Sports Betting Apps Are Even More Toxic Than You Thought

The fact that ESPN itself has a sports betting app tells you all you need to know about the perversion of sports now that gambling is blessed by the government.

I think I can live with the legalization of sports betting if there are strong restrictions against marketing and advertising. If you want to ruin your life that's your decision, and you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market. But the way that advertising has its tentacles in our culture now... it's bad.

The article appears to break gamblers into 3 groups.

1) casual players

2) problem players

3) professional gamblers.

so basically casual players gamble something like 50 bucks a year. Problem gamblers get money however they can (and although it's unstated and I have no evidence, I think this is where the actual money comes from). And finally, people that can snipe the mispriced bets, and make a lot of money.

Feels sort of submarine-ish. Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll. The pros eat up casino margins.

I dunno. Feels like a "I run a business, but I'm not really good at it so we need laws to force the pros out". Please don't regulate me, but regulate who can play.

Interesting that it's in Bloomberg. Interesting that the casinos are so bad at laying odd they lose. I have no sympathy for anyone but the addicts. Those folks are sick and need help.

I worked at a quant sports betting trading company, on occasion it would send the employees to place annonymous few grand bets at physical shops because it's such a problem getting people to continue accepting your bets if you are any good.

And found out that the more you bet, the more percentage commission you pay to exchanges like Betfair, which is quite contraintuitive - commission goes up with volume, not down.

I also learned a few tricks of the industry - when you open an online account they look up your address on Google Maps to see what kind of place you live in.

> Simulating addictive behavior, says Peabody, is an effective way to get online sportsbooks to send you bonus money and keep your accounts open. This isn’t necessarily because operators are targeting problem bettors, he says; they’re simply looking to identify and encourage customers who are likely to spend—and lose—the most. This just happens to be a good way to find and enable addicts, too.

ML run amuck

These apps should be banned. Gambling is a social ill with such a limited upside and so much harm it can't really be justified

I got out of ad-tech partially because our company was promoting some of the worst sports betting apps on the web. We knew how bad it was, but we had to make numbers, so everybody just pretended we weren't screwing up peoples' lives by using addictive algorithms to promote addictive products.

A lot of other comments are along similar lines, talking about how bad sports betting is. I agree with all that, but what I like is that pro bettors are using the same algorithms to make bank off of these predators. Maybe it'll create an arms race between gambling apps and professional gamblers, but I still hope that enough people follow this behavior and eventually break the model that gambling apps are using.

The fact that people good at gambling have to pretend to be addicted money losers in order to not get kicked off platforms tells you how predatory these platforms are.

The profit all comes from innumerate whales who often can't afford the losses.

money quote [pun unintended]:

>In states that allow online betting, they found, the average credit score drops by almost 1% after about four years, while the likelihood of bankruptcy increases by 28%, and the amount of debt sent to collection agencies increases by 8%.

Sports betting has the side effect of making things surrounding sports themselves more toxic.

Betting being as pervasive as it is, and only increasing, causes more people to view and interact with sports with bets or money, and thus can react negatively toward their losing teams.

If there's a large number of angry, vocal "fans" jumping down your neck every time you lose a game or make a mistake that caused their bet to fail, there's a lot of negativity fabricated where the team or player merely played the sport as usual.

Teams are made of humans, and humans make mistakes. This is normal for any sport or activity, but when you've got a chunk of cash in the game it turns into not-normal reactions.

This also bleeds into other forms of sport, like esport, and feeds into some already-negative online communities. Games like League of Legends or DotA 2 come to mind.

I really, really dislike the way sports betting has gone and how it's corrupted everything it touches.

Couple the above with the way these companies effectively prey on betters likely to lose money, and even encourage them to bet and lose more, while at the same time stonewall those that actually know what they're doing and make money, these companies are scum and should be eradicated.

Clearly the problem in all of this is that these markets are rigged. Imagine if the most knowledgeable investors were banned from trading stocks, or had artificially low bankrolls. It wouldn't be practical for individuals to invest in the market because everyone would assume they were getting ripped off, and the price was totally separated from the value of the business.

