America’s bad bet on expanding legal sports gambling | Hacker News Reader

America’s bad bet on expanding legal sports gambling

vox.com

106 pointspseudolus96 comments

Look at Australia for a cautionary tale on letting gaming companies do as they please. I've worked in the industry and I'm very much on the side of letting people gamble if they choose to do so, but _everywhere_ in our society is just plastered with ads for it. The volume of ads for gambling during a sports events can sometimes exceed the actual commentary on the event.

I'd ban gambling ads, and I'd ban pokies (tangential to this discussion but pokies are pure evil). I'd expand our self exclusion legislation to a national system and crack down on online retailers allowing the self exclusion system to be subverted.

For anyone else who does not speak Aussie, a pokie is a video poker or slot machine.

"Pokey" in old slang meant a jail cell. "Throw you into the pokey"

a pokie is a video poker or slot machine

Ah! You mean a, "fruit machine"?

I believe he was talking about one-armed bandits.

The tradie’s laptop

I live in Australia too and I think the government letting pretty much any company that wants a wagering license have one is problematic.

I'm sure there were problem gamblers 30 years ago when TAB was the only player but it feels like these days there's a new player entering the market every month, and they're getting increasingly desperate to make a profit in what is already a flooded market.

What is the tax the government is levying on these machines? I presume this is a case of “follow the money”.

Oh I was talking about sports betting but I used to work in a venue with poker machines and I was told the government tax was barely anything (like a tiny tiny fraction of what the venue earned in a year).

It was recently increased to and there was a huge lobbying effort with many places pretending they will go out of business.

Edit: Depends on business size.

https://www.revenue.nsw.gov.au/taxes-duties-levies-royalties...

The UK has a limit on the number of machines per shop which means the shops just fill the high streets with four machines in each one. It would be preferable to just have places with rows of machines.

The starter tax rate is a clear incentive for every venue to have a little gambling room upstairs. No getting away from your impulses if you like to gamble.

Nice to see they got covid relief too.

So your solution is to grant a monopoly to TAB and Sportsbet, preventing any competition?

Gatekeeping licenses leads to predatory monopolies.

That's why every single physical casino in Australia, which generally receive monopoly licenses, are cesspits of money laundering and gang activity.

Not necessarily, but I don't think the Northern Territory having no apparent limit on bookmaker licenses is a good idea either. That said, I think the tote is not a predatory monopoly because it just takes a percentage (I don't think it's fixed but maybe it's capped) of all bets whereas the fixed odds players need to squeeze every penny because if they're not careful they can lose money, so having 10+ fixed odds bookmakers creates an environment of cut-throat and sometimes dubious behaviour to make money.

I live in Pennsylvania and there are “pokies” at every gas station and bar around me. One gas station 15 minutes from me even set up a mini casino looking place (glass enclosure) where you can smoke and drink the tall boys you buy on the premises. All sorts of fun characters at night there. You never see anyone happy sitting on these machines, and despite the name “Pennsylvania Skill” you never hear any positive stories about them. Purely predatory and should be banned or better regulated IMO. This is coming from someone who supports state lotto/sports betting/etc.

A buddy of mine works for Pepsi maintaining outside equipment and says how people go from place to place throughout the day just spending everything they have on slots. Harder to feel sorry for someone that eats and leaves a few minutes a day, every day than someone that sits at one place all day wasting everything they have.

Let me offer a counter argument from a gambling friend of mine. He says that, sure, he often loses but sometimes he wins. What about the foodie snobs who blow a fortune to eat some weird recipe? What about the theater snobs who pay a fortune to sit and watch some great actor? Or the backpacking snobs pay a fortune for some ultralight tent. They all end poorer (monetarily) because they never win.

It's kind of funny how the people who love things that NEVER pay off some how snark on the gambling world because it slowly eats away at your savings.

Do you think spending money is a form of gambling?

It sounds like the argument is that gambling is a form of spending money.

Nearly every nightclub, dance floor, live music venue, and even many restaurants in pubs that I had in my younger years were pulled down to create "VIP rooms", which is what we call "rooms full of poker machines".

