alt.hn

4/4/2026 at 3:14:06 PM

When legal sports betting surges, so do Americans' financial problems

 https://www.npr.org/2026/04/04/nx-s1-5773354/legal-sports-betting-research-credit-bankruptcy

by pseudolus

4/4/2026 at 6:43:31 PM

> A 2024 Wall Street Journal report, for example, found that 70% of the profits from one online gambling company came from less than 1% of its users.

Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts.

For most, a lottery ticket or an online bet is just buying entertainment - not much different from a movie ticket or steam game. Turns out, though, this majority isn't the target customer; we're just the top of the funnel as these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy.

by carefulfungi

4/4/2026 at 8:55:25 PM

>Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts.

this isn't new. a relative is an MVP at a casino she dumps cash into. The pit bosses comp all of her meals and call her on days that she doesn't show up. It's all sold to the customer as friendly-people-who-care and the people eat that up, especially lonely elderly folks.

She fell at one such casino and ended up suing them, she wondered why all her friends stopped calling her, so she moved casinos and low-and-behold she was able to make friends there, too!

To be fair, like another poster mentioned, they do this everywhere people spend a lot of money, not just gambling. Car dealerships are lousy with this kind of 'concierge'-ness. They, too, take advantage of elderly folks who have the money for a new car that they don't yet realize they need.

by serf

4/4/2026 at 8:59:26 PM

To be fair, what you’ve describing strikes me as closer to hospitality than gambling per se. I live in a ski town. There are absolutely regulars at the Four Seasons who tip well in exchange for being “friends” with the staff. The fact that they never hang out outside work hours doesn’t seem to bother them.

by JumpCrisscross

4/4/2026 at 9:38:54 PM

This seems instructive for considering when a difference in degree makes for a difference in kind. Let's call this "whale potential": the amount of money that a power user can naturally funnel into a casino over a single visit is multiple orders of magnitude more than the amount of money that a power user can funnel into a ski resort over a single visit. For a casino, the act of a customer losing money is not merely a side effect of the activity, it is the primary effect of the activity.

by kibwen

4/5/2026 at 3:48:50 AM

I think you might be underestimating how much money can be spent at a ski resort.

by postflopclarity

4/6/2026 at 12:34:05 AM

A 7-day-card at the Semmering costs € ~280, the sports hotel there is another € ~800 and then let's price in €~600 for food. So an entire week-long ski holiday in the alps costs you around € 1.700.

I will not try to argue if this is much or little, just trying to add some context for those not familiar with popular skiing tourism destinations.

by rcbdev

4/5/2026 at 5:45:09 AM

There’s only so much you can spend at a ski resort. Casinos there is literally no limit. The high roller salons can have games with 10k+ per hand/game or more.

by Kirby64

4/5/2026 at 1:45:39 AM

We’re regulars at a resort we go to annually.

We always tip everyone generously and send notes to management about especially helpful staff. My wife was on a first name basis with our normal housekeepers, who have watched my kid grow up. We spend at the property with events, amenities etc. The management tends to cycle through the company but the local staff does not - they flag us as VIPs directly.

Most people don’t do that and don’t or can’t throw money around in a resort setting. But in a casino, it’s easy to measure the lifetime value of a guest and price the interaction cost. In a beach setting, the financial benefit of a happy customer is less certain. Point being, i would guess that Wynn does 50x the hospitality outreach than Relais & Châteaux, despite both offering a high quality product.

by Spooky23

4/4/2026 at 9:40:06 PM

You're spot on (ex casino worker). There's no conspiracy. Speaking for myself, I was nice to people because it made me more money in tips (also, because I am not an a-hole). Made a lot of "friends" when I worked in the casino, employees and patrons. It's not any different than folks I work with in tech (i.e. some you connect with and have genuine friendships and some are work friends). They likely stopped calling her due to upper management telling staff to not engage due to legal liability (or they lose their job).

edit: Additionally, there are whales and there are folks who's job it is to get them in the door (we had game managers for the big games).

by SaltyBackendGuy

4/5/2026 at 11:19:05 AM

While I'm certainly no supporter of casinos, I think that online gambling is a difference in kind.

by nsvd2

4/5/2026 at 12:23:01 AM

> this isn't new.

