US lawyer who put Big Tobacco on trial takes aim at sports betting | Hacker News Reader

US lawyer who put Big Tobacco on trial takes aim at sports betting

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178 pointsdonsupreme196 comments

The sports betting craze is really interesting to me. I'm from upstate NY and I remember when it got legalized I didn't think much about it. Let people do what they want. I won't play because I don't gamble.

Then when I was hope for the holidays and every man I knew from my home town that was near my age was doing it. They'd watch a basketball game only to see if their 8 leg parlay would hit. Whatever app they were using even listed your all time wins/loses (probably legally required) and _all_ of them had all time loses over $500 and it had only been legalized a few months prior.

It's just a drain on the average person, the same was cigarettes are. I struggle with the freedom for personal choice to do what you want vs the collective better situation we get to form for ourselves as a society by banning these things, but I think I'm just leaning more towards the latter now. On the other hand, I think weed and alcohol should be legal, despite it affecting people's lives in negative ways, but the majority if their users are completely normal people.

This is such a tricky subject to me and I guess I'll just stop rambling now, but I am interested in what other people thing about societal restriction for a better group vs personal freedoms.

The difference is that cigarettes directly affect people around you via secondhand smoke, which is a clear externality.

The real problem with sports betting is the immoral anticompetitive behavior of the gambling companies, which kick any "smart" money with too high of win rates off of their platforms. And that means that the gambling platforms aren't just platforms allowing the spreads to be set by users, but also active participants trying to use their own predictions to gamble against their users or tweak the spread, essentially double dipping.

If someone is addicted to gambling, they make some bets and lose losing their rent money leading to eviction. And that person has a children. Are those children not affected by gambling?

If we take impact on your own family has an externality, then all behaviors have externalities. I could easily spend enough of my time and money playing golf to negatively impact my loved ones. An externality generally refers to the general public

I think the difference being pointed out is that the externalities from smoking are far more visible and public. The harm from gambling is very localized to the families affected and happens at the end of the month - when it's time to pay the rent. You don't see it except in rising rates of poverty and dysfunctional families.

maybe also the state has to spend more money subsidizing these dysfunctional families to ensure their children are fed and housed. But the state also usually taxes gambling pretty heavily so maybe its still an overall gain for the state's bottom line.

Lots and lots of innocent people that are affected by the externalities of sports betting, i.e. lots of families who have seen their brothers, sons and husbands go down this perilous route to never come out again, in many cases taking the entire family down with them in a financial downhole.

As a counterpoint, I know plenty of people who willingly spend more than $500 on entertainment over a few months.

I think the comparison to alcohol is an apt one: we've seen from previous ban attempts that rather than deter people from an activity the ban risks driving people to the black market, empowering those willing to operate illegally, removing the capacity for regulation or legal recourse (exposing partakers to grievous downside risks from product perspectives, such as contaminated liquor and loan sharks) and, ultimately, requiring more intrusion of law enforcement processes on the lives of every-day people.

It does seem like legalization made it qualitatively worse. To quote the parent comment:

> Then when I was home for the holidays every man I knew from my home town that was near my age was doing it.

From how he's describing it, this sounds like a big change. I'm also getting the sense that maybe 1 in 100 guys did it before, and it's dropping to like 1 in 10. I think the reason is that drugs can be bought in cash, but bettors depend on credit cards, and when that rail was legalized, the floodgates opened.

Then you keep it legal but regulate the shit out of it. As the OP suggested, one step might be to force the betting houses to take all comers — also force them to indicate bettor losses compared to bettor gains, etc.

> but regulate the shit out of it.

So like a ban, but just a bit less so? This will bring the same ill effects, but a bit less so. What it the win then?

It's important to protect the r̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶i̶n̶c̶u̶m̶b̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ public from c̶o̶m̶p̶e̶t̶i̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ predators.

“A bit less so” is the point.

Under this logic you’re using, there’s no point to having speed limits on roadways or seatbelts and safety devices in cars. If we can never eliminate car crash deaths, why bother with all those regulations?

Lower number of bad thing is better than higher number of bad thing.

This is known to be effective with cigarettes. Higher taxes reduce usage. Less advertising reduces usage. Advertising induces demand that would not otherwise exist.

I think it is pretty different.

The moral justification for speed limits is risks to others on shared roads, not oneself. You can drive as fast as you want on a private track.

Seat belt law might be a better analogy, though there is always the risk of becoming a projectile when you don’t wear one that can injure others, so even that’s not a perfect one.

That's better, and still legal to ignore on private property.

There was a lot of anger and discussion about public seat belt laws for the reasons you said.

I think the family members of frequent gamblers might argue against the idea that it’s got no negative externalities to others.

In Brazil, tobacco is heavily regulated. They can’t advertise on TV and they must show scary health alerts on the back of their packages, for example.

Since government started this trend, in end of 80s, tobacco usage is in free fall, as shown by this Brazilian Cancer Institute chart: https://www.gov.br/inca/pt-br/assuntos/gestor-e-profissional...

I think the economics of a physical drug substance and gambling are different enough that it’s actually un-apt to draw a comparison between sports betting and alcohol prohibition. Indeed I think it's actually highly misleading to extrapolate the harms caused by alcohol/drug prohibition to the prohibition on gambling. Caveat: this is all armchair speculation, I have no expertise or research on the matter.

In the case of black market gambling it seems much easier to keep everything within my direct control, thereby limiting the risk of getting a bad product. I can make a wager or play a poker game with my buddy without taking on virtually any “undue” risk (aside the risk I’m taking on intentionally) because he’s my friend and I know he’s not going to kneecap me if I can’t pay. The chain of trust only needs one link, and it’s an easy one to verify. Some people clearly do go farther, and this isn’t to say that large-scale illegal betting doesn’t exist, but it seems like the majority of recreational gambling demand is met by this type of direct person-person transaction where trust is easy-ish to establish or enforce. In this case banning betting has limited harms, because for most people the black-market is relatively low-risk. Indeed legalizing it, and thus allowing big players into the game, actually seems less safe to me. A friendly poker game on Friday nights is going to self-regulate: nobody's too sharp, everyone has roughly equivalent cash reserves, and my friends are probably going to cut me off if it seems like I'm developing an addiction. In the long-run I'm unlikely to find myself too deep in the hole. Compare this to sports betting with DraftKings. I'm against an odds-maker who's WAY savvier, has much deeper reserves than I do, and is incentivized to keep me playing at almost any cost. It's orders of magnitude more likely that I'm going to blow everything I have and then some, and all through a frictionless iOS app while sitting on my couch.

Compare this to the illegal drug trade. Unlike purchasing gambling services, buying ex. cocaine from the same buddy requires a much longer chain of trust, because of the manufacture and distribution processes involved. Even if I trust my buddy not to sell me fentanyl, I have to trust his dealer, and his dealer’s dealer, and the dealer’s dealer’s supply, etc. In this case I very much want lots of regulation ensuring the product isn’t contaminated, contains what it’s supposed to, etc. Legalizing just takes the already-existing supply chain and big players and moves them under government control. In this case the legalized version is far safer than the black market equivalent.

