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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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

>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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

>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?

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.

> 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.

Sports betting is a harder drug than marijuana.

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.

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.

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