Bullshit.

If the person you’re raising kids with starts living at the casino 1-4 days a week, you notice.

The Internet, for better and for worse, masks this.

by DANmode

4/4/2026 at 7:42:52 PM

The same thing happens with in-app purchases.

A friend of mine worked at Disney, and it is insane how much data they capture on their players/spenders and how they use it for the sole purpose of triggering a popup at the right time, at the right price, that would maximize spending/gambling on loot boxes.

by OptionOfT

4/4/2026 at 10:23:54 PM

The first time I heard "whale" mentioned in the video game space was at a GDC panel around a game called Puzzle Pirates, where the dev noted that the bulk of their in-game purchases were made by a small group of "whale" players. In 2003 purchasable skins, pets, hats, etc were pretty new.

by Triphibian

4/5/2026 at 8:53:48 AM

I remember that one and remember being super exasperated about not being able to do anything without paying upfront for it. Ended up switching to Club Penguin instead lol.

by fakedang

4/4/2026 at 9:14:18 PM

Algorithmic optimisation will be the death of us.

Over-dramatic? Maybe, but this thought springs to my mind more and more.

by andrepd

4/6/2026 at 10:37:39 PM

This sort of scheme was banned in the UK - the place where bookmaking was invented, and many of the largest global brands are run from (albeit technically trading from Malta or Gibrlatar) - a few years back.

Why? Well... suicides. You're going to start seeing gambling-related suicides in the next couple of years, if you haven't already.

If you can learn anything from the UK, learn this:

- VIP schemes kill people

- Online casinos and video slots kill people faster than sports betting do

- The industry will always "self-regulate" to the point where its still harmful, but palatable enough that law makers will look the other way to keep the tax raised from it coming in

I have skin in the game (I write code that profitably trades on sports betting exchanges), and think it's possible to make gambling a healthy and fun thing to do, but the American market is ~5-10 years behind the UK market, and I can see it's going to get ugly before it gets better (not that the UK market is perfect yet, either).

by PaulRobinson

4/4/2026 at 8:27:20 PM

> these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy

With the AI progress, there will be no need in a search for personalities - algorithms will make you one. And this can be applied to any company producing entertainment (e.g. social networks), not just gambling.

by dandanua

4/4/2026 at 11:03:12 PM

> not much different from a movie ticket or steam game.

Movies require an investment of your time so it's somewhat hard to become "addicted" to them.

There are "steam game library" addicts though.

> this majority isn't the target customer

Of course they are. They just aren't prioritized for high cost user enticements. The company only exists if the majority lose. They have big losers and little losers. They aren't here to "entertain" you. Which features of their service are designed to heighten "entertainment" I wonder?

by themafia

4/5/2026 at 1:38:41 AM

That’s like saying cigarettes are the same as scented candles because both involve flame.

The difference is that gambling, like cigarettes, delivers a dopamine fix. The playbook is well aligned with cigarettes — you target brands to the population. Draft Kings is like mass market cigarettes, targeting low income males, soldiers, old people.

The “most profitable customer” metric is misleading - you need mass adoption to lure in the whales. My son is 14 - sports gambling is a routine conversation among his cohort and many kids are actively gambling in school with accounts provided by parents.

by Spooky23

4/4/2026 at 6:15:04 PM

> And research shows young people are particularly at risk of sports gambling problems, lured in by splashy advertisements often featuring celebrities and promises of low risks and high rewards. The Fed study found that the sharpest drop in credit delinquency rates were among people under 40 years old.

There are so many portions of the post Muprhy vs NCAA world that bum me out, but this is by far what makes me the most annoyed. There seem to be so many objectives being achieved while hiding behind the guise of protecting the children. Yet we just let these advertisements slide by and infest broadcasts that children largely consume. Not like getting an older person to buy you a GTA game when you are 12 or something either, this is just watching any sort of sports broadcast, aimed at all ages.

