Should Sports Betting Be Banned?

37 pointsposted a year ago
by paulpauper
(maximum-progress.com)

74 Comments

jmyeet

a year ago

Yes.

Gambling is poison to both the individual and the sport. Gambling addiction is absolutely devastating. Gambling has the highest rate of suicide of any addiction [1]. Being able to gamble on your phone is way too accessible. Gambling of any sort is an awful industry but at least a physical casino has a higher barrier to entry than pulling your phone out.

Here's something else you may not know: if you win too much on these sports betting sites, you can get banned [2].

Now, you might be tempted to say "casinos ban card counters in Blackjack", which is true. But sports betting is more like poker where the house takes a cut of any action, so by winning you're taking money from other players, not the house.

So why do sportsbooks ban you for winning? Because it means other people lose and to create addiction you can't always lose. You have to sometimes win.

For me, this absolutely destroys any argument that it is a "game of skill" (which matters for the legislation that legalized it).

[1]: https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/problem-gambl...

[2]: https://www.elitepickz.com/blog/do-sportsbooks-ban-winners-a...

senectus1

a year ago

I agree, but unfortunatley prohibition never works.

I would suggest restricting the aboslute crap out of it. make it really hard to get into.

throwuxiytayq

a year ago

It’s a literal scam. We prohibit literal scamming and defraudation. Gambling apps should be wiped off the face of the earth, not made inconvenient to install. If they move to Tor like drug marketplaces have, that’s fine. That’s their place, approximately.

hollerith

a year ago

>prohibition never works.

Sports gambling was prohibited in most US states during most of US history. It didn't "work" in the sense that it did not completely prevent sports gambling, but neither did it cause any major problems AFAICT.

senectus1

a year ago

it drove it underground, where the crime gang componenet got very rich and powerful.

I would argue, you still havent seen the end of THAT effect. the money talks for a long time.

hollerith

a year ago

The Italian mafia operated in my large New England town when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. There was a beefy Italian guy at the YMCA I frequented with a nose that had been horribly disfigured by some intentional violence. One of the Italian boys in my high school offered sports bets as a service to the other children. I'm guessing that that boy was mobbed up, but I never saw any sign of it that time I challenged him to a fight (to get him to stop talking trash to me).

Certainly everyone will agree with me that the mafia is a pale shadow of what it was on the East Coast of the US in the 1960s and 1970s? And do any of the non-mafia criminal gangs in the US even offer sports betting as a service? Sports betting is still illegal in many US states, including California: does anyone know of any gang offering sports betting to Californians?

I've spent many hours on Youtube learning about the mafia, which gave me the distinct impression that the worst effects of the mafia are when it "taxes" necessary society functions (like garbage collection and skyscraper construction) and that the mafia's offering services that are unequivocally illegal are less harmful. Certainly it was outright illegal for any party to offer betting of very-high-interest loans when I was growing up.

So, without someone's proving a decent amount of evidence to the contrary, I'm going to believe tentatively that "driving sports betting underground" does not in fact has a high societal cost. The mafia's making some regular money on this or that is not necessarily an unacceptable societal cost; the optimal amount of crime is not zero.

Mainsail

a year ago

I’m unsure but I’ll be honest in that I find it hard to understand how online poker is illegal in most states yet sports betting and the lottery are fine.

denkmoon

a year ago

No. Gambling is a part of a free society, just like drugs are.

Gambling advertisements on the other hand, learn from Australia. Don't let it happen.

heavensteeth

a year ago

Drugs are in fact banned for the public good (ostensibly).

And why aren't gambling advertisements "part of a free society"?

I'm all for being skeptical of the government and its (ab)use of power, but I must admit I struggle to find a good excuse to not ban gambling past "people should be allowed to ruin their own lives".

hifromwork

a year ago

I'm personally leaning towards gambling ban, but I can give a few excuses not to:

* Gambling won't disappear completely, but will move underground (creating mafias), or at least people will gamble online illegally (depriving country of tax revenue)

* Not every gambling leads to ruin, just like alcohol drinking is not always alcoholism. At policing the way people have fun is indeed a complex issue.