W/r/t legal enforcement side of things the differences seem similar. A small bet between friends is basically impossible to prosecute. It’s only the really big organized stuff that is even possible to detect, legally. On the other hand, a small amount of personal cannabis is very easy to detect and prosecute, often easier than the professional distribution network.

You make an interesting point. Take if for what you will, but there was/is very 'big organized stuff' going on in the illicit gambling world.

I had a close family member who spent the end of his life in the Federal custody for being part of it, and he wasn't even 'big time'. This was not long ago.

This gets mighty close to conspiracy territory, but I think that the current gambling wave is just a well made business play by the same people who were running the game previously.

Kind of like the cartel getting tired of dealing with interdiction and getting into the pharma business (which I don't think is a thing btw).

For sure. There is definitely harms in illegal gambling, I don't want to minimize that at all. But it seems enormously easier for me to create an illegal, yet low-risk gambling product for my friends to consume. It is much, much harder for me to safely manufacture MDMA and distribute it to my social circle. If I want to consume an illegal drug I am more or less required to trust a stranger. I think this difference is serious enough to warrant at the very least consideration in any comparison of the efficacies of prohibition.

Looking at ex. DraftKings I think your conspiracy theory is pretty well attested to.

> I had a close family member who spent the end of his life in the Federal custody for being part of it, and he wasn't even 'big time'. This was not long ago.

Very much so. I've known of people (actual people, not urban legends) who were working as small-time bookies in college (bets under $100, mostly). One started to take bets from non-students and for larger sums. After a few weeks, he got a call from the FBI. They told him it was just a courtesy call to let him know that 1) they knew about him and 2) he was starting to deal with some very very serious organized crime people, so perhaps his wisest choice would be pay out any bets he had taken so far, return any bets that he could, and hang up his hat before he ended up in prison or the ground.

My government banned cigarettes and alcohol during lockdown (don't ask).

And the only thing it achieved was they missed out on billions in sin tax revenue during that time. I have a few friends and family in the retail and hospitality space, and all of them were trading under the table.

Our local ice cream van (who remained operational because they were deemed "essential retail") pivoted to a mobile liquor store overnight.

I vaguely get the ban.

Cigarettes and alcohol are probably high on the list of things people 'go out for a pack of'. Doubly so when there's fuck all to do. Banning them would theoretically lower some spread.

I've seen the exact opposite practiced for alcohol: declaring liquor stores essential because DTs are no joke and they don't want alcoholics in withdraw taking up hospital beds.

Was a legitimate risk early on in COVID and why many places declared them essential businesses, which I am guessing is also what you are referencing without being explicit about it

It’s not a risk, it’s a certainty, and I ask:

So what?

We saw life under criminalized gambling. There was more loan sharking and kneecap breaking going on but overall gambling happened on a much smaller scale than it did under legalization. The people I see hurt by gambling only seems to have skyrocketed to me since legalization. The legal for-profit gambling industry does more harm than the gangsters ever did.

Just because alcohol criminalization isn’t worth it doesn’t mean we have to throw away criminalization as a tool in the toolbox.

>On the other hand, I think weed and alcohol should be legal, despite it affecting people's lives in negative ways, but the majority if their users are completely normal people.

Are you sure you aren't just too used to alcohol being normal? It's probably significantly more destructive than sports betting: https://drugabusestatistics.org/alcohol-related-deaths/

On the other hand, would banning sports betting change much, or would many of those people lose similar amounts of money on day trading or something if it weren't available? Is spending about a hundred bucks a month on some hobby really even that bad in the first place?

There are at least obvious issues with gambling compared to day trading (which is much more regulated). The main one being that winners are banned from participating. You can become a successful day trader, but any chance at being a successful sports bettor gets you banned from the marketplace.

In my anecdotal experience a lot of people would not find the same vice or even to the same degree as sports betting feels like a drain financially.

They would use bovada, which was the solution before sports betting became legalized.

This is always the struggle. In theory, I like the idea of just letting people make their own decisions, and let the consequences fall where they lie. But in practice we know that unrestricted distribution of addictive products (gambling, alcohol, drugs, etc) causes societal harms that are not confined to the individual making the bad choices. Doubly so when the makers of these products go out of their way to target those with addiction issues. The existence of which calls into question just how much of a choice some people really have, and whether we have a moral responsibility to protect these vulnerable people.

It will inspire some people to learn math, that's the only good thing about it as far as I can tell. It's made actual sports broadcasting unpleasant. For all the crap robinhood got about gamifying "investing" inspiring people with that gambling gene to throw their money at the stock market instead of negative expected value sports bets seems like a good move to me.

The ubiquity of the advertisements is striking. It's as though, almost overnight, it grew to take up a double digit percentage.

That’s the part that’s most shocking to me. It seems like the safest approach to legalizing sports betting would be to prohibit advertising, just as we have with e.g. cigarettes.

> I struggle with the freedom for personal choice to do what you want vs the collective better situation we get to form for ourselves as a society by banning these things, but I think I'm just leaning more towards the latter now.

I am 100% in favor of banning sports betting. The thing that makes it obvious for me is the "losers only" policy all of the sports betting sites have. If you consistently win by taking advantage of incorrectly priced odds you'll be banned.

All it takes is watching a few YouTube videos with sharps (aka winning bettors) or arbitrage bettors and you can see the scam. If you consistently lose, welcome aboard! If you consistently win, GTFO!

IMO, that makes it predatory. At a minimum, they should be forced to accept all bets and banning someone for winning should be illegal.

Very similar to card-counting at blackjack. You’re literally just using your brain to improve your odds. Even perfect conditions will only net the player a very slim edge against the casino but if the player is suspected of doing it they are no longer allowed to wager.

We can keep it legal but just make everyone's wins and losses public record. Full accounting. There's your wet blanket, and people get to keep their freedom.

You are correct. There is no gambling establishment or app that allows consistent winners to continue playing. Might not be rigged in the play itself, but it doesn't need to be if you are allowed to kick out the winners.

They exist, it's just a different business model (high volume, low margin) that's not compatible with massive TV advertising campaigns, large sign up bonuses, etc. See Pinnacle.

Alternatively, there's the exchange model a la Betfair where you let the users take the risk and merely collect a fee. You can also squeeze but not ban consistent winners with a "premium charge." Interstate betting outside of horse racing is of questionable legality and I don't think that model was too popular when it was tried in America so it doesn't really exist here.

It's not even clear that models in which winners aren't removed are more fair or better for the average person. Winners in betting on horses aren't banned. Yet total horse racing handle in the US has been in decline for almost 2 decades at this point. Most of the volume at this point is just algorithms competing with each other for some infinitesimally small edge. Lots of frustration among the humans with last second odds changes due to automated wagering. Not only that, traditionally under parimutuel betting the track take is 15-20%, but because racetracks want to raise volume they will give rebates of up to around half that to high volume (read: robot) bettors. Any sort of exchange model will eventually devolve into something like this.

