In a healthy economy “Tails I win, heads you lose” businesses should not be allowed to succeed.
If we're pretending it's entertainment, then it shouldn't matter that winners get shut down... because it's just supposed to be fun. If we're not pretending it's entertainment, then we need to deal with the fact that it's a huge negative payoff vice we shouldn't be allowing to happen easily (make it legal and rare).
The idea that we're trying to create "fairness" in a business that basically wouldn't exist if the operators don't have a guarantee of success is ridiculous. We can either require sports betting agencies to have betting lines that require their bets be balanced or we can basically ban them from becoming a large industry.
Paying for entertainment is a normal activity. People do it every day. But gambling feels different: you can pay a nearly unlimited amount for it. There are usually limits in other forms of entertainment. I can only see so many movies in a theater in a day. I can only go to so many concerts. The number of board games I can buy is limited by the storage space in my house.
I'm sure there are exceptions in some types of entertainment I haven't thought of, though.
No, they'll just hike premiums or refuse to insure you.
Earlier this year, sportsbooks lost a lot due to punter-friendly outcomes (a series of favourites winning), and they didn't cut people off. Doing this is extremely bad for business because: people won't come back, and you aren't giving customers the opportunity to lose that money back to you.
So what you are seeing when people are limited is not this but arbing line moves between bookmakers, people bearding for someone else, etc.
One of the articles mentions stuff relating to player behaviour - for example, if you bet on Australian Rules Football, you bet every game for multiple weeks then it doesn't matter if you win or lose, there is going to be a limit - there is a grey area, but the majority of people being limited don't fall into this category. They are just people doing stupid stuff (I have done this, I used to arb line moves 20 years ago in the UK, I have been banned everywhere, it is stupid and I should have been banned).
This is what market makers doing 24/7 on public stock markets. This is what creates "efficient markets".
It doesn't improve efficiency in any way because the price you are taking is known. If you are betting on the open with Asian books, you are adding to price discovery. By the time most bookmakers open their lines, the price of the risk is known so you placing your $100 bet isn't improving efficiency, it is just noise.
There definitely are -- everything from margin limitations, maintenance requirements, regulatory bodies, and counter party risk.
> It doesn't improve efficiency in any way because the price you are taking is known.
The price you are taking when you buy a stock is also known to all participants. Just like sports betting, the marketmaker (bookie) is profiting between the bid & ask spread.
When Betfair first came on to the scenes the traditional online (and offline) bookmakers were like fish in a barrel for arb bets.
I still remember when the first major bookmaker (pretty sure it was BetVictor) started tracking Betfair markets automatically. Now they all do it.
Also, their tech even today is still dogshit. It looks like they are tracking Betfair prices but most bookies use third parties for pricing, OpenBet for example, and so it is usually the third party tracking. There is still inherent latency so the main tool has been delays and limiting certain customers. This is why ppl who say they should just take any bet are idiots, it isn't a stock exchange (and most of these third parties also have massive latency in their stack too, naming no names...the stuff I have heard about how they run things is incredible).
I have done sports betting like three times, when I realized the odds were bonkers, and retrieving the money after winning was an extreme hazzle that took weeks with photocopies of passports and gas bills and what not. Paying the bets took a minute.
I mean, online betting is a shady business. Physical casinos at least have some sort of brick wall to bang your head against.
Blame the AML/KYC/income tax regulatory regime. Placing a bet doesn't require KYC any more than spending $10k at a club doesn't require KYC. However once the casino needs to disburse money Uncle Sam suddenly wants his cut and to make sure it doesn't go to Bad People.
Ideally we probably should have higher barriers to gambling on both sides, kind of like we do cigarettes.
that has nothing to do with sports betting. it's the same with trading stocks/forex/..., it's KYC/AML
[1] A heuristic to minimize your losses, because favorites are underbet, if you have minimal information
That's every gambling place/app, should they all be made illegal? Not that I'm disagreeing...
I don’t think Polymarket does this, but I also think it would be OK if the casino takes a cut of the prize pool, as long as it ensures that winners never receive less than they bet. For example, the casino may receive $losers/n (they pick n, $losers = total bets of losers), and winners receive $bet($losers(n - 1)/n + $winners)/$winners, $winners = total bets of winners, $bet = their bet).
Then it’s “tails = I win you lose, heads = we both win someone else loses, except nobody wins if everyone gets heads but that’s extremely unlikely (especially with more than 2 options)”.
* If you start applying the martingale to roulette, you will quickly be pointed to the exit.
Yeah, but if you try to "count cards" (i.e. actually utilize probability to play effectively) they'll throw you out. The parent comment is right that this is basically how all gambling against a business works. I'd totally be in favor of them all being illegal, but I also doubt that it would be feasible due to most people not sharing this view; it would probably go down about as well as prohibition (which ironically is also something I'm one of the few who would be relatively unaffected by given that I don't drink).
I think it’s immoral to allow their bad decisions to raise costs for those of us who do not care who wins the Big Game.
There's a vague parallel with the homelessness problem in my city: I would rather my tax dollars go toward giving people stable housing for free (along with job placement, drug addiction treatment, etc.), because any other use of that money (clearing out tent encampments, jailing addicts, etc.) doesn't actually fix the problem, and ultimately costs more in the long run. (And meanwhile, the city is dirty and I feel less safe walking around in it.)
Sure, giving someone housing for free isn't "fair" to all the people who work hard to pay their rent or mortgage, but sometimes fairness doesn't give us (all of us, not just the people involved) the best outcomes. And it may not be "fair" to limit what businesses are allowed to "sell" to consenting adults, but I am willing to accept that some businesses will not be as profitable if it means society is healthier.
When, as has been pointed out in this thread, people are instead being deceived and told the playing field is level, yeah, no we should not allow that.
If you instead ask if people should be allowed to make money on exploiting "bugs in human behavior", whether society should help casinos collect on gambling debts etc, in short whether this is an institution we should allow, it becomes a lot harder to justify.
Let's demonstrate that by just jumping to the end of this reasoning -- severely mentally retarded adults -- can they consent to sex? Why or why not?
This kind of argument is not particularly interesting; the entire point of a discussion board is for everyone to post and discuss their opinions, which will naturally differ sometimes. Asking what amounts to, "why are you allowed to have that opinion?" is pretty pointless.
We can endlessly debate morality, ethics and all that regarding lots of things, but in my humble opinion gambling could be reduced to:
"Would people still engage in those games of chance if there was no monetary aspect to it?"
And then how many of those people who would still engage with them are "notorious" gamblers on whom those games had a clear negative impact (in most people's eyes).
The choice is between the mafia or this. This is better than the mafia.
Any other argument is basically utopian.
I love mafia history though so I think many people just don't understand how powerful the mafia was in 20th century America.
Of course, it wouldn't be the Italians this time. It would be the Mexicans. A horrific thought.