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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

It seems bizarre that gambling is a growing industry. I guess rich people with boring lives are at a point where they'll do anything for a short thrill.

There's lots of rich and famous young adults in the YouTube space that regularly go gambling, and it's honestly one of their most shameful habits. Especially if it influences a bunch of young people to also get into gambling.

There's also a giant new streaming platform, Kick, which is entirely backed by rich gambling sites and they're not afraid to bankroll big streamers to join their site.

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It’s actually the opposite; more poor people have gambling problems than rich people. Here’s one source, but if you Google you will find more. https://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2014/01/001.html

Whether this really drives the industry overall would be a separate study, though. For one, this was conducted before federal legalization, in which case the lottery and charity bingo were probably the most accessible legal forms of gambling to most people who didn't regularly travel to Las Vegas. Those are inherently poor person forms of gambling. So whether this is still true we don't know. Maybe more importantly, the volume of individuals being larger in poor neighborhood doesn't necessarily mean the volume of money is larger. Phil Mickelson was just alleged to have bet over a billion dollars over the past 30 years. Assuming something like an average of a hundred thousand is enough to be "problem gambling" for poorer people over the span of 30 years, he matched 10,000 of them just by himself. It raises the question of whether gambling is a whale-driven industry or not.

Lottery and charity gambling is a bit of an interesting thing. It's a tax on the poor but it's not as if the government won't tax the poor if you take away gambling. Governments throughout history across societies have always avoided taxing the rich as they're savvy at avoiding taxes, whereas the poor always pay.

Governments and charities have restraint that for profit businesses just don't, and free market driven competition and efficiency is NOT a good thing in this context.

Mickelson may have bet a billion dollars (if you believe the rumors spread by a convicted criminal now selling a book, likely exaggerated) but he definitely did not lose a billion. The same source says it's approaching $100 million but even that number seems inflated.

It's not bizarre to me at all. Gambling is at the heart of the modern mobile gaming industry and its exploitation of its customers. On top of that, gambling companies are paying influencers to promote gambling like the cigarette companies used to pay movie stars.

It would be for the good of everybody if the entire industry, sports betting, casino's, p2w freemium games, lootboxes including for cosmetics, TCG "booster packs", paying streamers to promote this poison, all of it is better off if it were banned honestly. Every sale of any game should give people the same cards, same characters, same equipment, same cosmetics, none of this gambling garbage.

> Gambling is at the heart of the modern mobile gaming industry

Gambling is at the heart of the entire global financial system. Everyone with RobinHood, a brokerage account, a 401(k) or pension participates in the great roulette wheel known as the Stock Market. We're all placing bets--just on MSFT or AAPL instead of 14 and 29. Or our retirement account is putting it on Red. Some of us here are putting it in their startups, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to wagering money on unknown future events, which is the definition of gambling.

This isn't even close to the same thing and you know it. Purchasing capital assets in a retirement account is not equivalent to a bet with a binary outcome, especially when the other option as a saver is to simply hold cash instead, which is also not riskless and has never outperformed ownership stake in a broad sampling of all businesses over the average workspan of a human laborer. Putting excess income into stock is a bet stock will outperform other asset classes. Keeping it in cash is a bet cash will outperform other asset classes. Not saving for retirement at all is a bet that whatever your country's form of nationalized pension is will be enough, or you'll die before you retire.

The reason using all of your disposal income on roulette bets as a retirement strategy is bad is not because there is some probability of increasing your bankroll and some probability of decreasing it. It's bad because the long run expected outcome of repeated bets is negative. The house always has an edge. That dynamic is exactly reversed when putting retirement savings into a stock index. Betting that your entire national economy won't collapse for over four decades is inherently a smarter bet.

Your point is that the gamble has a positive EV (true), but it's still gambling. Instead of betting against the house, you're betting against other investors, and the "house" (financial institutions) takes a small rake. So OK it's more like poker than roulette.

It's not that it's +EV, it's that it's +EV for the average player at the "Table" which is NOT true of Poker.

Aside from the gamification you see with Robin Hood, I don't have much issue with gambling on the stock market as it's one of the few gambles that makes the average bettor wealthier, so it doesn't have the same socially deleterious effect. Bettors may be going up against far more vicious sharks than you will ever see at a poker table, but that doesn't seem to be reason enough not to play the game.

It just needs to be strongly regulated, and not in the way it is now, where wealthy people are allowed more freedom than the poor.

>We're all placing bets--just on MSFT or AAPL instead of 14 and 29.

There is a slight difference in the societal utility of those two categories of bets.

One grift I've noticed with sponsored gacha streams is how the streamer always have exceptionally amazing luck. They always manage to pull a top-tier character very quickly, and then they spend the whole stream showing it off.

This kind of behavior is beyond predatory and should really be illegal, because it's obvious that the streamer is playing with far better odds than regular people.

Heck, if you want to keep it legal that's probably fine as well, but at least require clear disclosure when the streamer is getting improved drop rates.

There are many salty streams where the streamer does not get what he wants. Having done some gacha pulls and received what I wanted on the first pull with 0.07% odds, it truly is random. One card I have took... let's just say a lot of money... to get. Characters are available for a limited time and then may or may not ever return. For example, the rare character Fujino in FGO could be summoned in 2020, then there was no idea whether she would ever return. It turns out she did return in 2021 and 2022, but her next projected availability is in 2027.

I am not saying that the streamer you referred to does not receive preferential treatment, but FGO streams are definitely random.

I think gambling is rarely rich people with boring lives seeking a quick thrill and more often not rich people living lives of quiet desperation chasing a dopamine high that they can sort of back-rationalize as a get-rich-quick scheme. Gambling is absolutely predatory, it exploits a flaw in the human firmware that used to make us good hunter gatherers but now just makes us targets for people who understand the bug.

It's not rich people who are gambling. It's folks who, like when marijuana was legalized, now have an easy/legal outlet to gamble on sports they were already watching without having to deal with a booky and the risks that entails.

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