It ruins lives, funnels money to terrible people, makes sports worse for everyone, and has no positive impact on society. The benefits of the "freedom" to let manipulation of your lizard brain drain you of your past and future earnings is not worth it.
But if you really think about it, yes there might be a tiny portion that wins overall, but they only win because there are a lot of people emotionally invested that ruin their lives. So yes, please ban.
Edit: While yes, it can be fun and I personally can have a lot of fun when I put 50 bucks into a slot machine once or twice a year, no matter the outcome, it doesn't really justify to keep that business alive
Probably explained by chance.
Gambling "systems" don't work unless there's a flaw in the game.
Winning sports betting players often go on to set odds.
Apparently exactly this. The people that I knew where always discussing the fitness of certain players and how that'd impact the game and stuff like that. Though it could've also been that they were on a long long lucky streak, because they minimized the risk with such considerations. At least t hey were not ruining their own lives
These sorts of inefficiencies, and often even true arbitrage bets, show up in sports betting because the bets you need to make are so complicated. There is a team at Susquehanna that does sports gambling as their form of trading, and they will sometimes play these sorts of arbitrages against bookies. I remember hearing about a perfectly-hedged arbitrage of 8 different bets from one member of that team in a specific gambling forum, but the bets were all so arcane that very few other players were playing each one.
As a professional bettor, you're not really outsmarting the sportsbook—you’re trying to outsmart the public. The key is finding moments where the crowd is wrong enough that betting the other side makes sense, even with the sportsbook’s fees. That means you’ll often skip betting when the odds are pretty accurate.
Most sportsbooks will limit how much you can bet if you're too successful, but they usually won’t ban you outright.
The Hong Kong horse race track was a famous example of market-priced bets where the book was run the way you said and the crowd was exploitable in the way you are suggesting. It was one of the last books to work that way.
Sportsbooks will open lines intelligently, but they absolutely do move the line in response to market forces in an attempt to balance money on both sides, because when the money is balanced, they are guaranteed profit.
It's true that when you make a sports wager, the house is paying you out of their wallet. It's also true that they employ a lot of energy and expertise in order to open the betting at accurate odds. However, no corporate, end user facing sportsbook is themselves fading action on one side of the match intentionally. They aggressively try to balance money on both sides so they can guarantee a profit.
Because that shit is legal in all 50 states and is worse for society in my opinion. No hysteria against this.
People don't lose their life savings redeeming D&B tickets. You have an uphill battle convincing me the Chuck E Cheese model is worth banning when it's mostly seen as harmless kids' fun.
If this is seriously bothering you, you probably spend way too much time at Dave & Buster's. And I would guess you do not have children.