Given that the supermajority of people will lose money betting and are betting for the thrill of it, should the interests of winners even be considered from a policy perspective?

The answer isn't banning it, it's some basic regulation of the industry.

For example, look how well the Nevada Gaming Control Board keeps Vegas casinos honest.

And the casinos welcome it too -- because it shows that Vegas is a pretty fair place to gamble. You will likely lose money, but you'll lose it fair and square.

What? Casinos are infamous for having the same policy.

I think there can be good remedies that can reduce the amount of harm. Like gambling is legal where I live, but only card rooms where players play against each other and not a dealer, the house just takes a cut. This way almost all of the money stays in the community.

I like this. It incentivizes the card rooms to provide a good service for the people playing against each other, as opposed to making sure that the house always wins

> I struggle with the freedom for personal choice to do what you want vs the collective better situation we get to form for ourselves as a society by banning these things

I'd say for many things it's no choice at all and it's why we have laws in the first place. You rights to speeding in front of schools are being suppressed everywhere. As is your right to homicide, infanticide. Any -cide really is not within your right to perform.

It's what living in a society is all about. "Every man for himself" is natures law; it's what we struggle to overcome and be better. I don't think we would have gotten where we are without rules that govern society.

Everything in moderation, including laws. We should view full legalization of "hazardous" activities in the same light as full prohibition. They are both black and white measures that increase harm. Somewhere in the middle, legalization with strictly enforced regulations, is the path of least harm. It is a healthy recognition that adults are adults and can make their own choices, while at the same time recognizing that there is good in protecting the vulnerable and society as a whole.

Make sports betting legal, audit and regulate the businesses offering the services, ban or heavily restrict advertising, tax it, and use the taxes to fund mental health services.

This has been and will always be the solution to all addictive activities. But the naive memes of laissez faire and morality are tough viruses to stamp out.

A solution that hits the happy middle for me is to ban, or at least restrict, advertising of sports betting. The way they've devoured sports coverage is what I find the most annoying.

The problem with this is that it runs into free speech issues. The right to say most things, including advertising legal things, is more culturally significant than the right to make wagers in many societies.

Though oddly, this is a place where we can take some inspiration from tobacco. Restrictions on advertising work, but restrictions on sales mostly don't. The thing that works may be preferable even if it is culturally more difficult to accept.

> The problem with this is that it runs into free speech issues.

No it absolutely does not. Rules and regulations on advertising including what can be advertised, how it's advertised, who it can be targeted to, and the medium in which it can be advertised in are already strictly regulated in the US, Canada, and Europe.

Yes, it absolutely does. That competing interests sometimes prevail does not eliminate this particular interest as an issue. Also worth noting that I was appealing to cultural significance rather than legal significance for a reason.

"Commerical speech" in the US and is subject to much stricter limitations than things like political speech. The government is allowed to restrict advertising to fulfill it's governance aims, provided those aims are narrowly defined and specific. Incidentally, the specific case of barring Casinos from advertising has legal precedent. So no, gambling ads cannot be argued to be under the protection of the first amendment.

https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/commercial-speech/

Edit: sorry, just saw your note about cultural significance. Not legal, so perhaps the legal argument will ring hollow.

But to address it from a cultural perspective, note that there is a long history of restricting advertising speech for public good. Doing so is not out of line culturally with what we do across thousands of different industries. It would be an extension of the status quo. Not an upheaval in our relationship to free speech

If I place a bet online do I pay a sales tax?

Depending on where you live, your winnings get taxed.

I'm aware that winnings are taxed buy why aren't bets subject to sales tax? You're buying a bet right?

Probably the same reason why you don't taxed for the sale when you invest, or gamble in a casino or buy a lottery ticket.

Gambling operators pay taxes on gross receipts beyond just ordinary corporate taxes that in most states range from 5-10% which also happens to be the typical range for sales tax. As well as a federal excise tax of 0.25% on all dollars wagered.

I believe that sports betting should be legal, and for context I do a little bit but in the few hundreds of dollars a year total range.

When I weigh the legality of things in the harms-vs-freedoms sort of way that you're describing, I tend to use alcohol as my point of comparison, since that's probably the most harmful behavior we allow.

So is sports betting less harmful than alcoholism? If you look at it from the perspective of the cost to society (which I think it should), it seems pretty clearly to me to be correct. The dollar cost to the consumer is less (remember when comparing numbers that the headline for gambling is the amount wagered, of which only a minority is actually lost, vs. for alcohol it's what's spent, which is all lost). Add to that the amount we have to spend on Medicare/Medicaid treatment for issues caused by alcohol, and in my view it's very tough to say that it's reasonable for alcohol to be legal but sports betting should not.

> On the other hand, I think weed and alcohol should be legal, despite it affecting people's lives in negative ways, but the majority if their users are completely normal people.

I do want to address this point - I don't think the majority of their users being normal is a good metric. There are an estimated two million people in AA, and those are just the ones for whom drinking has become a problem so serious that they felt the need to seek help. The consequences for those people are absolutely devastating.

Over the years I took part in few similar discussions. Almost every time argument against regulations was “but alcohol prohibition in USA made things worse”. I don’t have knowledge, but intuitively I’m not sure if it’s really that bulletproof argument. Have someone any thoughts? How to approach that critically?

Personal choice turned out to be less great than promised. You can see it all over the place in the statistics. For example, I recall growing up and and hearing people tell kids to “question authority” and “think for yourself.” The folks saying that assumed that kids would hear it and stop going to church. I don’t think they realized it would also cause kids to become anti-vaxxers and holocaust deniers. (A recent YouGov poll shows that 20% of people 18-29 think the “Holocaust is a myth,” versus 2% of people 49-64, and 0% of people above 65.)

When I was young I chaffed at my “oppressive Asian parents.” But in retrospect, I’ve seen my family members who have stuck to the path set forth by their parents do better in life and avoid a lot of mistakes. Maybe some people were “meant for something greater” that they didn’t pursue. But let’s face it—most weren’t, and avoiding drugs, going to college, and getting married left them in a pretty solid situation.

The majority of people that consume alcohol and/or weed are pretty fine. Is there any gambler that moved on sports betting with more money than they entered? I guess this answers your dilemma.

James Holzhauer I guess, he did well in sports betting and then became a Jeopardy champion. Not that I'd recommend it for most people lol. It's a negative sum game once the house takes their cut, so for every winner there's more than one loser.

> the freedom for personal choice to do what you want vs the collective better situation we get

In this case I prefer to think of it as the freedom of personal choice versus a nasty blurry-zone of not-quite-voluntarily choice where the fallible human meat brain gets hacked.

My biggest issue is the exposure to kids. If your kids are into professional sports they're going to be bombarded with gambling ads the entire time they watch.

Sports betting is a harder drug than marijuana.

