Make sports betting taboo again

I'm fine with sports betting being legal. If people want to gamble that's their decision.

But I believe any kind of advertising of it during a game should be made illegal. It is ruining the broadcast, with updates on the betting line and worthless statistics to non betters.

Gambling has a similar addiction profile to cigarettes and other drugs, so why not have the same kind of labels on every bet and app, something like, "FanDuel is legally required to tell you that sports gambling has been shown to cause massive financial losses and is a major cause of divorce."

I am also against specifically state sponsored gambling like the lottery. At least (non casino style day trading) investment in stocks has upside at all.

I'm pro legalized gambling, anti-gambling advertising.

The first paragraph of the article struck a chord with me. I listen to a fair amount of sports talk radio and have for most of my life. Even back into the 80s and 90s I remember noticing that these guys on the air seemed to speak the language of betting. Odds, spreads, etc. They would often talk about the games in this context. But, this being before the legal/online/casual betting age we're in now, it always struck me as both sad and out-of-touch. I would think, these sports radio hosts are all such degenerate gamblers, they probably don't realize that most of their listeners are actual sports fans. I would also think, maybe I'm the outlier? Maybe the hosts AND the listeners are all gambling and I'm the only one who doesn't?

But now, the cat is totally out of the bag. And the gateway drug, I think, was online fantasy sports leagues.

Anyway, I enjoyed this article and agree with many of its points, and for an article on Jacobin that's saying a lot coming from a died-in-the-wool centrist like me.

The article says that Robinhood has "an undisclosed $10 fee on every $100 investment." That seems absurdly high. But is it true? I did a minute of research and couldn't find any fees like that.

Sports betting and the spread of gambling is a symptom. Much like professional sports being a vehicle for advertising due to the teams' brand value. Or like a team having brand value due to the spectators it attracts. Or spectating someone else's physical activity.

There's inequity at every step here. And the fact that even a Jacobin article only addresses the terminal symptom should tell the reader how unimaginative our society has gotten.

Here's a thought: the guys in the article could have placed the same bets on themselves before their pick-up basketball game instead of draftkings. Should those bets that actually encourage physical activity be taboo too? The author suggest betting for a few pushups – great, but is that not gambling?

Of course, I'm ignoring a few other symptoms in the puzzle: states like Illinois facing _budgetary issues_ and taxing _addicts_. Limiting gambling availability might be a good band-aid for some of the symptoms, but I'd wager that solving root causes might be more worthwhile.

The author mentions an undisclosed $10 fee on every $100 invested in Robinhood. I've had an active Robinhood account since 2017 and I've never been charged a fee to invest.

I honestly think that the new found emphasis on betting in sports/sport reporting, is symptomatic of the "financialization" of literally everything. How can X company extract profit out of Y, where Y is the total set of all habits.

All companies now no longer exist to create a better product, but to prop up revenue/profit quarterly. To sustain this house of cards, companies must see all avenues of revenue. This includes the sports leagues and entertainment companies. Recurrent revenue is best, which is why there is a draw to subscriptions, and addiction is the peak subscription.

Low end customers/society be damned because, as the old saying goes, "price/spend dictates quality of customer". The firm's responsibility is to the shareholder, not society.

I haven't even gone into how I think it affects the quality of the actual sport play (hint, it hurts it).

Ba humbug.

I love gambling. I play poker every weekend and go to Las Vegas several times a year, sometimes for less than 24 hrs just to gamble.

Even I think that gambling is ruining sports. I like it when it's off to the side, when people are betting in Vegas and gathered around the sportbooks, but when it's factored directly in the game with TV ads, it's really offputting and highlights how easily sports can be manipulated by corrupt people that want to skew the results.

I absolutely hate the visibility of all forms of gambling. I hate going into a bar and seeing the big, bright machines that remind my children of Candy Crush. I agree with the overall sentiment here, if gambling is to be legal, it should be a hidden thing; no advertising. Seeing it everywhere makes it seem like something you should try at least once, like it's a rite of passage thing to becoming an adult.

I'd love to see what'd happen in a non profit casino where the wagers were exactly equal to the winnings less some modest operating expenses. Such an enterprise would address most of the inequity concerns in the article.

I'm concerned about the effects of the staggering amounts of gambling money on the sports themselves. It all quickly gets to where you ask yourself if what you are watching is real, or is it professional wrestling?

Yeah, tough one. When I was around twenty, a friend called the state lottery a tax on stupidity. At that time his comment seemed kind of amusing due its abrasiveness but I couldn't think of a serious retort that wouldn't come across as "we should protect people from themselves".

I'm not sure I still have an answer for that. And I now view the subject to include other forms of gambling (where you statistically stand to lose), helmet laws.... Why require seat belts?

I think you can defend laws, like speed limits, that serve to protect others from the would-be transgressor. Maybe you could make a case for the former if there are family involved that depend on the income of the person who might be fritting it away on Lotto tickets.

I have a friend who "gambled" on the stock market with his disposable income (and that there is an obvious distinction between the former cases, FWIW) because, he explained, he was never going to cross that next threshold and become "rich" just from stashing his gains away.

So, I don't know. I'm 40 years older now and still on the fence as to whether we should allow someone to wreck their life.

Why was this flagged?

> Even prior to the bill being passed into law, DraftKings and FanDuel issued a warning to the government, essentially promising to rig the spreads even further for Illinois residents, hiking their vigs and offering less appealing odds.

This is the real scary bit in this article and the crazy spiral. Yes, we can legalize gambling. Yes we can tax it (and keep increasing the taxes). But if we both make it very legal, and tax it a lot, the businesses who run the gambling will need to adjust their odds to make a profit, making the end situation a very easy way to gamble in "safe" ways that unfortunately are much less likely to return money to the gambler.

This is a complicated issue beyond just saying "gambling should be legal". As soon as taxing is involved, there's a scary tornado of nobody winning in these situations and it feeling like a wink-wink grift.

In the post-ZIRP era, I think separating newly-printed money from the hands of irrational market participants is a good thing.