I see some other people here mentioning how we gave into legalized state lotteries and its why we arrived here, its such a stark difference though. There was a ton of back and forth for state lotteries, the results were tons of advertising restrictions, and the profits largely benefited the education system.

Murphy vs NCAA was passed in 2018, we have legal sports betting now in 38 total states after ~8 total years.

New Hampshire legalized state lotteries in 1964, from that point it took 32 years to reach 38 total states with some form of a state lottery.

by sidrag22

4/4/2026 at 6:44:36 PM

> the profits largely benefited the education system.

The profits didn't benefit shit. Yes, the money went into education, and that same education system saw commensurate cuts from regular tax revenue.

What it did is shift the state's tax burden towards people who play the lottery... While permanently entrenching the lottery (How can we ban it! It would gut our education budget!).

by vkou

4/4/2026 at 7:36:37 PM

I agree with your point, its something i kinda didn't really consider how its perversely intertwining itself with the education budget and making itself effectively immune. I still think its a solid demonstration that comparable sports betting legislation surely lacked any sort of compromise at all, as it was all pushed through so aggressively fast.

by sidrag22

4/4/2026 at 8:50:26 PM

When I was in college I got lured into one of those pyramid schemes advertised in the middle of the night hoping to make extra money. I wonder how much money I would have lost if I had instant access to betting on a "sure thing" back then.

by seanalltogether

4/4/2026 at 5:11:24 PM

remember when gambling was illegal?

and the idea of advertising gambling on television wasn't even something conceivable?

and, even more so, the idea that sports entertainment channels would be directly involved in the operation of gambling of was just completely beyond comprehension?

ahhh, the remote, halcyon, bygone days of 2018...

by recursivedoubts

4/5/2026 at 1:45:58 PM

If you’ve seen Back to the Future 2, you would know we’re in this state because Biff got the Sports Almanac

by sghiassy

4/4/2026 at 6:34:13 PM

It was a quaint, simpler time. Now we are much more sophisticated and modern.

by skdhfkdjfhsjk

4/4/2026 at 6:28:48 PM

All those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned.

by deadbabe

4/4/2026 at 7:28:53 PM

It would be interesting to make that sort of thing generic. A law couldn’t legalize something without backporting the legalization.

by prpl

4/4/2026 at 7:29:55 PM

Pete Rose: reprehensible pariah or radical pioneer?

by sandy_coyote

4/5/2026 at 12:06:13 AM

> All those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned.

That is certainly on the table... as long as they have a couple of million stashed away to put into World Liberty Financial and the charges are federal.

The unwashed poors though... they are SOL.

by georgemcbay

4/4/2026 at 8:31:23 PM

It increases GDP. Also, have you seen the Dow?

by dandanua

4/4/2026 at 8:37:55 PM

> It increases GDP

I want this rigorously studied.

If it does, I’m more open to it. I don’t think it does. It’s a minuscule industry, macroeconomically spwaking, with massive negative externalities. I think regulating the marketing and conduct of industries proximate to addiction is something productive societies do. (On the other side of the spectrum we have the Qing.)

by JumpCrisscross

4/4/2026 at 8:47:08 PM

It's obviously a tongue in cheek comment sir.

by izacus

4/4/2026 at 8:53:02 PM

> It's obviously a tongue in cheek comment

But it captures a truth. States see lotteries as a funding source. Kalshi and Polymarket are combined valued at the GDP of Iceland (or alternatively, 13 Greenlands).