It's hard to express just how depressing it is what exactly has been done to sydney.

I genuinely don't know where people go out to socialise in their younger years these days, I cannot possibly imagine being 18 and getting the mates together to blast $300 on poker machines.

Also Australia. My experience is different. We absolutly have a bunch of pokies room, but these go hand in hand with pubs, bistros and other standard entertainment options. The only thing pokies seem to have largely wiped out is the live music option which used to be fairly standard.

As for socialising, it's the same. At least for me, very few people I know hit the pokies. Plently of bars, pubs, cafes etc. It seems more to be lonely people who aren't socialising that take to pokies from my limited view.

Personally I think the need to wind them down. Do something like ban advertising and reduce licensed machines ~3% a year type thing and they can slowly disappear.

I live in Western Australia. We don’t allow pokies outside the casino (well, actually, they aren’t technically pokies, due to some completely immaterial detail, but they look, smell, and quack like the duck). Going to the Eastern States is always such a shock. In fact I am writing this from a plane from Melbourne to Sydney, two capital cities that are utterly gripped by pokies everywhere in a way that I’m just not used to. I really hope that your State governments get their act together, which they actually seem to be doing, maybe.

We are of course plagued by sports betting in WA, just like everywhere else. I was disappointed to see the US loosen up around this. I expect the typical American didn’t know the complex sports betting industry that was ready to pounce on such a lucrative market. Given how many societal problems the US had as it was, I can’t only imagine that sports betting has cranked them up.

Remember people: supply reduction DOES work, sometimes. Certainly here.

It was such a terrible and unnecessary idea.

I know real people and communities are being hurt by this but what really broke my heart was watching baseball, where they've banned all time great players for life over very small or unproven gambling offenses, be turned into a fancy roulette wheel for cell phone casinos.

I grew up watching baseball, but now I watch these broadcasts and think "how could I let a kid watch these announcers talk about money lines and parlays ad nauseum?" That's a sad thought.

> We are of course plagued by sports betting in WA, just like everywhere else.

Oh really? I thought Western Australia was much stricter about allowing Northern Territory-registered bookmakers to operate in their state.

> Remember people: supply reduction DOES work, sometimes. Certainly here.

Thank you for this reminder.

What if the loss rate on pokies was legally set at 0.5%? Right now they are around 13% (i think?), and that is pure evil.

IMO it should be increased to something like 50% or above so people stop using them altogether.

Yeah, i guess that would work too.

Australia is the gambling king of the world, and they're heavy exporters.

Stake, the largest crypto casino in the world, was founded and built in Australia and the new Twitch competitor Kick with looser gambling rules is also built in Australia by the same founders.

Ironically, it's legal to operate an online casino in Australia, but you can't accept Australian customers :)

I've long looked askance at the rise of legal sports betting, back to the draft kings ads. It just feels so utterly insidious. The machine that is capital is running out of ways to extract money from us little folk, and wider spread gambling is the last gasp? I dunno, hard to express.

It just gives me a bad feeling.

When I moved to Japan one of the sadder things for me in smaller towns was how many old people just spend their entire day playing pachinko. It seemed legitimately like the largest economic activity in some places.

On the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, having played a lot of live poker, I'm fond of my local OMCs (old man coffees) who just want to chat and play cards, and are slightly losing over time (most to the house). That doesn't feel nearly as inequitable as the whale-hunting gaming ultimately depends upon (and which drove me away from it).

Which isn't to suggest that pachinko doesn't have whales (or blackjack, or the state lottery, or slots), or that the picture you paint isn't depressing (I've seen it around the world in different forms, and it's always very depressing).

Running out of capitalist* ways to milk to common folk. More rents are comin'.

They do remind you to call a counselling number if you're addicted to gambling after the FanDuel commercial that tries to convince you to gamble though... So there's that... sigh

In the UK the gambling companies funded a campaign "when the FUN stops, STOP" with a nice big FUN the size of a bus.

wow, you really can't make this stuff up. Image being referred to: https://www.google.com/search?q=when+the+FUN+stops%2C+STOP&s...