The fact that the most successful investors have the largest effect on the price is exactly what makes the market fair. A layman can login to manage their 401k, put in a market order, and know they are getting a fair price because many people, much more knowledgeable than the layman, are competing to set the price.

I just don’t understand how this kind of thing can be legal. How can you say “I’m running a gambling game, and if you’re not that good at it you can bet as much as you want and lose as much as you want, but if you are good, you’re not allowed to bet more than would hurt my bottom line.” I don’t understand how you can have different rules for different customers like this

Related:

Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41659458

Much like many substance use disorders, I am inclined the to believe the substance is merely a self-medication technique for a deeper rooted issue.

I am curious what about the gambling makes it so addictive? I refuse to believe that people are addicted solely because of bro-science's elementary understanding dopamine. What makes people continue despite the negative consequences in their lives? Is it the hope? The hope that if they win big, then a better life awaits them or that the money will fix all their problems?

I am not sure if I have ever had a "real addiction^1," but I definitely have had psychological dependencies/self-medication strategies with things like video games and Internet usage.

I am quite an introspective person, thus the underlying reasons were never a mystery to me. I wasn't "addicted" to gaming nor the Internet because they are just fun or entertaining. Each served a different purpose in my life. Mostly through out my early childhood and into my young adult life.

With games, I felt that, in whatever virtual world I was playing in, that I was able to be more than I could in real life. I could gain competence and mastery of "skills." I felt like I was a useful; a person people that could count on. My hard work would materialize right before my very eyes. Do <insert task> and get <insert reward>. I was no longer the [undiagnosed] weird, anxious and depressed person with ADHD. In the games, I was no longer "lazy" nor a "failure." People weren't trying to "discipline" the issues out of me. Games allowed me to be something the world would never allow me to be -- myself.

The Internet was different though. I was like Ponce De Leon in search of the Fountain of Youth. I believed that there was some sort of knowledge, that once discovered, then all my problems would subside. Like some sort of metaphorical magical spell. Once I came across it, I would know it. The answers were out there, and I just needed to find them. However, much like Ponce De Leon, what I was looking for did not exist. But hey, at least I read and learned a lot. =D

There has to be something deeper to gambling addiction. If so, then what is it?

[1] I define addiction as a dependency in which one is unable to resist despite it causing real, tangible harm in one or more areas of one's life -- school, work, relationships, etc..

The implication being that the apps are identifying signs of addiction in users and actively encouraging it? I shouldn't be scandalized but I must admit that I am.

Not new. "punter accounts" (accounts with large losses) has been worth money for at least 20 years.

Does look like I would have to get a lot more toxic thoughts before I would be able to keep up :(

Which one is BossmanJack?

I don’t understand why people still use centralised betting markets anywhere at all. This kind of stuff could easily be done over p2p systems, right?

Related:

Should Sports Betting Be Banned?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665630

Titles ending “than you thought” always, always come across as condescending nonsense.

maybe just get a job?

My favorite grift with the sports app betting space being legalized is all the fake Indian tribes adopting the commercial software like Caesar, MGM, Draftkings, etc.

Unironically, "blockchain fixes this".

Decentralized prediction/betting markets, on public consensus ledgers (blockchains), can't exclude the best bettors. And, match bettors and clear markets with far less overhead/"vig" – resulting in fairer, market-set odds.

That leaves less room for a small clique of enterprises whose profits are driven by problem betting, and thus capable & incentivized to engage in manipulative marketing, and misleading product offerings, to find and drive the vulnerable to "extinction". (That's a term of art in gambling design, see https://alum.mit.edu/slice/play-extinction-research-reveals-....)

The regulation and licensing of privileged franchises to state-approved entities has made such entities more able to exploit compulsive gamblers than a free and open system would.

Many states have even gotten into the business themselves, with lotteries offering atrocious odds, promoted with deceptive advertising, overwhelmingly patronized by the poorer & more-innumerate.

Go figure!