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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

Sports betting is a market.

Like any market, those with knowledge and power systematically enrich themselves by extracting wealth from those without.

If sports betting should be banned because it exploits those without wealth or knowledge, then other markets with many naive participants should also be banned, such as markets for stocks and crypto.

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Sports betting is a negative EV zero-sum game motivated by an addiction, for a significant fraction of the population.

Investment in equities is principally a non-zero-sum positive EV game motivated by rational expectations for preservation and growth of wealth.

The fact that some financial actors have very good sharpe ratios or dominate capture of trading profits on millisecond horizons isn’t a significant detriment to the larger good resulting from retail investment.

If you support banning sports betting because it's a zero-sum game that is generally -EV for non-professionals in aggregate, and if short-term trading of stocks is also zero-sum and -EV for non-professionals in aggregate, then do you support also banning short-term stock trading for non-professionals?

I don’t know exactly what the right regulation would look like to restrict this specific kind of activity, but I don’t have a problem, in principle, with such regulation.

Bookies don't take stakes from habitual winners. The "market" is rigged.

So every market should be banned?

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