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Comment by wkat4242 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't really sound fair if they are allowed to ban clever people. Isn't that the point of a game?

The point is to part gamblers with their money. Sport betting was never anything more than that.

Yeah, on the spectrum of ways to make money, running a sports betting site is pretty bad. It's zero-sum (unlike, say, founding a company and getting rich from shares that were initially worthless), doesn't really incentivize discovery of any truly valuable info (if you find out a player is injured an hour before everyone else ... ok?), and seems to disproportionately hit people who are already not doing very well.

Seeing the statistics about young American men's betting habits makes me feel old.

The sum is negative, really.

If you take $1000 from a few gambling addicts? You spend your own time and effort doing that - while the negative impact of that loss on their livelihood is likely to be larger than positive impact of your gain on your livelihood.

It's why gambling is usually regulated so heavily. Some people must have thought that sports-flavored gambling is going to be different - or were financially incentivized to think so. Turns out it isn't.

> while the negative impact of that loss on their livelihood is likely to be larger than positive impact of your gain on your livelihood.

What's your point? /s Negative things happening to other people is "0," as long as you are getting something from it. In some cases, it may actually be "good," if you don't like the people suffering negative consequences.

This is not a trait that only applies to gambling. Almost every corporation on Earth takes the same attitude.

That's why unregulated capitalism is very bad.

Not parent but I think the point they’re making is that there is no productive value from gambling (regulated or not). Unlike, say, plane manufacturing which provides a positive good to society and also benefits from heavy regulation.

It was a joke. Sorry. I keep forgetting sarcasm doesn't translate.

Zero sum is still a hell of a lot better than broken windows negative sum economic activity. A lot more stuff than you'd think falls into that category.

At least sports gambling is fairly "pure" in that regard.

It is not zero sum. If it was zero sum middle man would earn nothing. It is strictly negative sum because it is profitable.

Yes, it is not fair. The entire gambling industry is unfair and exploitative.

Since when is betting supposed to be fair? The whole point is the middle man extracts money.

No, it is a business, that business employs millions of people worldwide. There are some books where, for various reasons, that kind of business would destroy their ability to serve retail customers...which is the point: the ultimate point is entertainment, it isn't supposed to be a financial transaction, do people rage at the dead loss from eating food?

The market is moving towards a model that is more similar to financial markets with price discovery from informed participants. It enables higher volume, this business model is used by Asian books such as SBOBet...but the market is where it is now, and most places are also using beards to bet at soft books too, and those books will continue to try to protect their business as it is now.

Btw, one of the major issues that explain why books are soft is the use of marketing to fund growth. If that spending wasn't required, it would change the operating model completely to one where gambling companies took a spread. But the marketing spend is the main avenue of competition, not price.

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