Both gambling and drugs (alcohol is a drug too) need one small but utterly crippling regulation everywhere in the world. Ban advertising. No advertising of any kind, electronic or physical. No logos, no brands, no specific color patterns if they happen to do gambling or drugs. No advertisement via product placement - so no products on visible market shelves. But otherwise leave them legal.

I'm guessing that as soon as overaggressive advertisement is banned they will immediately lose a majority of fresh marks and victims. During BigTobacco trials those companies showed stats that the overwhelming majority of new smokers are teenagers. As soon as they can't be easily influenced the abuse usage will go down.

Completely agreed. Legalizing drugs and gambling is important for cutting off the flow of money and social legitimacy to criminal operations, but the "nice" thing (from a marketing perspective) about addictive substances and activities is you don't need to try hard to sell them. For users, even addicts, the bar set by having to deal with black markets is so low that we can get them out of the streets with the truly blandest, unenticing solutions -- plain black and white boxes, black and white screens, beige halls. Just cheap enough to undercut illegal alternatives, with all color and marketing effort placed on the offramps: addiction treatment information and guidance framed in a friendly, empathetic, medical manner.

Lots of things people do for entertainment cost money that they would be better off saving. Why pick on this one thing? A lot of people blow their money shopping or travelling or on luxury goods. They may be affected negatively by these pursuits. It’s not my business. All I ask is that these folks don’t come for my money when they run out of theirs.

I don't think you're looking at the losses the right way. It's not right to say 500 dollars of losses over six months is a drain on the average person, there may be unpriced benefit to them you don't see. For example, I buy 20 dollars of lotto tickets whenever the prize is over 50 million. This has certainly translated into 10k+ of losses for myself over the last 20 years but I am pretty happy with the transaction because fantasizing about what I would do if I won is worth way more than 20 dollars in just enjoyment each week I play.

That being said, I don't know if your conclusion is wrong, and I especially don't like that these sites can ban winners. If they are showing a line they should be forced to honor it for everyone and go out of business if they suck bad enough that a gambler with skill can wipe them out.

>and _all_ of them had all time loses over $500 and it had only been legalized a few months prior.

So what, whats wrong with 150usd/month on harmless fun (unlike smoking)?

Whats the diff if you spend it on netflix, video games, etc?

I was never into fantasy sports betting, especially after the FanDuel/DraftKings insider trading scandal it was pretty obvious there were a LOT of people playing both sides in order to make huge money. The entire industry (AFAIK) is still completely unregulated, so this kind of "insider trading" is perfectly legal.

This story about DraftKings bonus play just confirms they're tilting the table in their favor more than a few percentage points to gain an advantage. They're looking for addicts or suckers to hand over large sums of money with little or no chance of winning anything.

In case anybody is interested: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-fantasy-sports-employees...

An employee with one of the companies, DraftKings, admitted last week to inadvertently releasing data before the start of the third week of N.F.L. games. The midlevel content manager later won $350,000 at rival site FanDuel that same week, the Times reported.

...insider trading like what? With fantasy sports, they controlled the game so could use pick rates. With sports betting, it is one of the most liquid markets in the world with billions traded every week.

Sports books definitely use liquidity to set their lines, but 99.9% of the bets they take are uninformed bettors who aren't going to move the market..that is how they make money. And the books in the US have very little to no staff setting lines, they just work out what margin/risk they want to take and then add that onto current market prices...that is it. They aren't betting against you, you are betting against the market, they are taking a commission.

The reason why they are doing the bonus stuff is because they are the most exploited part of the market. I live in the UK, when these bonuses were a bigger part of bookmakers promo strategy I knew people who made a living from them (I will leave it up to you to work out how). Most bookmakers deploy a more careful strategy these days, this clearly wasn't a careful promo that they decided to try and make up with onerous T&C...not a good idea (this is, unfortunately, the way things are going).

Esports betting is the wild west frontier, targetting kids. It's one of the trifecta of biggest stains on professional Counter-Strike, along with Saudi and UAE money and weapon skins gambling. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JT17l53Fkj0&pp=ygUWaG91bmdvdW5....

Edit: Vast majority of CS tournaments are structured into two phases, "groups" and playoffs. Losing a match in groups means falling through into the "lower bracket", one Major tournament (ESL Pro League) even has three brackets. This leads to many "upsets" as the top teams play the opening matches against much lower-ranked opponents half-asleep, and then march through to (semi-)finals through the lower/lowest bracket. This effect was clearly demonstrated in a recent tournament with no second chances (Gamers8), where every underdog got eliminated in the first round. i don't bet on CS because of the unpredictability enabled by bracketing, but anyone could have made a shit ton of money by betting on the higher-ranked teams in the first round of Gamers8. I'm convinced the bracketing is a result of collusion between tournament organizers and bookmakers, their major sponsors.

Can you even bet with CSGO skins anymore? Once CSGOLounge went down, it seems like that scene died off for the most part.

The wepon skin-gambling part lies strictly with Valve and the $2.50 key mechanic, with a minor but vital support from popular commentators like Chad "SPUNJ" Burchill. You can unlock a skin that sells for six digits; you will (99.9999999%) unlock a skin that sells for $0.17... And Valve will take 30% of that sale.

If we do away with that. Maybe we should also ban Magic The Gathering and like. After whole one ring serialized card it is pretty clear that whole thing is just an unregulated lottery...

Skins provide nearly-zero gameplay value, so for those, the analogy with lottery holds. But Mt:G cards have entertainment value separate from their dollar value, so that's fundamentally different.

MTG cards could be sold only in pre-constructed decks or even like living card games. Nothing mandates them being exploitative loot boxes filled mostly with filler...

Wouldn't it be better if you knew what you were getting?

I only play draft, so no.

It's not, not really. Prices of new set cards are basically set by a box price and the probability to get said card. If the price is too high, people will buy a lot of box, other cards in the same set prices will fall, until the price is right.

I don't think MtG should be banned wholesale, but I agree with your lottery point. That facet should go.

I remember the CSGO lotto scandal where one of the main people promoting was part owner or something [1].

> There were no financial charges held against Cassell.

The craziest part of that whole debacle was his apology video with a nice view of the inside of his mansion and a fancy car sitting outside in the background. It was basically a "crime does pay" ad for the upcoming generation.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicate_(Internet_personalit...

That's way before I started following pro CS, but this past Sunday was the finals day of BetBoom Dacha, a tournament named after one of the competing teams. They placed 3rd-4th. https://www.hltv.org/events/7499/betboom-dacha-2023

Is there specific evidence to support the claim that esports betting is targeting kids, or is the presumption that video games = children?

Yes, there's specific evidence. There's a shit ton of online esports gambling platforms with next-to no age controls. Some of these are prominent tournament and/or team sponsors, and plenty of them advertise through pro players and content creators.

I can't make the case better than HOUNGOUNGAGNE in the video I linked earlier, and a few others:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp5eeNWKgFY

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07QgHRPD0ms

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT17l53Fkj0

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpvePQVscUQ

"Lack of age controls" doesn't mean "targeting kids" though, does it?

