Bombarding gamblers with offers greatly increases betting and gambling harm
bristol.ac.uk
bristol.ac.uk
Controlling/banning advertising for Alcohol and Tobacco results in significant health benefits. Sports gambling used to be illegal in many places or limited to specific places. Now that it's available in your pocket, like a pack of smokes or a flask of whisky, why wouldn't advertising triggers, direct or otherwise, be effective at encouraging susceptible people to partake? This is not a surprising result. It's the inaction of most governments that is surprising.
The only ones that don’t want the ban are the ones selling the advertising slots. No way they’re giving up the gravy train.
Because most of the time if you can argue “they won’t do a good job at capitalism [going to work]” then everyone goes “oh no no no we can’t have that.”
Disgusting behavior, especially coming from those who often claim their content is to improve things. Hypocrites across the board.
With gambling you can gamble away your kid's college savings, or the retirement savings for you and your spouse. Seems that you can wreak havoc beyond yourself even more so than with other types of addiction.
Limit gambling to symbolic amounts (maybe a monthly limit of the minimum salary in that country), and see how it goes.
You might even have gambling companies lobbying to increase the minimum salary!
"Hey, I see we haven't chat / you didn't vibe code for few days now, how about you get 1000 free tokens and we just see where that lead us?"
It perfectly aligns with sycophantic interaction and then roulette outcome one gets, sure it might not work 100% of the time but it works most of the time and "I" as a user somehow "get it" more than AI researcher so "I" can get it to work for me.
Brilliant.
“Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma When Jumping from Aircraft: Randomized Controlled Trial.” BMJ, vol. 363, 2018, k5094. https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
For example, "The survival time of chocolates on hospital wards: covert observational study".
I brought this up previously [1] and recently [2] it and I made that accurate comparison as a form of gambling and got immediately flag'd despite that being correct.
[0] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march...
Well FWIW I see you and agree with you.
I've been around the block long enough to know you never take an 'easy profit' deal from someone who is in the business of making money from them while in their own domain.
To make the "free" money and not ruin your life, You must have the discipline to look at things from a purely numbers perspective. It has to be mechanical and not emotional. If some action is +EV, and bet sizing is correct relative to variance, then you should perform the action. Never chase losses with a -EV bet.
The terrible thing about gambling is that there is no limit to how much you can lose, and you can also lose way more money than you actually have. It's a dangerous game.
There's a certain poker quip which I like to use and apply to other contexts, such as active investing: "If you look around the table can't tell which player is the sucker, you're the sucker."
In other words, beware entering into a game where the rules ensure somebody will be victimized. This is especially true when many of the existing denizens spend much much more time and effort and finagling than you'll ever want to match.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." -- W.O.P.R, War Games (1983)
I collected a few grand back then, however those sort of promotions are now illegal where I live.
Laura ingalls wilder said it best, in Farmer Boy:
“never bet your money on another man’s game”
That's what they mean when they say the house always wins.
We didn't decide that, btw.
But say that, and the same non sensical asinine crowd that spammed about crypto future or NFTs will tell you that's just to have more accurate information and you don't get it.
A lot of the ads basically go along the lines of: 'you could win big and have a great time, awesome! (disclaimer: will probably ruin your life)'.
It should be like it is with smoking - photos of lung cancer patients on the package. People will still do it of course but at least it's not falsely advertised.
So the gambling ads should be things like, that moment where your wife finds out you've drained the family's savings and the house is about to be re-possessed. Yeah.
But the most efficient gambling provider is the one that extracts the most money from its customers. Helping gambling companies be successful is a net loss to society.
No more need to rely on MSM or governments, it's all just math and data (odds jumped entirely based on Reuters newswire update posting a quote from an unnamed Israeli source).
And as a bonus, people lost a bunch of money "winning" that trade!
What it aleays means is you still win or lose a bet they just shuffled the permutations so that you win and lose in different outcomes.
But emotiionally they sell it as them giving you a chance. Pretty manipulative.
Examples would be like "money back if your horse comes second" or "bet on horse coming 3rd 4th or 5th" or "if your team is up at half time we count it as a win".
They are just offering a different wager!
And for the operator, they make money by... doing nothing? That's a huge red flag. Usually if that's the case, then the business is not legitimate.