The blanket prohibition didn't have a good explanation so people got tired of being coddled.

We can regulate advertisement spots though.

Legalizing mobile gambling (sports is a common form of this) is a terrible idea. I used to be heavily in favor of legalized sports gambling; like the article says, I’m not harming anyone, and it’s my choice.

Then one of my close friends with a gambling problem lost a substantial chunk of his life savings on gambling on his phone. He didn’t even have to leave his house to do it. After that, I had to reconsider my position.

While I disapprove of governments babysitting their constituents rather than treating them as independent and responsible adults, I think addictive habits are a worthwhile exception. A person who is addicted to gambling is not in their right mind or acting rationally. It is the same as any other psychoactive drug or habit. Nobody should have their life outcome determined by something that hijacks their biology for exploitative purposes (and I do see it as exploitative inherently; the business model of gambling is such that on average the user must lose).

I hate all forms of gambling outside of a casino. At least at a casino, it's isolated but when it's on your phone or in your neighborhood, it's just gross. At first I wanted to boycott any establishment that allowed machines in their businesses but it seems its too lucrative a draw as I see them everywhere in cities where they're allowed.

I used to be very much the same and have started to reconsider too. I think I’m shocked at just how prevalent it becomes when it’s legal and advertising is permitted. It’s like gambling becomes a double digit percentage of the economy.

In the future I think the ability to resist addiction is going to become a massive factor affecting life outcome, possibly even larger than intelligence or education or appearance.

Sports gambling has just been legalized in my state and I’ve been getting bombarded by advertisements non-stop over the last few weeks. I joke now that every commercial is a sports gambling commercial. And the rub is, as the article says, the “please gamble responsibly” in the fine print. Those companies want us to gamble as responsibly as is required to keep them from being banned and not a hair more.

Have seen this destroy families as well. Once people use up their own funds they will absolutely find ways to extract from others, including elderly parents. It can be ruinous.

Alcohol is an addictive habit and is behind over 50% of domestic violence but prohibitionist takes like yours never seem to recommend bans on the actual harmful substances in society like alcohol. Why is that?

Voluntary gambling should be banned, but alcohol and Big Macs are fine despite the terrible societal consequences?

It's why I can't take arguments for prohibition seriously, it's always reactionary and ignores the major elephants in the room.

140,000 dead every year from alcohol. 280,000 from obesity.

Gambling is less than 20,000.

We have to draw the line somewhere.

Extracting everything possible from a host without killing it is literal parasitism.

Whatever their kill count, guns, alcohol and cheeseburgers at least have some other useful purpose.

Gambling's "fun" is an exploitative artificial construct only realized under finite conditions.

A cheeseburger provides calories whether or not you're hungry. How much "fun" is gambling when you're broke?

Meanwhile, states and cities are trying to illegalize vaping while leaving cigarettes on shelves, not to mention continuing the criminally stupid "war on drugs" in ways too myriad to count while retaining one's sanity.

_sigh_

In all seriousness: where are e-cigarettes more restricted than cigarettes?

I'm going to give you the official reasons, because I do believe that is the "why" for most people who want to ban them:

They are more attractive to kids.

Tobacco is an acquired taste. I enjoy a yearly cigar but even it can be a bit strong for me.

Vaping has flavors and is smooth and gentle.

The problem here is not just that cigs are worse for you than vaping. Kids smoke because smoking is rebellious behavior. Making vaping illegal will only make it more rebellious. Also nicotine is a pretty solid fix for anxiety which kids are full of.

There is a an alternative argument that vaping bans are due to tobacco industry insiders. Honestly though they would probably refer to capture profits than ban them.

Vaping is relatively safe, esp compared to tobacco. My two pack a day mother who smoked since she was 14 moved entirely to vaping and got her nicotine habit very under control. This was a woman who got in trouble for smoking in a hospital bed pregnant yet was willing to forego her vape for four hours without even a complaint last time she had to fly.