And I read the transcripts of the four videos, and I don't see anyone even suggesting the specific or explicit targeting of kids. Some mention of younger teens gambling, but nobody's claiming explicit targeting, as far as I can tell.

My point, though, is the whole, "think of the kids!" argument is often abused to try and prohibit activity that any adult should be free to engage in.

from the video its like 8 in 10 youtube/twitch streams on the games: who do you think watches?

Okay, so are we claiming then that video games are for children? That was my original question.

I don't think the claim is video games are (only) for children, but the claim is that a not insignificant number of the viewers/players are children. Advertising cigarettes in a superman comic doesn't mean comics are only for kids.

It does though, if your argument is that the advertising was targeted at kids. Is the argument here that, by virtue of being on a stream about a video game, the advertising is necessarily therefore targeting kids?

Because that's only the case if video games are for kids. If they're not for kids, which is all I hear when I talk to an adult about video games, then it's harder to draw the clear bright line some folks here seem to presume. Or are we now saying adults shouldn't be allowed to gamble too?

so you think loot box gamble mechanics are targeted at adults?

You seem to want to define targeting very narrowly, curious to know what you think about candy cigarettes or a cartoon camel…

Yes, why wouldn't they be?

Targeting doesn't have to be explicit or exclusionary. A gambling operation with no age controls is targeting kids, because who else is the lack of controls bring in?

Sorry but "targeting" implies intent, and negligence is the absence of intent.

We do have to think of the kids though. They are absolutely our future and will have to be capable of taking over the economy and our issues.

Children are a non negligible demographic of gaming oriented content and are vulnerable to profit seeking corporations and influencers capable of manipulating them. The target towards children is implicit unfortunately.

Echoing another comment, one huge problem with the current sports betting market is banning/limiting winners.

I started prop-odds.com to help the more mathematically inclined gamblers take advantage of mispriced odds or let them build and backtest their own models. So while it's actually not too difficult to beat the book, the challenge comes from evading their detection and getting banned.

I do find this annoying, but to play devil's advocate, it is supposed to be just entertainment. The question is who is losing money when you find an edge like that? Is it the sportsbook? Or is it poor souls (The fools) on the other side of those bets? Probably a bit of both. To some extent, the sportsbooks is simply acts as a marketplace to pair up two sides of a bet, and taking a cut. In all honestly though, if they set limits, fine, but they should set the same limit for everyone. I am intrigued by your web site, I have to say.

Yes, you have a point. The "soft-books" (FanDuel, DraftKings) use the justification of being a form of entertainment as the reason to limit players. Fair enough, I have no personal issue with that.

As for who is losing money, I think you're also correct about that. Both the sportsbook and losing bettors will subsidize the "sharp bettor".

It's also worth noting that some sportsbooks (the more well established ones like Caesars and Pinnacle) do limit all players equally. That's because the do as you say and act like a marketplace to pair up both sides of the bet.

The problem with entertainment books is that they often pick a side on the bet so each side is not equally balanced. An attempt to maximize potential profits for themself instead of the traditional strategy to minimize their risk.

Those situations where the book picks a side are interesting. Do you have any insight on how those situations arise? To me they must find a big difference between what their internal model says, and what public perception says, and so they create a point spread in the middle to lure the better into the taking the less favorable side.

Tangential: one of Romania's main investigative journals, part of the Swiss Ringier group had just fired its main editors and around 20% of their staff last week, over their reluctance to stop investigating and writing about the local betting industry. The explanation was cost-cutting as the printed edition is no longer profitable, but the journalists claim otherwise, having written extensively about the gambling industry which is a potential advertising partner.

I imagine if you’re ok with exploiting desperate gamblers for profits you’re also probably fine with bribing whoever to maintain those profits. Money is a helluva drug

This makes me so happy. To see sports betting corrupt ESPN in real time is so sad. Advertising of sports betting should be as legal as advertising of cigarettes.

100%. it's insane the lack of regulation around sportsbook advertising, considering we all know gambling to be potentially habit-forming and potentially life ruining- there's a reason support groups for gamblers are widely available. It's absurd to me that University of Colorado was willing/able to sign a deal with PointsBet to advertise on campus for $1.6M plus $30 for each user signup (likely to be a student)

20 years ago, credit card companies could setup on college campuses to offer silly "rewards" to students that applied for the credit card. Pretty sure that was banned many years ago now.

But if you're asking "how does this happen???" it's because a) much money is involved and b) it's novel.

Money is a hell of a drug. This is why regulation is the only answer.

But what do we do when the ones writing the regulations are on the money drug?!

Yeah that's the tricky bit, isn't it.

Sports betting and poker are the only financial type bet that are not influenced by politics or other people in general.

On the stock/bond/commodities/real estate market you need to not only predict what will happen but also predict when and if other people will realize what is about to happen and when/if they'd trade accordingly.

In sports betting you only have to study the starting pitcher and the relief vs the other team hitters, or the matchups in a NFL game. Horse races are all about the horses and their health and conditioning etc.

It's liberating for somebody who wants to make a financial bet to just think about those things as opposed to trying to predict the behavior of billions of people that move the prices of stocks.

Sports betting is a black eye on one of the few "wholesome" parts of society left. We are tribal animals and at least sports lets us exercise some of that with a relative level of "don't kill each other" civility.

I'm particularly annoyed at the superimposed ads on hockey boards. They are hugely distracting and make it difficult to watch the game. A game entirely dependent on following a small moving item onscreen. You're going to tell me that flashing / animated graphics don't make it hard to follow the action / puck? You know THE ENTIRE REASON PEOPLE ARE WATCHING?!

Ads on jerseys and helmets is a slippery slope. It's been nice to see the NFL resist this pressure but the NHL sweaters and lids with logos are starting to look like european leagues.

The incessent drumbeat of sports betting along with content about the game is disgusting. Gambling used to be a vice now it's just part of everyday life. It's another situation where the UX of the activity is hugely degraded, and the people doing it just. don't. give. a. fuck.

I cannot have any compassion for the people that drive the enshittification of our lives.

I hope Gretzky and McDavid starring in gambling ads has put some kind of cosmic curse on the Oilers so they never win a cup. Shame on both of those loser sellouts.

I'm glad this is getting looked at; it's a common and annoying scam for companies to claim large "free money" sums that are not actually US dollar equivalents (exchangeable for off-platform goods).

I honestly don't even necessarily mind some loopholes, but it's gone too far. DraftKings should settle, apologize, and adjust/eliminate such promotions. After all, these promos are not in their business' critical path, so just come up with some other thing.

The issue isnt a single gamble.

The issue is that gambling companies were able to use their tricks to create addiction.

Sad stuff, no idea the solution. Might be worth teaching people in 10th grade health class brain science on addictions.

Honestly, I wish they would tackle loot crates first. Obvious gambling mechanic that gamifies people's wallets for exorbitant cashouts. Whether they publish the odds or not.

I never understood how gacha games and loot boxes are allowed in first place... Or why people spend money on them...

