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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

I find it puzzling that the reaction to the lottery here on HN and among many tech people I know is very different to say... fantasy sports betting.

With sports betting, not only do you have the prospect of wasting lots of time, but you end up getting hooked to obsessive watching of ESPN and tracking player stats, wasting lots of time. With lotto, I drop $2 and I'm done.

Yet the consensus seems to be the the millions of people buying lotto tickets are all rubes, but the folks flouting the law and running bookmaking operations on the internet are disrupting staid government regulation?

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Probably because fantasy sports betting is not a 100% game of chance and that application of data science ostensibly increases your chances of winning.

As with poker versus slots, one may require more time/work to become a reliably winning player, but the payoff is larger. With slots, you pull the lever and you're done.

Ultimately, though, gamblers of all kinds find these sorts of things fun in some way, otherwise they wouldn't continue to throw away money. It's addictive because it triggers some sort of reward center in the brain, and simply participating provides not only fantasy but also a sense of drama and unknown in an otherwise very predictable life.

full disclosure: not a gambler and rarely play the lotto

Lots of gambling isn't "100% a game of chance": Poker, Blackjack, Horse Racing, etc. That doesn't seem like a very good rationalization for fantasy sports over lottery... and I agree with GP: Lots of fantasy sports folks waste insane amounts of time tracking and updating their rosters. You could justify it as "more fun for the same $$", but that definitely wouldn't be true for me.

Blackjack is not like horse racing and poker -- in the latter, the player can use information that is available to them to have a positive expected outcome. In blackjack, no matter how good you are you cannot create a positive expected outcome, you can only minimize your negative expected outcome.

Actually you can in blackjack, it just involves playing outside the individual game of blackjack and employing card counting techniques across multiple tables. Although, at that point, I can understand if you distinguished between playing that "game" and playing a table of blackjack.

Yes, you can do that. In Nevada that's cheating and in New Jersey it isn't (but if they see you doing it they can make your life very difficult), but at that point you're operating outside the norms of the game so I didn't count it.

It's not cheating in Nevada. But you can be bounced when they catch you.

It's not against the law unless you're using a device, but you can bet your ass that Casinos will kick you to the curb if they figure out you've been doing it. They'll also tell all of the other Casinos to blacklist you too.

And they will figure it out, too. It's not that hard for me to spot card counters, and I'm not a pro.

Seems like over the years the way they've dealt with card counters is by tweaking the game, though. They've added decks, they shuffle sooner, they shuffle when you increase your bet or when a new player sits down and plays for nontrivial amounts, and lately with continuous shuffling machines.

It also depends very strongly on the rules of the game. There are variations where you can get a slightly better than 50% odds just by playing "correctly" if the rules are in your favor. (single deck, hit on 16, etc etc)

I heard if you play perfectly on a totally random round, the dealer has less than a 0.5% edge (depending on the rules) which is very good for the player, compared to other games.

If you count cards on a small hand shuffled shoe, even with a basic system it is relatively easy for a player to have a fraction of a percent edge. Good players can have a few percent edges.

However, most casinos nowadays use large shoes and frequently (or even constantly) machine shuffle the cards. This effectively almost completely negate card counting.

Large shoe is actually more advantageous to card counting, and mechanical shuffling doesn't make a difference (but the frequency of shuffling does).

It's perceived the smaller shoes are better since they are easier to county, but with a smaller shoes the count can't swing as far one way or another, so with a large shoes there is a high probability of getting better odds.

The main thing they do is not play through the whole shoe, i.e. they shuffle before they get all the way through. This prevents the count from being allowed to swing as far as possible.

It's not just that, though. They will also shuffle if you substantially increase your bet, or if you're a new player coming in with larger bets. So even if you get a good count you won't be able to exploit it.

Interesting. Counterintuitive but it makes sense.

I think the guy who explained it to me was talking about a combination of counting, pattern recognition and other such strategies, hence my confusion.

Actually the best casino game to play from an odds perspective is craps at a table that meets these conditions:

1. Field has 2 or 12 pay triple and the other pays double

2. 5x odds bets or better allowed.

3. Minimal / no restrictions on place bets. ( some table don't let you do place bets on 6 or 8 )

And then follow these rules:

1. Only do field, place, or come bets

2. Always have your place and odds bet "working" - you will have to tell the dealer

3. If a number is rolled that you have an existing place bet on convert it to a odds bet.

4. Limit the total amount of money on the table - one 7 will wipe everything.

5. If you feel nervous, take all the money off the table that you can. Let the last few remaining bets play out and then walk away.

6. Lastly, and most importantly limit yourself to a specific amount of time or rolls. This is especially important if you are winning.