* There are forms of gambling that can't be regulated easily. One (unfortunately) form of gambling common recently is making insane bets in the stock market (see WallStreetBets subreddit, for example). It's even tax advantaged, compared to regular gambling.

* Making gambling illegal may make it harder for gambling addicts to find the help they need.

sneak

a year ago

Drugs aren't banned. You can buy nicotine and caffeine and liquor everywhere.

The idea that we ban things for the public good is laughable.

cowthulhu

a year ago

Opiates and amphetamines seem like they obviously have a different risk profile (and resultant societal impact) than nicotine or caffeine. Somewhat off topic, but I’ve always wondered if alcohol would still be legal if it wasn’t grandfathered in by, like, every single culture ever.

sneak

a year ago

Nah. Opiates and amphetamines don’t kill 50% of their users. Nicotine does.

lores

a year ago

Except a few large ones :)

starspangled

a year ago

I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion but I'd like to know how you arrived there. What makes gambling a part of free society but not gambling advertisements?

reidjs

a year ago

The difference is self harm vs harming others. The distinction is that advertising may convince people who do not gamble to start gambling.

wellthisisgreat

a year ago

Gambling is extraordinarily harmful to others, I personally witnessed half a dozen families ruined completely by gambling when the country I lived in allowed slot machines everywhere.

“Legalize everything I can do to myself” is a wildly toxic and uneducated message that completely ignores all the knowledge we have accumulated about the weaknesses and loopholes of human nature.

lillecarl

a year ago

Anecdata, I know a guy who is a chef. He's gambled it all away, it's just 30k$ (in debt) or so but considering the Swedish tax system it's actually a lot of money. Now kronofogden is after him, he's recently been handed divorce papers and the government takes half his paycheck.

He's got 3 kids (duh) so it immediately affects 4 people while straining even more, for what gain? Megaprofits for $megagamblingcorp?

addicted

a year ago

1. Thats a criteria based on harm, not “free society”.

2. Gambling has massive harms on others. The family of the men who gamble (it’s usually men gambling on sports), including the minor kids who cannot leave the individual and are dependent on them, as well as broader society which now has to pick up the pieces for this individual and the people dependent on him.

starspangled

a year ago

That can't be the difference. Assuming parent poster is talking about gambling hurting people (and ignoring that gambling and most other addictions do hurt others, as siblings pointed out), then banning of hurting others you would mean banning bookmakers, not just their advertisements. Parent was specifically banning advertisements but seemed to be saying to leave gambling industry legal.

I could see the way to argue for banning advertising being along the lines of minimizing harm. You acknowledge that gambling does hurt gamblers but also people close to them and society more broadly, but that prohibition may not be very effective so you permit regulated legal gambling (but no ads). I just don't really see how you can make it a freedom argument.

WalterBright

a year ago

In order to censor speech, to prevent leading the masses astray, the censor must hear/see it.

Why isn't the censor led astray?

cfmcdonald

a year ago

I can't tell if this comment is really serious. In case it needs explanation, you don't ban gambling advertising by having a censor watch every ad and then decide which ones to allow. You pass a law that says "no advertising gambling" and then if someone does it, you prosecute them.

WalterBright

a year ago

Somebody has to look at it to decide it should be banned.

lillecarl

a year ago

If you ban it it's no longer going to be produced, and all things don't affect all brains equally.

As someone mentioned men are more likely to gamble, I'm sure (but don't quote me on this) that ADHD is over represented as well.

If you broadcast an ad to 10 million people and 1k gets hooked it's still 1k too many lives ruined, while being an annoyance to the other ~10 million

WalterBright

a year ago

Marxism has resulted in the death of at least 100 million people. Should we ban Marxist content from HN?

matharmin

a year ago

By your argument, moderators on HN/Reddit shouldn't remove harmful content, since moderators would still have seen it either way.

WalterBright

a year ago

If moderators can view it without being harmed, what makes them so special?

matharmin

a year ago

I can't tell whether you're trolling or serious...