Whatever you say about CS and TF2, at least there is some after market, even if it is just in-store credit...

I feel like if they did that the whole videogames industry might topple like a house of cards. There was a pinball prohibition in America where lawmakers decided all pinball looked like gambling whether gambling was involved or not and so they just banned all pinball machines and it took decades to undo the damage those laws did. I fear that if lawmakers started trying to pin down what in videogames was gambling and what wasn't, especially to crack down on "loot crates", who knows where they'd stop. A lot game mechanics look like loot crates.

(On top of that, so much of the videogames industry is funded by things like loot crates today. The big budget games don't have their big budgets in 2023 without their parent companies out whale hunting with some terrible mobile game or another. There are more players on mobile devices spending more money than anywhere else in videogames.)

Publishing odds and making sure that "real money can go in, but real money can't come out" were the contest laws that in part came out of compromises when pinball prohibition ended. They seem to be the best regulations we've come up with so far. They definitely don't feel sufficient to stop some of the worst offenders, but I would imagine any intelligent attempt to "tackle" loot crates would have to start with enforcing and beefing up those regulations rather than to start with bans.

How is gambling not the issue?

It's obviously designed to get money from people, otherwise they'd go bankrupt, and the people gambling are ~randomly taking money from each other into addiction or bankruptcy whether they win too much or lose too much.

Why don't offer fentanyl in small doses then and blame it on people for using it too much?

ft link and archive.is link doesn't work for me but I found this:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3wkgg/the-lawyer-who-took-o...

It's a bit click bait since they are targeting draftkings not 'sports betting'

Those who have not watched the Wendover Productions video on Sports Betting in America definitely should: https://youtu.be/Pm5bTZRhncY?si=rh-7RO8_nqPT5_PH

If they do as well as they did with Big Tobacco it will be a massive failure other than giving themselves a huge paycheck.

$50 BILLION in tobacco product sales and 46% profit margin last year (Coca-Cola has 26% profit margin in comparison)

And all those payouts to the states that were supposed to help people, all those extra taxes to discourage smoking? Well all that money went to other pet projects because no law was ever made how it should be used.

The absolutely drastic reduction of smoking says otherwise.

I personally think that has more to do with state taxes raising prices and young people choosing vape over traditional tobacco.

I'd argue the drastic reduction of smoking is the result of a culture shift around the activity (better education) and governments banning it from public spaces, not lawyers suing Philip Morris.

Educational programs aren’t free, though. The tobacco industry was forced to spend billions paying for these programs as part of the master settlement in 1998. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Ag...

The "better education" part is directly funded from tobacco lawsuits.

I'd posit that legal actions provide lubricant for shifts in social consensus. We could probably argue chickens and eggs for awhile though.

Yeah, given shifts in social consensus also provide lubricants for lawsuits (and laws). One would have to study the issue harder than I have--and I'm sure people have and probably written books. But certainly there was a massive shift in most places that probably isn't explained by either legal actions or higher taxes.

I think it's pretty hard to say that that cultural shift happened in isolation from the reduction in commercial advertising of tobacco products (due to legal bans in the 70s and 80s) and the associated increase in advertising of their negative effects (often paid for by lawsuit settlement money).

Those companies spent billions to shape the cultural perception of smoking through direct advertisement and popular media.

I don't know how to define failure... The extra cost does reduce smoking and a lot of taxes have been collected. ($19B in 2020 according to [1], overwhelmingly to the states).

One can certainly disagree with what the tax money was spent on, but that's really a different question since that goes for all taxes collected.

Not sure too many people are eager to raise sale or property taxes to cut the tobacco taxes and/or cut state budgets.

[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

Sounds like a straightforward deal, not sure why he's suing.

agree

It doesn't sound straightforward to me. I saw the ads and assumed it would be credit and require a deposit of near the size of the bonus to be kept for X days and maybe bet at least once, but needing to risk $25k on bets you're very likely to lose (I honestly can't remember if 1-3 means 0.25 or 0.75 probability, or neither, but even 0.75 is going to be hard to keep) wasn't expected. I'm sure it's all there in the fine print when you go to sign up, but the ads pretty much just yell at you "we're giving you free money to gamble with!".

I never saw the ads, but I have gambled on a couple of online casinos that use crypto, and that was how their bonuses worked. It was pretty easy to hit the targets. If you bet the same $200 ten times then you're at $2,000 gambled. I don't know anything about sports betting, so maybe that's different.

>It was pretty easy to hit the targets. If you bet the same $200 ten times then you're at $2,000 gambled.

Yes, gambling is easy, as long as you win.

It amazes me that sports betting is allowed to persist as is. It’s an addictive hobby with similar detriments to addictive substances, yet advertising to children is ok.

If you go to Europe, you’re probably familiar with betting parlors. They shittify any town they take over, filling up with lonely men losing their money.

Online just hides it a little better.

>It’s an addictive hobby with similar detriments to addictive substances, yet advertising to children is ok.

We lost that battle when states introduced lotteries. Government gambling.

Do lotteries advertise to children in your state? I guess scratch-off game designs are bright and colorful, but here in TN the ads on TV/radio are largely angled at adults.

Yes, we have commercials and billboards and convenience stores with big billboards saying they sold a winning ticket.

I don't really buy the argument that if advertising is bright and colorful, it's distinctly targeted to children. Most advertising is bright and colorful. The only decent argument from the smoking / vape wars was Joe Camel because he was a cartoon character, but I didn't know who Joe Camel was until I was ad adult. I think the advertising to children because it contains non-unusual ________ argument is pretty weak.

If you mean advertise where children would be able to see it, absolutely, all over the place.

Lotteries (gevernmental or not) and sport betting are worlds apart in term of societal damage

I’m curious, how so? I don’t participate in either aside from maybe a few scratchers a year (like literally, 3, maybe) but at a surface level them seem to be very similar.

Sports betting seems more social and seems more "skill based" in that you can follow a team and the news and try and make better bets vs a scratch ticket which doesn't care.

It would take a lot of effort to burn an entire paycheck on lotto tickets. It would take 60 seconds to do so with online betting.

Many states have added online lotteries.

https://lotto.com

The largest order I can make at one time is $30. It would take a lot of dedication to burn through a few thousand dollars, and it would come with no immediate feedback/reward for the effort. I'm not saying it's impossible to ruin one's life buying lotto tickets, but it seems highly unlikely and extremely boring compared to any other gambling problem I can think of.

Few people watch routinely lotto extractions with strong emotions, millions are sport fan that never skip a game.

Nobody cares wether the next lottery has a 24 and millions care very deeply about who wins the next sportball cup.

Both allow you to use them as an addiction but one has a far weaker and narrower pull.

I'm aware there are lots of differences and I agree with all these points. I was just pointing out this fact because it was a recent surprise to me that these states would allow this massive expansion of lotteries to the internet. I think a lot of people still largely view state lotteries as those scratchers and what not you have to buy with cash at gas stations but apparently they've expanded to allowing online transactions with credit cards.