Casinos are run as a productive part of Nevada’s economy. Lotteries, too, on average, at least in some places. Our liquor and now cannabis industries are economic engines. It isn’t ridiculous to expect gambling apps to wind up in a similar place.

by JumpCrisscross

4/5/2026 at 1:03:25 AM

Depends. I imagine the opportunity cost of alcohol and cannabis outweigh their benefits from lost productivity. So likely those industries merely give an illusion of positive economics

by danny_codes

4/5/2026 at 1:14:11 AM

The economic windows are less broken when people smoke themselves stupid than they are when we send state violence after those people. This goes for most "bad" things. (State) violence is just that destructive to productivity. See also: prohibition.

by cucumber3732842

4/4/2026 at 11:52:12 PM

It's obviously a joke, but joking that a bad thing is actually good because of some surface-level benefit does raise the question of whether it even has that surface-level benefit.

by Dylan16807

4/4/2026 at 10:08:07 PM

Humans have tried to ban gambling for as long as gambling existed, and gambling has existed for about as long as homo sapiens. Gambling still exists.

by Ferret7446

4/4/2026 at 10:57:22 PM

Humans have tried to ban murder for as long as murder existed, and murder has existed for about as long as homo sapiens. Murdering still exists.

by recursivedoubts

4/5/2026 at 6:12:53 AM

What a strawman. Murder is done to other people. Gambling is something people do themselves consensually. Murder is banned and people universally condemn it. Gambling is banned and people have always been generally tolerant of it.

by Ferret7446

4/5/2026 at 6:56:34 AM

> Gambling is something people do themselves consensually.

Yes, as evidenced by the full court press advertising.

by recursivedoubts

4/4/2026 at 10:26:51 PM

Ah yea and 1 billion $ or 100billion $ it's all the same

by notTooFarGone

4/4/2026 at 11:13:33 PM

For those who find this appealing: Fires still burn down houses so what’s the point of fire departments?

by blueboo

4/4/2026 at 7:32:33 PM

Remember when alcohol was illegal? Ahh, the remote, halcyon, bygone days of the 1920s.

How about we treat adults like they're adults and let them make their own choices?

by fasterik

4/4/2026 at 7:45:36 PM

These are systems completely designed to prey on vulnerable people, addicts who can't control their impulse to gamble. That's their purpose. I think it's worth regulating intentionally predatory and harmful industries.

by 1bpp

4/4/2026 at 7:53:39 PM

We limit alcohol advertising because it also has an addictive quality.

Limiting gambling ads the same way might be a good step.

by jfengel

4/4/2026 at 10:25:18 PM

When making decisions like this, one should consider not just the desired consequences of the policy, but the difficulty in actually implementing it. Alcohol and narcotics prohibitions fall short here.

It's hard to fully prohibit gambling (because you can play poker around a table, and it's better if that's legalized). It's much easier to prohibit banks from interacting with casinos and TV networks from letting them advertise, as those are large businesses who want to be compliant. That doesn't make gambling itself illegal, but cuts off most of its oxygen.

by miki123211

4/5/2026 at 12:07:26 AM

The problem though is that technically, legally most of this stuff is no longer classified as "gambling". It's now a "prediction market" of which team will win the game.

by nradov

4/5/2026 at 4:27:47 AM

That's a specific problem of corruption in the current administration. It's not even clear whether this obviously absurd theory of classification will hold up in court, Arizona is already fighting it.

by SpicyLemonZest

4/4/2026 at 8:43:18 PM

> Remember when alcohol was illegal?

I don’t really gamble. But I agree with you. Prohibition is never the answer.

Our current regime, however, is one where bartenders face zero liability for their patrons’ drunk driving. Making gambling companies liable for problematic gambling is a good start. Banning gambling ads, within apps and without, is a great end. I’d also argue for a cap on bet sizes, but I’m open to being talked out of that.

by JumpCrisscross

4/5/2026 at 12:13:41 AM

You actually want to ban bet maximums. Regular people get destroyed making small stupid bets on nonsense like freethrows for benchwarmers. Apps only offer those because they put a low max bet so they have little risk on a wager that is impossible to price accurately. If they couldn’t set such a low max then they couldn’t offer those nonsense wagers.

by idontwantthis

4/5/2026 at 12:19:10 AM

>Banning gambling ads, within apps and without, is a great end.

That's prohibition.

by ribosometronome

4/5/2026 at 3:11:52 AM

Of what? It certainly hasn't stopped cigarettes.

