Online Gambling Is Changing Sports for the Worse | Hacker News Reader

Online Gambling Is Changing Sports for the Worse

newyorker.com

35 pointsjbegley26 comments

America Made a Bet on Sports Gambling. The Backlash Is Here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39860374

I hate the proliferation of gambling on TV sports. It was bad enough to ask my kids to sit through alcohol ads and fast food ads, but the gambling ads are the worst.

I was thinking this would push people to watch sports where betting wasn't as prominent. Then I thought, why not jai alai, and maybe I can relive my excitement of Miami Vice. But, it looks like even jai alai is corrupted by gambling:

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

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

Jai alai in Miami was always about betting. Like the dogtrack.

Wait, jai alai is your go-to for a sport not influenced by gambling? In my perception its history is closely entwined with gambling, it's like horse racing-level.

So, I'm a recent transplant to Florida. All I know about jai alai was the three seconds from the intro to the Miami Vice series. I looked up whether it is still a popular pastime and apparently it has faded from the glory days of Crocket and Tubbs. Which to me sounded great, because I thought it might be a fun sport without the outrageous costs of other live sports. But, I was wrong about all my assumptions, as usual.

Ah I see. Yeah it has a long history of being a gambling sport in europe and controversies around organizational corruption & match fixing, and entanglements with organized crime are about as old as the sport itself. It's a great game but unfortunately in the places it caught on it also usually brought some of that baggage with.

I guess the error was to take ideas for family activities from the intro of a crime series called Miami Vice.

Yeah, flying them into Colombia so we could buy drugs from El Chapo did not end well, have to admit!

Your comment really made me laugh, thanks!

> it looks like even jai alai is corrupted by gambling

You may be joking but for those who are not aware betting has been prominent in jai alai since the thirties.

CS Professor Steven Skiena has a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Calculated-Bets-Computers-Gambling-Ma...

Excerpts from the book: https://www.jai-tech.com

https://archive.is/zkNNx

I absolutely hate the proliferation of online gambling everywhere in the US. I'm used to it in Europe, but it's still jarring to me that live broadcasts will regularly mention betting odds in an attempt to get people to gamble.

I can't imagine how difficult it must be for somebody with a gambling addiction. I also can't help but think what kids think about gambling if its thrown at them constantly.

Gambling for me is analogous to marijuana smoke. It's stinky, and I don't really want it in public, but I don't mind if you do it behind closed doors. I just don't want to see it constantly.

Kids were gambling on loot boxes until recently, no?

It hasn't really stopped, from what I can see. Some sites got shut down, but it was a token few and certainly not something the video game industry seems keen on shutting down with any seriousness, and why would they? The loophole here is that that you are gambling loot for loot, so you are only paying for loot with real dollars, you aren't (usually) straight gambling money on odds, though this does occur, its far far less prominent than the culture around loot and gambling, as noted, and this has lead to misaligned incentives and the government has not shown any real interest in taking systematic action, from what I can tell.

Still going strong, except belgium I think?

I’m thankful some US States still don’t allow online gambling.

> Gambling for me is analogous to marijuana smoke. It's stinky, and I don't really want it in public, but I don't mind if you do it behind closed doors. I just don't want to see it constantly.

This is a purely cultural adaptation — especially in the U.S.

People said the exact same thing about interracial & homosexual couples in the 60's.

Gambling isn't inherently bad, it was just banned throughout the U.S. and, like marijuana, was constantly presented as bad.

As a recovering addict, learning to deal with the advertisements is just a part of recovering. The world doesn't cater to meet the needs of the few who struggle with any vice.

> People said the exact same thing about interracial & homosexual couples in the 60's

Not sure if this is a false equivalence or strawman fallacy. Maybe both?

First they came for the gamblers and I did not speak up because I am not a gambler.

And then they came for the guns owned by 5 year olds, and I didn’t speak up… Then they came for the huge environment polluters, and I didn’t speak up…

Somethings really are dangerous and should be regulated.

Yeah lol I was poking fun at the hilarious false equivalence.

It feels like we already solved this with cigarettes... we've mostly agreed that we can't/shouldn't make them illegal, but we absolutely made it illegal to advertise them, we put huge taxes on them, required huge warning labels on boxes, etc.

Meanwhile, US colleges: https://apnews.com/article/college-sports-betting-on-campus-...

> The four schools partnered with PointsBet and Caesars have agreements that go beyond ads in stadiums and on broadcasts. A campus-wide email campaign from Caesars targeted anyone on LSU Athletics’ email list, offering free bets for an initial wager

Cigarettes are cool, kiddos!

Wow, I thought it was bad when I was in school and they tried pushing credit cards we didn't need on us. Now colleges are partnering with sportsbooks? That's terrible.

I still see ads for cigarettes and I still get nauseated by second hand smoke when in public places. I don't think we have solved the smoking problem at all. I don't particularly care about the ads, but the second hand smoke is a major problem.

Mobile gambling apps should be outright illegal nationwide. The degree to which mobile app makers have hacked people's psychology to get them to spend hours doing things that are counter to the person's own goals is insane. Mixing that with its own separately extremely addictive behavior, gambling, is a recipe for disaster. Where it gets really, really nasty is that it's quite hard to maintain and hide a gambling addiction when you have to go to the casino or track so often. But now you can get roped into this family-destroying activity from the couch sitting right beside your partner. Your drug dealer is perpetually a mere one click away, and dangling huge incentives in front of you from every TV screen in the country.

Politicians actively broadening access to these sorts of services should be (journalistically) investigated for bribery and/or their own gambling addiction. It is so blatantly anti-social so as to be indefensible.

I'm not against making gambling advertisement illegal. It is reasonable enough ban.

On other hand I might find odds kinda interesting point to discuss. Not as specific odds, but in general. As that is purest number that could actually help in predicting the game. So maybe it should be okay to mention range of odds, just not where those odds come from.

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