I didn't ask why people want to ban e-cigarettes; I asked where are they controlled more severely than cigarettes (and I don't consider flavor bans to be more severe than controls on cigarettes, since cigarettes themselves have rules on their composition which include flavor!)

The city I live in recently passed a ban on "flavored tobacco," which includes (for some reason) vape products. While this ban has not taken effect yet, after it does, the net effect will be that full strength cigarettes like Marlboro Reds remain accessible at every gas station and corner store, while any vape product with a "flavor" is no longer legally saleable in the city limits.

I guess if flavor bans don't count for you, this wouldn't bother you. For me, this is a major "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" move that will remove access to a class of product with great effectiveness for smoking cessation and harm reduction. The reasoning, to my eye, seem to be largely moral panic bullshit, largely caused by the popularity of vaping among teenagers. (Why not impose harsher penalties for stores selling to underage kids? Seems to work fairly well for liquor in my experience.)

I'm also generally opposed to prohibition and think adults should be able to decide what goes into their bodies, so I'm opposed in principle.

It’s gotten so ridiculous I’ve started to see jobs… fully remote… that say will refuse to hire you if you use any nicotine products, explicitly including quitting aids like gums and patches.

That raises my eyebrows... How do they plan to validate this? What's to stop one from just... lying?

Urinalysis

A quick google suggests nicotine stays in your system for just a few days after quitting. I realize of course that it's hard to just quit nicotine on a whim for a few days, but I imagine most could do it for the sake of a job.

Why is that ridiculous? Health insurance costs more for smokers. Hiring non-smokers just makes economic sense.

God, I can't stand vaping. I went to a concert and the guy next to me literally vaped for 3 hours straight. That's like 2 boxes in one sitting. I don't mind those that take small swigs here and there but just puffing it non-stop is like, dude, you're going to die.

Brazil. Sale of ecigs is not permitted, cigarettes have the usual restrictions (but not taxed as heavily as some other places). Still - I have to give it to them. I get the feeling it was the right call. No vaping ads and vape shops everywhere like I see in Europe

Vaping in some EU countries is out of control. Due to the lack of government regulations compared to normal cigs, smokers found it as a good loophole for indoor smoking and switched to vaping everywhere, especially in public spaces like malls, pubs, clubs, shopping centers, etc.

And whenever you tell them "please stop vaping here", unless you're a bouncer, they'll lash out saying "it's not illegal, show me which law forbids me vaping indoor; yeah smoking is forbidden indoor, but vaping is not smoking and this is just steam bro, not smoke, it's not dangerous for you".

Some venues enforce a vape ban on their own, but most don't want to piss off their customers, so many venues ignore the people who vape inside.

> I get the feeling it was the right call. No vaping ads and vape shops everywhere like I see in Europe

Vapes cause at most 1/100 the harm cigarettes do. There is no combustion products, only nicotine, and not always. The only harm they do is as a possible gateway to actual smoked tobacco. As such, banning them while allowing tobacco is completely nonsensical. It should be the other way around.

Thailand. They're illegal. Cigarettes are not.

San Francisco

This one is going to hit really hard over time, because it normalizes betting on sports. Children will grow up in environments where it’s just what people do. How far are we from allowing people to bet money on high school sports? We’re going to start having big problems with degenerate gambling addictions in 10-15 years.

I don't know where you grew up, but gambling on sports was already extremely normalized in my experience. Some sports more than others, but it's rare to go to a Superbowl party or the like without discussion of "making it interesting".

Betting 20 bucks on the super bowl once a year with your friends is worlds away from "normalized gambling".

In Australian the Melbourne / Adelaide cup days generally get a large amount of attention. I think they normalise and introduce gambling in a very problematic way - work ‘sweeps’ etc are very normal and mean that people are peer pressured into gambling.

Vegas is about to legalize Esports betting. Canada already has, I believe.

There will be ads in every video game in the not too distant future.