> Field has 2 or 12 pay triple and the other pays double

> Only do field, place, or come bets

The house edge on the field with those rules is 2.78%, which isn't bad, but isn't great. Ideally you want one that pays triple on both 2 and 12 (good luck finding that!) because then the house edge is 0.00%

All the rest of your bets are either 0% or 1.4-1.6% house edge.

Also, if you're really worried about one seven wiping you off the table and don't mind being contrarian, play the don't. While the odds are basically the same (slightly better actually) in the long term, I find the short term odds much better (because of the aforementioned deadly seven).

However if you value the social aspect of the game or your casino player rating, don't play the don't. :)

Yeap on the odds. In other words, best game if you want to have a reasonable chance on being a lucky winner.

Also impossible for the casino to make a subtle rule or behavior change that negatively affects the odds.

I personally don't know why casinos bother worrying about card counting. All they really have to do is increase the number of decks and/or increase the reshuffle frequency.

Or if they really want to stop it but some house rules that say that the next bet can't be any more than 2x the previous bet.

Sure they might miss that person that is going to go all in on one last draw. But whatever. Besides gambling revenues are down and non-casino revenues (like shows) are up. So maybe Las Vegas will stop being a gambling mecca and just be an entertainment hub.

I would love it if Vegas started shifting the rules back into the player's favor so us degenerate gamblers could come back more.

I got so angry when I see a blackjack table with a 6 for 5 payout on a blackjack and the lack of surrender.

I don't see how you're disagreeing with me. I'm positing that HN may be more amenable to games that allow you to employ skill/knowledge to your benefit (racing/poker/blackjack/sports betting) over games that rely entirely on chance (lottery/slots).

> Yet the consensus seems to be the the millions of people buying lotto tickets are all rubes, but the folks flouting the law and running bookmaking operations on the internet are disrupting staid government regulation?

I agree with you, but I also gamble when I go to Vegas. I think when people say lottery players are dumb they are mainly pointing to the 'spend a large percentage of my paycheck each week on the lottery' group. When the jackpot is this big and is dominating pop culture, buying a ticket is just part of being entertained by the whole thing.

With the lottery, you are expected to lose. I would the lottery in the same box as slots, blackjack, and other games where you play against the house. The house will always win. They spend a lot of money making sure the odds are in their favor.

Fantasy sports is more like poker. Yes, it is a game of chance, but it is primarily a game of skill. Maybe most people don't have enough skill to make a difference, but given enough time, it can be acquired and you can have +EV.

Also, in poker and fantasy sports, you don't play against the house. They just take their cut, and you play against other people.

Note, I'm excluding blackjack from skill-based mainly because you are playing against the house, so its by their rules, and if you start winning, they'll kick you out.

Recent article posted here in HN shows that fantasy sports are not a game of skill, since a very few people win all the money (millions) and everybody else loses. Because those few have written software to game the leagues. So essentially just a money pit.

I'm curious how you arrive at the conclusion that using software to help you win a game means it's not a game of skill.

That's like the definition of self-contradiction.

Your skill is irrelevant against the automated betting bots.

Only because their skill is much higher than mine. That makes it a game of skill, just one in which the top percent is MUCH better than most.

What?

If very few people win all the money, it is most definitely a game of skill and not a game of chance,

...or the game is essentially fixed, so that your skill is irrelevant.

It's a zero sum game, so the applicability of your skill is relative to the other players. The average bettor understands the mechanics of the bet and has an intuitive understanding of what he is betting on. The 25th percentile bettor is clueless or worse (I like green, go Jets!) and is operating a reverse ATM.

Look at horse racing. At an off-season harness track where the purse is low and horses all suck, the professional handicapper loses a lot of his edge, as you never know when one horse is going to have a great day.

At the Belmont/Preakness/Travers/Kentucky Derby, a pro has a huge edge, as they generally can call the winner with precision -- the pros are betting on the finishing order via exacta bets. The crowd tries to picks the winning horse, and in the event of a win, makes a lousy $0.50 on a $2 bet :)

It's negative-sum, because of the rake.

That's not entirely true.

They game the system by automating lineups that allow them to play multiple games a day.

A minor quibble with this argument, both in poker and fantasy sports, while you do compete with others, the house also always wins, because of the rake.

TBH, the whole "game of skill" thing (notice how obsessively often this particular phrase pops up) is just a way to sneak fantasy sports through a loophole in anti-gambling laws. For your average Joe, it's indistinguishable from gambling - including all the addiction and collateral damage that causes gambling to be heavily regulated in the first place.