It's not about moderators being harmed or not. It's a preference of the wider community to not have the harmful content, and the moderators volunteering to help keep it that way.

With most harmful content, the effect of seeing a single instance is not significant. Being exposed to it constantly in places you frequent for other reason (your online communities, or advertisements everwhere), builds up much more of an effect. Now moderators being constantly exposed might also be affected, but they're choosing to do so, and may have coping strategies in place for the more extreme cases.

WalterBright

a year ago

Online communities can moderate as they see fit. I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about the law banning certain content.

I've lived long enough to see certain kinds of content banned, and then embraced, and then a different kind of content be banned.

Which era is correct in their choice of banning?

Mustachio

a year ago

What's the deal with trying so hard to defend the advertising of an objectively harmful industry?

I think a good parallel here is Tobacco advertising. Smoking is harmful in every way, therefore I don't see any reason why advertising it to a broad audience (which will inadvertently also include children) is something we should allow.

What's the net benefit of allowing such advertising? I don't see it. Yo could argue something about rights to free speech or some variation, but societies still have a responsibility to look out for the health of their people, no?

WalterBright

a year ago

I agree that children are special and should be protected.

As for adults, I am an amateur historian. History is jam packed with censorship of things those in power have deemed "harmful". Examples:

1. William Tyndale was burned at the stake for translating the Bible to English.

2. Galileo was put under house arrest for his heliocentric views.

3. Mae West was sentenced to 10 days in jail for her play "Sex".

4. Boris Pasternak's novels were banned in the Soviet Union.

5. TV shows in the 1970s were not allowed to show toilets in the bathrooms.

6. Homosexuality could not be portrayed in films until the 1960s.

7. Howard Stern was fined $2.5m for "indecent" broadcasts.

8. Violence on film is far, far more graphic today than was allowed just a few years ago.

9. You can say "fuck" on TV today, along with nudity.

And on and on it goes. Those censors were just as convinced as you are that they were doing the right thing.

antifa

a year ago

Yeah that's true, random unrelated things did happen in the past, but that's not a credible argument against having slap on the wrist fines for advertising gambling.

bsder

a year ago

> No. Gambling is a part of a free society, just like drugs are.

How do you square the harm that gambling does to unrelated parties?

It's really easy to lose a lot of money super fast with gambling such that suddenly your entire family is dire straits (losing the house, facing bankruptcy, etc.) before the non-gamblers have any ability to react.

addicted

a year ago

There is no logically consistent world in which “Gambling is a part of a free society” and “Gambling advertisements…Don’t let it happen”.

If you’re taking a libertarian, its part of a free society therefore we are helpless and must allow it view, then banning the speech around it completely contradicts this view.

habosa

a year ago

The constant pushing of sports gambling by leagues and broadcasters is well on the way to ruining sports themselves, so it might ban itself when there's nothing left to bet on.

paulpauper

a year ago

Then how about daytrading, crypto trading, lottery, horse betting, etc. the list goes on. There are no shortage of ways to separate people from their money. It's like those school soda bans. As it turns out, people can get their soda from many places, not just school.

basementcat

a year ago

There are some forms of gambling that may arguably be a social good. For example, car insurance is a wager by the car insurance company that a driver won't get in a car accident during the coverage period. Commodity speculators may serve as a counterparty for farm insurance derivatives.

I’ve wondered if it could be possible to harness some of these "suboptimal" gambling behaviors into "socially good" gambling but I haven’t quite figured out how to do it. Maybe someone else here can do it.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF

a year ago

Maybe. Day trading is silly.

theGeatZhopa

a year ago

Why is day trading is silly and what alternative would you suggest?

vitalurk

a year ago

Yes, the math understanding is not here at scale. It's strip mining a vulnerable populace. Of course it should be banned.

nosefurhairdo

a year ago

The same argument could be made for alcohol, cigarettes, credit cards, luxury goods, lottery tickets, tattoos...