If gamblers want to gamble, is not seeing the 30 second video ad the only thing stopping them?

by yifanl

4/7/2026 at 1:27:33 AM

Of speech.

prohibition noun pro· hi· bi· tion ˌprō-ə-ˈbi-shən also ˌprō-hə- Synonyms of prohibition 1 : the act of prohibiting by authority 2 : an order to restrain or stop

by ribosometronome

4/4/2026 at 8:34:40 PM

Adults can and do become addicted to gambling (and drugs, etc.) and ruin the lives of themselves and those around them.

Recognizing this fact isn't treating them like children, it's treating them like the adults they are.

by umanwizard

4/4/2026 at 9:17:23 PM

Let's combine the idea of hyper-targeted advertising based on mass data collection with custom tailored addicted substances.

If I design a chemical that will specifically make you fasterik so dependent on it that you'll do any sexually depraved things that a line up of random strangers want so that they'll give you pocket change so that you can get another hit of that chemical should it be illegal for me to surreptitiously give it to you in a product that you buy from me?

Why or why not?

by Teever

4/4/2026 at 9:20:01 PM

There's a fine line between prohibition and all-out attack, everywhere all at once, from TV internet and sports, trying to get everyone addicted to gambling, from 9 to 99 years old.

Like... cigarretes aren't prohibited. But you're hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't agree that we're MUCH better off now with full advertising bans, indoor smoking bans, bans on sales to minors, steep tax, etc, than what we were in the 70s with disgusting cigarrete smoke everywhere.

by andrepd

4/4/2026 at 7:37:55 PM

I guess you also think we need to stop policing drunk driving? Because the reasons for regulating gambling are similar.

by hgoel

4/4/2026 at 7:49:28 PM

That's quite a straw man. Drunk driving is and should be illegal because it puts the lives of others at risk. Alcohol is legal because it only puts the health of the drinker at risk. Generally in a free society we accept that adults should be free to make decisions that harm only themselves.

by fasterik

4/4/2026 at 8:15:05 PM

Problem gambling has a similar negative outcome profile (in terms of suicide, financial problems, etc.) as an addiction to hard drugs

by lux-lux-lux

4/4/2026 at 8:03:08 PM

It's interesting to be arguing that gambling doesn't put others at risk in the comments to a post about a broad trend of collective harm associated with loosened controls on gambling. Do you think these people exist in a vacuum?

On top of that, sports betting inevitably leads into match fixing, threatening of players etc.

by hgoel

4/4/2026 at 8:13:05 PM

I believe most of the negative impacts you're referring to are covered by existing laws concerning fraud and consumer protection. I'm in favor of making truly fraudulent and predatory behavior illegal. I don't see any evidence that the "collective harm" you mention from the article is anything other than individuals making bad financial decisions.

I believe that I, as a responsible adult, should be allowed to gamble for entertainment if I want to, and my right to do that shouldn't be taken away because a small minority of the population has low impulse control.

by fasterik

4/4/2026 at 10:00:33 PM

> I don't see any evidence that the "collective harm" you mention from the article is anything other than individuals making bad financial decisions.

Legalized gambling establishments do very little besides extract money from visitors and project negative externalities into their surroundings.

> I believe that I, as a responsible adult, should be allowed to gamble for entertainment if I want to, and my right to do that shouldn't be taken away because a small minority of the population has low impulse control.

You can believe that, and be correct in theory. In practice, the "small minority" doesn't appear to be small enough under the current regulatory regime.

It's no different than the regulation of controlled substances and other vices. Or do you have an issue with that as well, and feel you should have the right to consume as much heroin as you want?

by bpt3

4/4/2026 at 11:07:39 PM

I'm pretty liberal when it comes to drugs. I think it's a case by case basis, but I do believe that heroin and most other drugs should be legal and regulated. As long as there's demand, prohibition just leads to black markets, funnels money to cartels, and consumers ultimately get a less reliable and more dangerous product.

by fasterik

4/4/2026 at 11:13:05 PM

Is there any drug that you would consider off limits for recreational consumption? OxyContin or fentanyl for example?

by bpt3

4/4/2026 at 11:21:19 PM

I don't consider those off limits for recreational consumption in safe doses. If fentanyl were legalized, I would see a strong argument for restricting the sale of large amounts of pure fentanyl. Fentanyl lollipops with small doses, I think would be fine.