I’ve seen several family members and friends who might have bought a few scratchers here and there, or even played “their” 3-5 sets of numbers twice a week, but otherwise kept their gambling to an annual trip to Vegas get sucked into sports gambling now that it’s always available on their phones.

Not just the money, but also the amount of their mental energy it comes to capture.

People can delude themselves into thinking they have an edge in sports prediction skills. There's no analogous delusion for lotto.

I mean gambling is gambling. You make it morally acceptable, it's gonna seed society. You're just probably used to lotteries which is why they seem different.

I've heard lotteries called a "hope tax," which is pretty morbid.

Tautology aside "gambling is gambling" false just like "addiction is addiction" is false.

I personally dislike tobacco and wish people would stop using it, but it would be dishonest to claim that it is as bad as heroine just because they are both addictive.

> It amazes me that sports betting is allowed to persist as is. It’s an addictive hobby with similar detriments to addictive substances, yet advertising to children is ok.

This didn't just magically happen. We knew all of these problems, and it was completely illegal in the US for decades because of that. But there was a concerted, highly funded, well organized push among state legislatures over the past few years to get this stuff through, to the complete detriment of society. Pure blatant regulatory capture funded by multi-billion dollar corporations.

I don’t see how betting on sports is any worse than buying lotto tickets or making risky options or shitcoin trades that the person barely understands.

All these things are bad, too.

I think sports is much easier to understand than shitcoins, and the payout cycles are much faster than waiting for a cryto vehicle to go up over an unspecified period of time.

Zero-day options.

Sports betting is not zero harm, but the rate of harm is significantly lower than the kinds of betting that are legal in parts of the US.

The US is one of the weirdest markets globally in that it legalized all the high-harm activities (because of massive political corruption) and banned all the low-harm stuff. Now they are normalizing, you have the hysterical people who don't really understand why it was banned initially saying that Eden has fallen.

Part of it is the ubiquity of advertising, and the ability to gamble from anywhere using your phone. Both of which make it much easier to develop a gambling addiction, and much harder for and addict to stop gambling.

Sports betting also has the unique issue of introducing corruption into sports. A league like the NFL has a huge number of players, coaches, referees, and league staff, all of whom can influence the outcome of a game, and all of whom are potentially susceptible to bribes. A notable case of this happening is the "Black Sox" scandal, where the 1919 Chicago White Sox blatantly threw the World Series in exchange for bribes from a gambling syndicate. The more prolific sports betting is, the more likely events like this are.

> Part of it is the ubiquity of advertising

This cannot be overstated.

I like to watch my local hockey team. To (legally) access their games, you must pay $30/mo (or have a cable TV package that includes it). Once you pay the entry fee, you're then to subject to _near constant_ ads for gambling: at least one gambling ad every commercial break (and which translates to ~10 ads just during periods), betting lines and bookmaker logos in scorebugs, full-screen takeover ads with reads during breaks in play, ads for on-network shows covering gambling more in depth, etc.

Oh, and at one point the team had a sportsbook _inside the arena_ (it's since been replaced with a different sponsor).

It's completely taken over sports broadcasts.

There are bookies still operating to this day, one in the local dive bar my wife and I frequent. I have no idea who is muscle is but if you don’t pay him you will have violent repercussions. He’s an older guy who chain smokes some sort of pipe tobacco and he’s been there forever.

Is that really better than a regulated industry? Because that’s the alternative when you have prohibition.

>Is that really better than a regulated industry? Because that’s the alternative when you have prohibition.

It all comes down to access. The mobile aspect of things can fuel addictions to an extreme that otherwise would have been controllable. There's no reason you can't have casinos or gambling halls or whatever to fill that need. Prohibition obviously isn't the answer. But being able to pop open an app and lose your paycheck in a moment is ruinous to people, and there's an entire predatory industry out there designing these things to trick people like that.

Is that really better than a regulated industry? Because that’s the alternative when you have prohibition.

Scale is important. If the "regulated" (I use that term loosely in this context) industry is hundreds or thousands of times larger than the previous unregulated industry, then I could see it being a much worse problem.

And the fact that ads for sports betting have taken over broadcasting and online media for anything even tangentially related, my reaction is that the problem has gotten much worse.

When sports betting was illegal, the US was already the largest sports-betting market in the world.

Yes that's better. The mafia wasn't doing hundreds of billions in dollars of gambling business every year. Sports betting is today, and it's growing at double digit percentages.

Prohibition never completely stamps something out, but it's better than opening up access to every 18 year old with a smartphone.

My uncle used to say “they had vote after vote after vote to legalize casinos in our state. It kept failing and they kept bringing up new votes. And wouldn’t you know once it was legalized we never had to vote on it again.”

Legislation is weird because the bad guys only have to win once, and to prevent them you have to win every single time.

1. How do you propose to prevent it? 2. Do you want to live in a free society, or do you want a lot of regulation over your behavior?

If you start letting moralizers regulate everyone's behavior "for their own good" where do you stop?

If we don't regulate behavior at some level, and continuously pursue "freedom" over all else, our society will not be acting in the best interests of its people.

I notice that you don't have a response for 1. I understand, because, it's very challenging to solve real problems like preventing all gambling over the internet. In which case, it's easier to regulate it for fairness than to have it remain underground and completely unregulated; that's not good enough for some people though.

>If you go to Europe, you’re probably familiar with betting parlors. They shittify any town they take over, filling up with lonely men losing their money

You mean the UK? What you describe is uncommon in most european countries. UK is a very exception because private over-the-counter gambling outlets (aka bookies) are legal. That's not the case in most european countries where usually the state has monopoly.

There was a boom in Spain not long ago. Luckily, a new government tried to curb the expansion and I believe they got somewhere.

It also sucks for this completely orthogonal reason: it brings in people who have no passion for the sport. Just people who glamorize gambling or want something for nothing. If I'm a big ${sport}ball fan, it detracts (in various ways) to associate with people who aren't genuine fans but just want to gamble.

"betting parlors"...I have never heard of this term used anywhere. You have high-street bookmakers, there are a lot of regulations about what they can and can't do, they aren't a very big part of the business anymore (and have been in decline for about ten years).

Most old men used to meet up with their friends and put a line on for the races...you don't enjoy that, maybe you don't have friends to go places with but other people did...what is the issue? The government has wisely cracked down on FBOTs, the worst part of that model that appeared after sports betting moved online. The culture that exists today (as this industry disappears) is nothing to do with what it was (and, btw, the move online has seen the vig go down by something like 90%...so that isn't bad either).

The really weird one is casinos in the US: until Adelson died, both parties largest donors were the casino industry...now it just the Dems. You have zero harm protection, zero regulations, and massive levels of political corruption.

In the UK, these companies pay lots of tax, they invest heavily in technology, and until last year were the only people funding gambling addiction...the government, which runs the healthcare system, refused to do so.

