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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Or at minimum, banning advertising for it.

If people want to gamble, they are free to look for a bookie, if people want to buy heroin, they are free to look for a street pharmaceutical sales representative, but neither should be allowed to manufacture demand for their poison, or hand out free samples.

> In 2022, Washington Post reported a bettor Beau Wagner who bet $1,000 and won $50,000 on an NBA game. He tweeted a screenshot of his winning bet, and DraftKings reposted it with the caption, “BEAU KNOWS BETTING”. However, a day after his successful bet, his betting limit was severely restricted to a grand total of three dollars and sixty three cents. DraftKings used his win as an advertisement to lure new, unsophisticated bettors to the platform, but they shut down the very bettor they were advertising.

Absolute scum.

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Sports betting ads are the absolute plague of sports broadcasting here in Australia. You can't go 5 seconds without seeing an ad for gambling. It's just insane, like seeing the cigarette ads in old sports games.

I enjoy sports gambling. I’m sure people reading this won’t believe me, but I am “up” about 47% over the past 2 years, which is when I started. I’m good at it and I have a system.

I wholeheartedly agree with you, they need to ban advertising, as they did with tobacco. The amount of commercials and adverts is nauseating, the industry is predatory, and I’m having serious thoughts about stopping because of that.

They could (in addition to banning Ads), require them to take bets from anyone not banned for misconduct by some neutral party.

I’m not going to defend bans, the industry is shady. People who get lucky once on a big bet shouldn’t get banned, or throttled, especially if they have a history of generally not hitting.

To consider it neutrally, there are people who are just really, really good at it. Think a pro athlete playing on a JV sports team, a man among boys if you will. Those people are sincerely just fucking around with online books anyways and make most of their actual plays in-person, large stakes, and it is their primary source of income.

I get why they get banned. These piddly online books aren’t “meant” for them. I don’t blame them for trying, it’s as close to free money as they can get. I also get why they get banned.

Again, the industry is scummy and predatory. Not defending it. I can see both sides of it though.

Agree with the banning, problem is they are major sponsors of a lot of sports which would then need to find alternatives for funding.

AFL (Australia) is one with very embedded sponsorship from SportsBet.

Even the voting group for the Norm Smith medal (best on ground in the Grand Final) has someone from SportsBet on it.

> Agree with the banning, problem is they are major sponsors of a lot of sports which would then need to find alternatives for funding.

They've managed to get by before sports betting was legalized.

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