to make something similar. (He was gracious enough to reply, thanks Jean!) The reason for this is that as part of my research into betting strategies, I found a common theme: nobody backtests their strategies. In fact, quite a few times I have seen people berated for wanting to backtest because... reasons. Some of these reasons seem quite reasonable - eg you need domain knowledge not just data.

For me though, it seems the biggest reason for not backtesting is that the multitude of "strategies" fail, and testing would show that. But a lot of betting strategies rely on a "feel" for the bet. If it fails, "Oh, unlucky" if it wins "Solid strategy dude!!" I would like to create a place where people would have to prove that their strategy is just that - a thought out, long term plan of attack on how to bet on a sport.

Because I think that is what drives a gambling addiction - losses are just plain bad luck and wins are solid logical thinking.

Secondly, as I have seen through my 'experiment' gambling isn't just luck. If it was, we wouldn't expect to see gambling companies being so profitable. When you find the sure winners, you find you can't bet on them. The bookies spend money on their own form of "betopian" I think. Or basically raw math talent who really understand probability theory.

So I dream (and I have nowhere near the technical ability to make it happen - yet) of betopian.com being a site where gamblers can have their dreams safely dashed, and maybe open their eyes to the reality of the betting world. It's stacked against you in ways you cannot imagine.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on this idea.

[edit: formatting]

Just tax it and regulate it, enough with the puritan witch hunts.

But taxation can itself become addiction. When a government earns enough from gambling it becomes a necessity. Rather than dissuade, the government starts promoting the vice (ie state lottos). Some say this has happened with smoking, that countries like Canada and the UK now take in more through taxing cigs than they spend on treating smoke-related disease. That's the danger of vice.

But many states that ban gambling already have lotteries, so the two aren't as clearly linked as you think. Plus, stating the governments 'promote the vice' is a big stretch, governments don't promote the lotteries, the companies that run them do.

As for taxation on cigarettes, why should all the money go to treating smokers? It's fantastic that there is extra cash to go to other causes. You cite the UK government but you'd be hard-pressed to find evidence that they are promoting smoking, indeed the laws on smoking advertising keep getting tougher and tougher.

I suspect that you've just got an axe to grind against governments in general.

But many states that ban gambling already have lotteries, so the two aren't as clearly linked as you think.

This is a non sequitur. Banning lottery competitors certainly would be "promoting" the lottery.

For lotteries in particular, it's a little unclear. The lottery-playing public seem to love gigantic jackpots (just see all the press when a jackpot grows obscenely large. Why would a small-time player buy more tickets to win $100 million, but not bother to buy a ticket to win $1 million? But still they do...) , and the more lottery companies out there, the more distributed the money becomes, leading to smaller jackpots and thus fewer players. So the difference between licensing one lottery and several might not be much.

(I wonder if any has done studies on this? There must be some 'optimal' (for tax revenue) number of lotteries for a jurisdiction)

I think you missed my point. If the purpose of increased taxation on vices like cigarettes is to dissuade people from a particular activity, that goal is missed once the taxation become a profitable venture. The government becomes reliant on the vice and risks switching into a promotional mode.

Raising money to treat smokers is all well and good, but I'd rather see fewer people smoking. If a government becomes reliant to the tax revenue it risks becoming as addicted to cigarette use as the people it was once trying to stop smoking. Such traps are what separates vice from other pleasurable activities.

But I haven't seen (and you haven't shown) any real evidence of governments promoting these vices. I do get your point, there's clearly a conflict of interest here, and I too would prefer people to stop smoking rather than countries making money from it.

I reckon that actually the only real limiting factors involved are that if government taxes something like cigarettes too much, then the black market steps in and more people buy untaxed products, cutting the tax revenues. In fact I suspect that's already happening in some countries (black market cigarettes are big in the UK, for instance. There are occasional busts of lorries packed full of untold millions of them, and anecdotally, most people seem to know of someone who sells them).

Perhaps (speculation time) this actually keeps governments from even considering promoting vices like smoking? The current balance of taxes and government controls on advertising vs the black market means that there's marginal benefits to increasing demand, and current taxations are 'optimal' ?

Really? I cannot turn on the TV or radio without hearing an ad for government-owned gambling.

Just look at this: http://www.bclc.com/ And here is their twitter feed: https://twitter.com/bclc

That's the British Columbia Lottery corporation, the crown-owned business with a monopoly on gambling in my province. They buy ads, sell tickets, license betting venues, and even run their own online casino (playnow.com). BC is not unique among states/provinces in this regard. How can one not describe this as governments promoting gambling?

It's a company who has the license to run a lottery. Of course they advertise! Now in this case, the company is owned by the crown, but would you expect any different if it was owned by non-government money? I'm still not sure why you think that the government is acting differently here.

> Plus, stating the governments 'promote the vice' is a big stretch, governments don't promote the lotteries, the companies that run them do.

Where do the companies that run them get the revenue and authority to promote them?

Just because the states outsource the management doesn't mean that they are absolved of all of the effects.

are you saying the Canadian government is promoting smoking?

Not yet. Let's see how they handle e-cigs.

But I would definitely say the Canadian government promotes drinking. They have a practical monopoly on many forms of alcohol. Whether they turn a net profit re medical costs is complicated, but they certainly do earn lots of money from sales.

(fyi Canadian government control of alcohol sales is a holdover from prohibition days in the US. The provinces actually sell the alcohol to the public. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverages_in_Canada#...)

it's plausible that gov't can become addicted to vice taxes. However, on the cig. tax, there is no evidence of that this is the norm. In fact, in both US and Canada, smoking rate has gone down significantly so something is working and therefore, we shouldn't be too concern with this gov't addiction red herring.

As a very heavy smoker, I just laugh at all the furor surrounding smoking. High taxes, warning labels, interventions. I know exactly how bad smoking is, the empirical evidence is unassailable, but my question is, and has always been:

If smoking is sooo bad, to me, to pregnant women, to children, to the planet: Why on earth is it still legal?

I know taxes play a part of this, but I really wonder how much is due to tobacco lobbying? I read an article recently (which is making me think long and hard about quitting smoking) about the American Chamber of Commerce, and how they are throwing around their weight in various central Asian countries to keep anti-tobacco laws from being passed. I mean, I hate but understand lobbyists. But the ACC I (naively?) thought was above political intrigues to promote American business interests.

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