But it is a good game for bored STEM undergrads, just like online poker is a good game for bored computer science undergrads. I had a few guys on my year who lived completely off online poker games while in university. They deployed custom-made scripts to automate playing on multiple tables at the same time, and probably did some other things that they didn't tell me. It's the same thing with fantasy sports, except you spend most of the time maintaining complex spreadsheets.

you end up getting hooked to obsessive watching of ESPN and tracking player stats

For many people it's the other way around. They were already obsessively watching ESPN - fantasy sports betting just gives them an additional reason to do so.

The difference between playing fantasy football and playing the lottery are like the difference between playing an RPG and running an UPDATE script on a database.

In the end, grinding out your characters stats are just running scripts with a nice GUI on top. It's the experience that provides the value, not the result.

The difference between lottery and playing fantasy football is like the difference between betting against a random number generator, and playing Eve Online part-time, respectively. In the former, you lose consistently. In the latter, you lose to people who spend most of the time in Microsoft Excel and are better at it than many a corporate accountant.

The lottery is a government subsidy to bog, established, non-tech-industry, non-startup firms. HN, naturally, dislikes it.

DFS, OTOH, is a quasilegal (at best) industry with new, rapidly scaling, tech-heavy firms.

The fact that both are gambling is really a side issue to how they relate to HN's focus and biases.

So DFS is literally Uber for lottery? That would explain quite a lot about why there's a split on HN between the people who hate it and the people who love it.

> you end up getting hooked to obsessive watching of ESPN and tracking player stats, wasting lots of time.

I kind of thought that was the point. If you just want to win money their are, as you said, lots of easier ways of doing that. But that would be less fun.

That's certainly the reason the major sports leagues have invested in DFS.

That's kind of the point.

If someone without a lot of skills is wasting his money on the lottery and that's bad, why is it ok to bet on college basketball? It's a zero-sum game.

Especially with this new model of "take my money, and sell my eyeballs". Old time bookmakers just took their vig, the corporate version wants you soul too (consume media = buy subscriptions + watch ads).

It's really an insidious business!

as per the top post I think the main issue that people have with the lottery is that it is a stupid/poor tax. Low income and less educated people spend the most on lottery tickets anywhere between 1.5 times to 3.5 times more than those with a higher level of education or a higher income. Notably this spending is also a significantly higher % of their total income than it is for those on middle/higher income levels.

Structurally, this seems similar to thinking that drugs should be legal, but taking drugs is silly.

I think the difference is the fantasy sports betting are small companies whereas lotteries are typically run by the government. There is also the difference in that winning fantasy sports betting is far, far more likely than winning a lottery jackpot.

Seems pretty different to me enough to illicit different reactions.

Is it? I.e. winning small on lottery is not that improbable. It still has negative expected value, and so do fantasy sports. The difference is that winning big in lottery is uniformly unlikely, while winning big in fantasy sports is mostly tied to your Microsoft Excel skills. Which:

a) makes me believe that your assumption that "winning fantasy sports betting is far, far more likely than winning a lottery jackpot" is incorrect, and in fact for an average Joe, the reverse is the case;

b) suggests that the biggest advocates of fantasy sports will be people who believe they're good enough with Excel and statistics.

> Is it? I.e. winning small on lottery is not that improbable.

Yeah I know meant winning the big jackpots not the few dollars here and there many people win.

You are probably biasing the prominence of the voices that disagree with your position.

Most of the comments on this story are pretty straightforward attempts to apply some analysis to the problem (with no real hostility behind them)

If all you want to do is to take a random bet, you can do that with the sports games too... but at least you have the opportunity to increase your odds by doing some research.

Yeah, but to some people all of the things in your second paragraph are FUN - not a waste of time. Pretty condescending attitude man...

GP wasn't condescending at all but was merely pointing out how it's condescending and hypocritical to look down on people playing the lottery when the attitude is different wrt sports bets.

They are two very different things though. Even the OP acknowledges that's less about the outcome and more about the experience (which is the opposite for lottos).

Cutting right to the more meta part of the discussion, it's just false equivalency constructed that hits both a desire to dump on sports fans and find a way to make an absurdly irresponsible habit practiced mostly by lower income people more palatable.

And so is most of the gambling. Whether poker, roulette or slot machines, a lot of people would tell you they're doing it for the pleasure.

But in a way, a lot of things are gambling - up to and including investing, particularly in startups. The desirability of a particular form of gambling in society is tied to the negative effects it has on people (e.g. how easy is it for a player to get addicted), and how exploitative the organizations operating a given game are. Under those metrics, fantasy sports are very much like lottery or one-armed bandit, and very much unlike investing.

And hell, it's not just about being condescending to people. I'm perplexed by how people tolerate, and even vocally support companies that intentionally fuck over poor people.

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