The rate of harm from online gambling is usually under 1% and highest in markets that are either overregulated (i.e. Hong Kong) or unregulated (i.e. US). You "lose" every time you go to the cinema, buy food, do anything by your terms is a loss. You want to gamble on sports, someone will take your bet, what is the issue? Casino/table games are pointless, but this isn't what "betting parlors" are and this isn't the culture in Europe which skews heavily towards sports betting, which is relatively low-harm.

Again, look at the US: crypto, zero-day options, etc. There is value in having an outlet, because people are going to do this stuff whether it is legal or not.

You don't have to get rid of it, just treat as what it is.. a negative addiction pattern. As it is right now, it's a first class member of society in the US. Treat it more like regulated substances like tobacco. Allowed, but with big warnings and not in plain view. I don't know about your harm statistics, but I've personally seen friends irresponsibly lose money after legalization. It used to be much more manageable before.

Just look at research. The harm rates are stable across countries because gambling addiction is a real addiction, it occurs regardless of governmental structure (but serious harm can be prevented by effective regulation, HK is an example of a country where overregulation has led to massive harm).

It didn't use to be manageable before, you probably just didn't hear of it happening. Remember online poker used to be widespread. Illegal sports betting was very widespread. Someone "irresponsibly" losing money isn't the same thing as an addiction either (if you do research into why people get addicted to gambling, you will find out that it isn't about money, it is often about sensory experiences which sports betting does not provide).

You sound like a politician defending gambling after receiving a large donation from 888, or else an employee at a betting company.

The irony being that regulation basically removes this avenue. And you have a country like the US where sports betting was totally illegal, and the largest donor for both parties was...casino-linked donors. Lol. This works precisely in the opposite way that you think.

I live in Europe, I have no idea what a betting parlor is. Pubs have a machine in a corner somewhere with a sad looking person playing a vaguely slots looking game (not sure never played), but I've never seen a parlor or especially one that took over a town. Do you have an example of what these look like? Or are there specific countries in Europe you're referring to?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betting_shop

UK, Ireland, Greece are mentioned. Italy apparently has them too. I don't know about anywhere else.

Some British towns had four or more of these within 100m. It was generally a sign of a deprived area.

TL;DR for clickbait title:

> The lawsuit outlined how DraftKings advertised a bonus for first-time users of “up to $1,000” through a range of social media, third party, TV and radio promotions. But in order to ever receive $1,000 in additional bets, customers had to make a $5,000 initial deposit, risk $25,000 in real money within 90 days and bet on events with odds steeper than 1-3, according to the lawsuit. The bonus would also be paid out only in non-withdrawable credit.

The case has not yet gone to trial.

That is an aggressive promo strategy for anyone unfamiliar with the industry.

The big problem with bonuses is that they are so easy to exploit so books end up having to do stuff like this. European operators have long worked out how to run these promos but, unsurprisingly, DK is struggling without that knowledge.

A lot of native-US books seem to be like this. Clueless.

I think social media should go first.

Anyone under 18 should not be allowed on social media. I would even take it a step further and say no smart phones till you’re an adult at 18.

This is hard, as was talked about 8 months ago here (and other threads):

"Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35307647

"PornHub blocks users in Utah, cites state’s age verification law" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35786086

Utah passed an age based access to social media, but that means that websites need to effectively do a KYC on all users to determine their age.

we should start with public campaigns , like they did with cigarettes. mandatory warnings and bans on advertising such media.

I think Apple Watch with cell service is an excellent compromise. Gives my kid freedom to go around the neighborhood and visit her friends without having access to apps and all that smartphones bring.

Phones can do that today, with things like Family Link: https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103340?hl=en

Or there is a purpose-built phone for people that don't want to figure it out: https://gabb.com/

What is the functional difference between a smartphone and a tablet? Children have tablets as toddlers and while there is a downside, there are upsides. Like videogames and any other demonized thing kids enjoy we do have to take a second to ask about parenting. For some reason when it comes to smartphones parents are helpless although they are the only way kids get them and we have tools that give ultimate control to what they can acces. "Oh but their friends!" I guess it's good to know parents who make this claim would let their kids do drugs if their friends were too.

I don't think that kid should have access to gambling or that social media is great for them, but I think like candy and soda consumption, parents have more control than they don't.

The onus for regulating this should not fall on parents. That’s millions of relationship ruining fights across the country that shouldn’t happen. The parents should be able to say it’s illegal and leave it at that. Obviously this is a subjective issue but that’s the side I’m on.

oo. Bad move. Tobacco companies killed people in a theoretical, impersonal, non-contact manner.

Some of the folks in the gambling industry have direct experience with impediment elimination.

If Big Tobacco is full of spooky masterminds, why were we able to virtually eliminate smoking in the USA?

Vaping, or e-cigs, is on a strong upward trend in the US. The statistics are alarming

Mmm.. so a giant reduction in bad health outcomes is alarming? How so?

I'd remind you that those same big tobacco companies fight vapes tooth and nail. You might ask yourself - why do they do that.

I thought Big Tobacco is buying up the vape companies? Some cursory searching seems to indicate this is their preferred move.

> You might ask yourself - why do they do that

> giant reduction in bad health outcomes is alarming

We are separating cigarette use from vapes. My "alarming statistics" is only for vaping. Cigarettes were down before vapes gained popularity. So since their introduction, health outcomes are becoming worse, would you not agree? In other words, it is not substitution at play, rather there was a reduction and now a new increase from vaping.

Yes, big tobacco is all out trying to wipe out vaping.

No I would not agree re overall health outcomes becoming worse. Much of the cig consumption reduction came exactly due to them being replaced by vapes.

I can't think of where do you get that "health outcomes are becoming worse" because of vapes replacing cigs except from the big tobacco propaganda maybe.

EDIT: assume pure nicotine consumption is not decreasing. what would you prefer -- smoke or vape? This is the question. Because otherwise you have to prohibit nicotine itself, and we know where this particular rabbit hole leads.

> Much of the cig consumption reduction came exactly due to them being replaced by vapes

> assume pure nicotine consumption is not decreasing

If you look at data that covers the last 100 years instead of 20, you will see these are not valid assumptions, at least in the US. Other countries are different, but this is a post about the US

The vast reduction in cigarette usage has been attributed to the relentless anti-smoking campaigns, from statements on the pack, banning indoor smoking, banning advertisements, anti-smoking ads on TV, and ever increasing taxes

Nope, they own or control the vape companies. Philip Morris owns 35% of Juul, and R.J. Reynolds owns Vuse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuse

Anyone serious about their habits buys 100mg/100ml freebase nicotine/PG, some VG (Glycerine) and PG (Propylenglicol) and maybe a bit of flavors and mixes their own. A liter of this lasts a year and costs about a hundred-to-thousand times less than buying premixed shit with who knows what in it.

This is what this all is about. No one controls chinese sources yet, but oh god do they want to.

If there was group of spooky masterminds behind tobacco, why would they waste their time on a relatively small market like the USA?

Is it eliminated or just pushed out of most public spaces?

I guess the fact that I can’t tell if this comment is serious can count as a point towards my autism diagnosis.

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