Yep, as another commenter said, you don’t really need to make guesses here. Just look at Australia. “The odds” are so intrenched in talking about the game itself, that kids are naturally taught the lingo and that watching / betting on sports go hand in hand. We are in the process of trying to wind this shit back, but unfortunately at this point we’ve had enough time to build a powerful sports betting lobby, including the sporting clubs and leagues themselves. A politician has no powerful friends when they decide to fight this issue, and it makes them a lot of powerful enemies.

People who used to say that gambling is a personal right are either stupid or idiots.

It will destroy the communities.

Thak god. My country doesn't even allow lottery

I am surprised fairness in sport isn't a more central theme in this discussion. As more money is spent in sports betting there is more incentive to "fix" games. I view sports betting as a threat to fair competition. Maybe we've spent so long with limited sports gambling that we have forgotten the impact these scandals have.

Gambling creates no wealth for society as a whole. A gambling island like Vegas may benefit because they suck wealth from surrounding areas.

Any jobs or government revenue created from gambling come at the expense of productive activities, while simultaneously creating social problems from addiction and crime.

I hate the term gambling. It isn't a gamble for the state lotto that sets mathematical payouts that ensure a certain percent profit, nor is it a gamble for the casino owner with his slot machines.

> Gambling creates no wealth for society as a whole.

How is it different from any other form of entertainment?

I was about to post a retort but you got me there. Maybe one could say that most entertainment is more nourishing?

Most other forms of entertainment do not negatively affect the lives of the consumer and everyone around them.

Porn, prostitution and shopping/hoarding are the three main exceptions that come to mind.

Drinking and smoking would be on my list.

In the UK its a real problem. I've just watched a TV show on a national TV catchup streaming service (UKTV Play). I've just had to sit through 4 minutes of ads and every single one of them was for a different gambling company. It's plastered all over billboards too. Even major daytime TV shows are sponsored by gambling organisations to get those grannies in too (Foxy Bingo). It's sickening and I feel most people are blind to what is actually going on.

> I've just had to sit through 4 minutes of ads and every single one of them was for a different gambling company.

Crypto? Online card games? Mobile gacha games? Sports betting? A mix?

It makes all the commercials for bad beer, fast food, and sugary drinks seem kind of quaint in retrospect. Like the old surveys of teachers from the mid 20th century claiming gum chewing as one of the biggest concerns for their classrooms.

Pretty much all complaints about this stuff comes down to "the ads are EVERYWHERE" - what's stopping us from just banning advertisements like we did with cigarettes? Feels like a fine compromise.

When I watched a documentary explaing how universities welcomed gambling companies to their campus made realise that USA already lost the battle to China.

Just an outsider opinion

An example of a gambling dystopia is Serbia. There are gambling places everywhere, even in small towns or next to otherwise scenic places. It is terribly depressing to be constantly reminded of this massive suck on productive society. And these places are a visual assault, the front of the buildings are a mix bright, flashing lights and blackened windows on otherwise lively streets.

I really wish I was exaggerating. The Google Street View of Belgrade hasn't been updated since 2014, but if you look up "Belgrade Casino", you can see just how many of these have spread in the last decade.

I know nothing about FanDuel and DraftKings, or sports betting in general. Do FanDuel and DraftKings only make money on fees, or are there also situations where , like in a Casino, you're playing against the house?

Also, I bet there are SWE's from FanDuel and DraftKings on HN. No judgement I would love to hear how you see things from the inside.

Everyone's playing against the house, but the house sets lines and odds with a goal of getting 50% of bettors on either side of the bet for a guaranteed profit.

This is a clean narrative and a reasonable starting assumption, but not necessarily accurate. House bookies are trying to maximize their earnings, not limit themselves to the rake.

For example, certain teams have fans that bet on the team as a show of support rather than betting wisely. The house will identify these positions so they can take advantage, rather than letting the other side of the bet make most of the cash on bad bets.

Yep big gambling companies have a lot of analysts on staff - all working on improving models to squeeze more money.