Regardless, I don't think we should stretch the metaphor between gambling and drugs too far. They are fundamentally different things.

by fasterik

4/5/2026 at 1:12:56 AM

They aren't that different, in that they are addictive, provide no value to society other than entertainment (which is not worthless by any means, but not something that is very heavily weighted in a cost/benefit analysis), and the resulting behavior of addicted individuals is highly negative and has an impact well beyond the addicted individual.

You are on an extreme fringe to put it mildly. It is your right to hold that opinion, but it also means that there's no real point in discussing this with you from what I can tell.

by bpt3

4/4/2026 at 10:28:39 PM

[dead]

by listenallyall

4/4/2026 at 7:49:37 PM

And yet you can't do a quick Google search to understand that "expecting adults to act like adults" is a ridiculous idea when 80% of people have NPC agency

Prohibition was a mistake and it goes a long way of sorting how people will act stupid regardless

by raverbashing

4/4/2026 at 5:35:57 PM

and the US govt often helps facilitate gambling during downturns so we could see even more direct and indirect promotion of the problem. examples:

+ in stagflation of 70s/early 80s - states create state-run lotteries to help fix their budgets

+ 2008 great recession - states legalize casinos to recover lost tax revenue and prevent folks from traveling out of state to gamble

+ C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue

by gz5

4/4/2026 at 5:48:59 PM

"Lottos help your school!" they said. Until you're in rural bumfuck nowhere, and your lotto win suddenly drags your community's average income from "dirt poor" to "middle class" by becoming Spiders Georg and you end up costing nearly half a mil in state aid to go up in smoke.

https://www.syracuse.com/news/2017/07/one_mans_huge_lottery_...

by kotaKat

4/4/2026 at 8:22:37 PM

I'm not sure you read that article all the way through... The loss is $450k, but that's only 3% of the year's state aid and an even smaller amount of the district's operating budget. And it only impacted that one year. Inflation and random political feuds usually impact public school budgets to a far greater degree.

The problem in this case is not that the lotto exists, it's that the formula for awarding school funding is (or was?) broken in this state. This is a textbook example of why you almost always use the median instead of mean on things that have a bell curve.

by bityard

4/4/2026 at 5:54:20 PM

>+ C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue

This seems questionable given that covid-19 relief funds from the federal government left states flush with cash, causing them to spend lavishly or even cut taxes. It also makes me suspicious of the other examples. Recessions happen every 5-10 years, and if you count the few years after a recession as part of the recession, it's not hard to pattern match a little too aggressively and think it's tied to economic downturns, when it's really a secular trend.

by gruez

4/4/2026 at 5:54:40 PM

The house always wins.

I don't know of any long term profitable sports gamblers - but that makes sense because why reveal yourself and your methods if you're profitable?

By long term I mean at least 1,000 bets while still being profitable. Even more impressive if they are making a living off of it.

The only person I can think of is Picks Office on Twitter.

by chistev

4/4/2026 at 6:01:37 PM

If you profit at sports betting they limit your bet size severely

by gnopgnip

4/4/2026 at 9:27:18 PM

Except in the state of MA.

They rightfully passed legislation banning such practices. The idea is that if casinos and bookies refuse to cap your downside, they have zero right to cap your upside.

by NickC25

4/4/2026 at 6:25:18 PM

Even if you don’t profit but place what looks like smart bets

by awakeasleep

4/4/2026 at 8:58:15 PM

A casino or bookmaker doesn't need to heuristically identify betting behaviour that's 'smart'. They don't need to spot evidence that could be hidden by good opsec. No need to find micro-expressions or hidden cheating gadgets. Nor to do background checks to know you've got a buddy with insider knowledge.

All they need to do is check if you're cashing out more chips than you came in with.

by michaelt

4/4/2026 at 9:41:44 PM

It's not trivial for the casino to track this against a determined adversary. If you're already thinking about "good opsec", you can get someone else to help cash out your winnings.