There wasn't a group that chose to opt out, and another group that chose not to. Everyone agreed to be in the study, and then a random half of the cohort was removed from the mailing lists.
Gambling should return to being legal in Vegas and on reservations, 24/7 gambling anywhere is very problematic.
I’m pretty sure you would see so many people selling their quotas that the price would be dirt cheap.
At the most basic level: how many can afford to go to Vegas? This would be sure money. They’d take it when they need it.
and most people have ethics and so would not sell. Maybe to someone in the family, but strangers.
So it may help by stopping some people from getting to that point, but as a safety net, an important chunk of the victims will still punch right through it.
This kind of research being that which shows an obvious harm that we all know about. It should have zero influence because it is blindingly obvious. Namely because if the title wasn't true, betting companies wouldn't be spending lots of money on it in the first place. But they are, as everyone who lives in the UK can tell. So we know. So this study shouldn't influence policy in the slightest. But it does.
I hate it because there's by definition a gap of years between A. all of us knowing that a phenomenon is harmful B. the study coming out. And then another gap of many years between the study and actual policy changes.
Here's my request to people in academia who do studies like these - which is admittedly a tiny percentage of academia. Just fudge the numbers and publish it a year earlier. Use LLMs to generate the text. It would be a huge boon to society. We all know it's true, so you're not doing anything wrong. Your quest for honesty is hurting everyone. The actual data is pointless.
It's like gathering real data on whether pigeons will indeed eat sunflower seeds if thrown on the ground in front of them, versus just making it up. Maybe such a study hasn't been done yet, but it literally doesn't matter because we know the outcome. There's zero gain from actually doing the study versus saying that yes, pigeons will generally do so.
Hopefully this research ends up being used to justify more gambling regulations, but governments are addicted to the gambling lobby donations so who knows what will happen.
Gamblers are the whales of that industry. The industry is well aware of that and well aware of how much harm they can cause. But their paychecks depend on not knowing so they choose not to.
Same as pay-to-win freemium games. Find the whales and milk them for all you can. For every high-spender who can afford it they know full well the other 99 cannot. They know they are ruining some people's lives. They know they use dirty psychological manipulation tactics. Their paychecks depend on not knowing so they choose not to.
So if you're still there it's just because you're being milked.
There's a a giant market for second hand accounts on betting websites for this very reason.
By that I mean that they try to detect and ban any pattern that may be math / ML derived or arbitrage seeking.
I have been banned on an account that was loosing money (around -15eur) and the bet was 2.96eur - yep fractional bets is a big no - no.
So while it is possible to find better odds and win in the long run based on stats and ML with a 3% - 5% profit they will ban you before you do.
They are not big fans
It is an inherent property of unchecked capitalism to externalise and ignore any unwanted costs. Or on the flip side of that coin, profit from causing damage to others, where possible.
Had an interesting case study where a coworker liked to gamble - he was fairly responsible, kept to his budget and treated it like an expensive hobby he enjoyed- but at the same time, he had someone else handle his retirement investments, which is an unpredictable payoff market where you come out ahead on average. I asked a couple times why he didn't replace gambling with investing and never got a good answer. He was certainly smart enough that he could have had fun with the research and chance.
Then there was a market downturn and his investment advisor had to talk him down from selling in a panic, and I was like "oh... It's not an information problem at all. It's entirely an emotional regulation problem"
I should sell a "meditation for investors" course
There's a simple answer, which is that gambling is fun, and investing is not fun (my guess.) Your coworker is a pleasure seeker, like everyone is to some degree.
This is what happened to EVE Online and many other MMORPGs.
If gambling orgs do something that you know causes harm, why isn't the a legal sense of responsibility?
That's not how addiction works.
It's an enlightening read on addiction that will make you more empathetic for addicts of all types: gambling, substances, shopping, whatever.
Definitely worth a look if you find yourself asking "Why don't they just stop?"
https://www.amazon.com/Realm-Hungry-Ghosts-Encounters-Addict...
People are not machines, it’s not as simple as deciding whether to do something or not. You have stronger and weaker days. Temptation makes it harder to do what is in your best interests, even if you’ve decided on another day that you’d rather not partake.