Until sports betting was legalised in the US, FanDuel and DraftKings specialised in fantasy football, where you pay to enter competitions against other players. The winning players split the prize money, the company takes any money left over. For legal reasons the prize pot was fixed so if not enough people entered a contest the company would have to eat the loss.

That was arguably not sports betting, therefore legal, because it was a game of skill against other players.

The big difference with sports betting is that you’re now playing directly against the house. Their profit depends on how well they calculate their betting odds. Arguably it’s still a game of skill, but it’s obviously pretty stacked in the company’s favour.

Until sports betting was legalised in the US, FanDuel and DraftKings specialised in fantasy football

Not to be pedantic, but they specialized in 'daily fantasy', which differs from general 'fantasy football'. In daily fantasy, you are given a budget, players are given a value and you draft every week. In regular fantasy football, you draft once at the beginning of the year and manage that team for the rest of the season.

Pedantic is good! Thanks for the clarification.

In Minnesota, the taxpayers are paying for corporate welfare to the tune of billions of dollars via multiple Pro sports stadiums, the main one being the Vikings stadium. Back when Jesse Ventura was governor, he had a plan to run statewide legal sports betting to pay for those stadiums (since the multi-billion dollar NFL corp wasn't going to).

Of course it was squashed immediately without any research or investigation into how it would be implemented, but it is one example of a positive outcome from sports betting. People are going to bet regardless of the system, but I'd rather people that actually care about sports pay into a massive stadium than that average person wondering why the taxes have gone up.

Side note: If you get a drink downtown Mpls, you're not only paying tax for the Vikings stadium, you're also paying a penny or so tax for the Metrodome which was torn down nearly 10 years ago.

Not just welfare for the stadium, but sports betting means more literal welfare for people who can afford it least. Sports betting takes money from the least successful and funnels it off in the worst, least productive way possible.

Fair point, and totally agree, but it won't stop people from betting or gambling. I wonder what it would take to ban Powerball or other lotteries? Worth the discussion for sure.

Wait until Vox finds out about alcohol and marijuana...

Seriously though, too much of anything is an issue and gambling is no exception. Even eating can have terrible health effects. And lack of sufficient exercise is quite bad for you too.

Could it be a problem for some people? Yes, of course. Is it their choice? Yes, it is. Putting it in perspective, it's yet another personal choice that can have a dramatic impact on your quality of life, and if you have a family to support, theirs as well.

Some of it seems like gambling minus the fun. Especially when people bet on sports online anonymously against strangers. Still, just because it doesn't sound fun to me doesn't mean it isn't fun. Maybe they tell their stories to friends and still have social experiences, or it heightens the experience of following sports with friends.

The US historically has oscillated between allowing gambling and restricting gambling. We might be at the high mark of this current swing. When most people know someone whose life was ruined by gambling we will see widespread bans and likely go back to just Nevada having legal gambling (as it is allowed in their state constitution).

Zero chance. Casinos generate taxes and jobs. Online gambling & sports betting generates more taxes and a few more jobs. Lotteries and horse racing too. States simply can't afford to give it up now.

Gambling in general is expanding across the board. Loot boxes for kids, then cryptocurrency pump & dump, sports gambling, casinos being built. It’s a kind of decay I saw elsewhere first.

Isn't this what crypto is? It's the same sort of thing. At least sport's betting does not seem to have the same level or magnitude of scamming or fraud compared to crypto.

It's sad but a big chunk of what people spend their time on nowadays whittles down to a bet. Sure crypto is one example, but you can easily find yourself in similarly scammy territory in more regulated markets. Where you live, how you live, even where you work is a bet on how much you think you're worth vs how much the market values your work. Where you stick your retirement funds is a bet hoping for a prosperous post-work life. A normal sequence of life is looking more like a series of bets, to me anyway. Maybe it was always like this, but people just didn't look at it that way quite as much?

What about “gambling” in the financial markets? Want that $1.50 call on GameStop earnings? Bets come in all shapes and sizes, including Wall Street bets.

As virtually most issues in America, unchecked capitalism is ruinous

Unchecked capitalism is enabled by inadequate education.

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