If you banned everything that some percent of the population could use to harm themselves, you might be disappointed by what's left.

orwin

a year ago

Tattoos?

nosefurhairdo

a year ago

Tattoos can be extremely expensive; I personally know many people who struggle financially and spend what's left on tattoos.

It sounds ridiculous, but so does blowing lots of money on sports betting.

orwin

a year ago

OK, thank you for your response, I learned something today.

the_cat_kittles

a year ago

based on empirical data, yes, its a net negative for us

np_tedious

a year ago

So is sugar. Would you ban that? People have agency and choice

idle_zealot

a year ago

You don't ban people from consuming sugar, you ban companies from mass-producing food with unhealthy amounts of it. It's about friction and incentives. If you want to buy a bag of sugar and bake a cake that's fine.

kelseyfrog

a year ago

Consistency is overrated. Ban gambling

the_cat_kittles

a year ago

shades of grey and tradeoffs. gambling has a very clear and well studied negative effect on a small but sizeable percent of people and its not that great for everyone else. its my opinion were better off without it

wellthisisgreat

a year ago

Absolutely regulate sugary drinks like cigarettes

np_tedious

a year ago

I do think sugar should be regulated more and probably excised taxed, but banning is a different thing altogether

wellthisisgreat

a year ago

I meant you can buy it but the health hazards are plastered all over

sneak

a year ago

Government bans on a thing are a question of "should we use guns to prevent people from doing $THING?"

Given that the use of violence is a rather extreme remedy to a perceived problem, there'd have to be a pretty compelling case to warrant pulling out a gun to stop people from doing something.

That's what government bans are.

antifa

a year ago

> guns

Except for the 300 layers of asking nicely, , formally giving warnings, issuing fines and citations, etc., yeah it basically is just guns threats violence and totalitarianism.

jruz

a year ago

You don’t ban anything, you make more attractive whatever behavior you want to promote, the paper thinks stocks are better so then make index investing a better alternative.

Dalewyn

a year ago

Index investing isn't really gambling in the generally understood sense though, you just buy the whole haystack (or at least a haystack that's big enough) and ride it.

m0llusk

a year ago

How about "Could sports betting be banned?" People are strongly motivated to do this and often spontaneously form networks to share bets. How exactly would the state put a stop to this? Even with really thorough access to all financial transactions it would be hard to prove what went on without direct testimony which is unlikely to be available.

enugu

a year ago

Legalized gambling with big enterprises running it and ads visible to most people, many of whom wouldn't usually gamble, should be orders of magnitude worse than informal networks. One may not get rid of the latter, but stopping the former has a very great value.

hifromwork

a year ago

Interesting question! Depends on how strong is your desire to ban it. The humanity has a long history of banning things, including certain plants, certain thoughts (for example, religious beliefs), certain ideas, certain symbols, certain pictures, and even certain numbers.

I have a few ideas. Criminal groups are often broken by having a police infiltrate the group and collect the evidence. We could have police officers joining the gambling groups (the groups need to accept some people, so they have someone they can make bets with) and catching the perpetrators. I also don't think that - at least right now - gamblers use tor or sufficiently anonymous proxies, so it would be easy to get most of them by just observing network traffic. Also, significant money transfers between random private people are uncommon. You can find sets of people who often do transfers like this, and find the "gambler networks".

nmca

a year ago

Sports betting should be banned because knowing the outcome of sports games is in advance is not socially valuable.

Gambling on many other things e.g elections, crime rates, ceo performance, etc should be allowed because predictions there are socially valuable.

nosefurhairdo

a year ago

There are countless activities that could be deemed "not socially valuable". That is far too broad and subjective a metric to determine whether something should be banned.

user

a year ago

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bitshiftfaced

a year ago

Just like the lottery, you can never really ban it. It just shifts to a shadowy, untaxed venue. The least bad law would be to put restrictions on advertising. I don't understand why people tolerate State-sponsored lotteries being able to advertise like they do.

WalterBright

a year ago

So much evil is done by people who are certain they know what is best for others, and therefore are justified in forcing it on them.

user

a year ago

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user

a year ago

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