Getting concrete about gambling: lots of people decide not to gamble and just don’t. Lots of people decide they don’t care whether they gamble and they do. But there are also many people in the middle, who would rather not gamble, but find that they sometimes act against their own best interests, and their own past resolutions to not gamble. Bombarding these people with offers of free bets increases the likelihood that they will gamble on their weaker days.
When I hear takes like yours, I feel very jealous. I would love to always act in my own best interests and according to some policy I predetermined. But that’s just not my experience of how life works.
I feel like you’re trying to force some sort of binary here, but I’m trying to say that you may choose not to gamble in general, on day X, but find that you do gamble later.
In fact I would say that many gambling addicts have _chosen_ _not_ to gamble in some sense, but in another moment they do find that they choose to. There’s a temporal aspect to this.
Advertising gambling to those people makes it less likely that they will follow through on their choices.
Do you always do literally everything you choose with a clear head? Never procrastinate, get angry, feel sad, whatever? It’s really hard for me to see your perspective on this.
This means you can say people voluntarily got into their addiction, but you cannot say they voluntarily stay in their addiction.
Cigarettes are a good example. It is easier to wean off from cigarettes and switch to vaping and then quit vaping, than to quit smoking directly.
This is because the transition cost from smoking to vaping is much lower.
The same way sober alcoholics would disagree with a similar statement about alcohol addiction.
I'd like to know the difference between the characterization of being "powerless over alcohol" for example and not having the capacity of choice.
"I want to eat this bucket of ice cream... But I also really want to not want to."
Lost savings means an impoverished individual and potentially an impoverished family and children. These draw support resources from the state and community, are more likely to turn to crime, and are less likely to develop into contributing members of society.
Exhibit A: Tobacco. Prior to regulation, it was advertised widely and thought to be not that bad.
Once we regulated knowledge and consent, use plummeted.
For knowledge, we display pictures on the pack and carton of people in agony dying of lung cancer. We tell them the odds. For consent, we mitigate by saying "WARNING: nicotine is an addictive chemical. Nicotine can be more addictive than Heroine".
The fallacy here is that markets are naturally free and government intervention makes markets less free. That's rarely the case. Often, intervention makes the market more free.
| If it's so bad for gamblers, why don't they stop?
If this is serious, lol. "Why are you addicted to X. Just stop, it's easy!"
Because harm does not guarantee control.
When it becomes compulsive, it’s not a simple cost-benefit choice anymore. People can know it’s hurting them and still feel driven to keep doing it.
The dopamine rush of gambling means the brain can get stuck chasing relief, hope, or reward, despite also knowing that it is destructive.
> If gambling orgs do something that you know causes harm, why isn't the a legal sense of responsibility?
Because it’s not that easy to prove responsibility in the face of powerful money lobbying and victim-blaming. Shame and stigma around addiction means people don’t come forward. Freedom argument comes in that not everyone who gambles is an addict, so restricting it takes freedom away. The same argument is used to push the personal responsibility angle.
Ultimately I think the way the gambling orgs cover their ass is by advertising gambling addiction helplines and adding small disclaimers to call those lines if you have a problem: “that’s it, legislators, we are clearly giving them the tools to help themselves, and that shows us exercising responsibility. Bombarding gamblers with offers is simply marketing and creating engagement for our business, you can’t make that illegal.”
Do they have moral responsibility to not exploit addicted gamblers? I would argue, yes, they do. But unless you prohibit all gambling marketing, how would you accomplish this moral responsibility even if the gambling company agreed it had it? It’s not like addicts identify themselves or that you can filter your marketing easily to people without problems. This is why the solutions have been on outlawing the whole thing, because it’s really hard to operate as a business without the societal cost.
Because they're stupid. Gamblers are idiots, gambling companies prey on the dumb. Anyone who understands the very basic math behind the games understands that it's pointless to play, you'll just lose more the more you play. That's the whole point. It's not even a secret, you can find the exact odds for each game.
Poker is different as you're playing other players rather than the house but it's still a negative sum game as the house takes a cut so you have to be better than the others to play. And if you're a reasonably intelligent person you'll just bet a little and accept your losses and move on. Or not play at all. Idiots will do dumb stuff like bet way more than they can afford, then they won't have money to pay their mortgage, rent etc and so on. People call it an addiction but I'm pretty sure it's mostly just being really really stupid. Can't be addicted to gambling if you aren't dumb as a rock.