A buddy from out of town, or a losing regular, or a poker player who the casino doesn't care if they win. In Vegas some casinos' chips are negotiable, officially or unofficially, in other casinos.

by dmurray

4/5/2026 at 1:03:45 AM

Not everywhere. Circa wants winners.

by idontwantthis

4/4/2026 at 6:29:49 PM

You can just jump bookies.

by chistev

4/4/2026 at 7:01:58 PM

Sports betting is the one place that "prediction markets" make the most sense. Instead of there being a house to win against, the market just skims a fee. The line is set organically by betters, not be the house targeting a profit margin, and the house has no incentive to restrict successful betters because they solely profit on flow, not losses.

by conscion

4/4/2026 at 7:58:11 PM

You do have to be careful to avoid letting whales manipulate the perceived market. There are ways to con other gamblers with carefully timed bets.

The bigger the market the harder that is, so maybe it doesn't apply at the level of online sports betting. But organized crime could make trouble at horse tracks.

by jfengel

4/5/2026 at 4:27:56 AM

How would that work?

by HWR_14

4/5/2026 at 1:31:34 PM

Lots of bets on horse A. Makes the odds on horse B look cheap. Place late bets on B.

It helps if you can also rig the race, but just knowing the odds better than the pari-mutuel stakes gives you an advantage.

by jfengel

4/5/2026 at 5:43:45 PM

But if it's parimutuel, don't you lost more on A than you can make on B? Are you tricking other players, or is the idea that you make lots of bets on A, and then make bets on B fast enough that the bookmaker does not have time to correct?

by HWR_14

4/5/2026 at 2:51:29 AM

I used to work for a sports betting company. These people definitely exist. They are few though because they are the ones who understand that the sport/game/match/whatever is irrelevant. They bet the "odd line". They bet on the platform that screwed up and didn't adjust their line quickly enough to follow the market. They don't know baseball, or football, or tennis. They just know the numbers.

by dudul

4/4/2026 at 7:46:11 PM

What about Frank Rosenthal? Admittedly these guys are extremely rare, that's why the handful of successful ones are famous.

by jeffbee

4/4/2026 at 8:02:24 PM

Never heard of him

by chistev

4/4/2026 at 10:09:10 PM

The movie Casino was loosely based on him. Worth a watch, but also actually looking the real guy up.

by yareally

4/5/2026 at 1:12:47 AM

We all have the occasional friend that brags about every time he wins money at the casino. If you accompany them a few times, it’s incredible how the “always winning” story just changes.

by Vaslo

4/4/2026 at 9:21:03 PM

Tony Bloom, the billionaire owner of Brighton & Hove Albion FC seems to be managing it.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/dec/05/brighton-ow...

by n1b0m

4/4/2026 at 9:37:08 PM

Tony is also super smart in how he gambled. Your average degenerate is nowhere near as intelligent as Tony is.

I have a very small edge in sports betting although I don't really do any of the deep overpriced/underpriced arbitrage or any special types of bets outside of wins/loses. And it's limited to tennis, a sport I've played my entire life and have followed the pro circuit closely for 3 decades. And even then my edge is very small, and the strategy I use when I do bet doesn't make me much in total return.

by NickC25

4/4/2026 at 10:08:59 PM

Honest question; sorta related: How long until prostitution is legalized in the United States? Sounds crazy, indeed, but when I was a kid growing up in Missouri - if you told me, someday, businesses will be open on Sunday, alcohol will be legally sold on Sunday, and there will be gambling casinos a few miles from my house, I wouldn't have believed you.

by jimt1234

4/5/2026 at 11:24:55 AM

Already is in Nevada.

by nsvd2

4/4/2026 at 10:03:20 PM

Gambling is massive in large parts of Europe. For Spain, in 2022 83.9% of the population participated in gambling. Every time I am outside I am confronted with gambling in some sort of way. I don't think society benefits from it.

by retired

4/4/2026 at 10:19:27 PM

> For Spain, in 2022 83.9% of the population participated in gambling

Does that include the Christmas lottery? If so then that’s not really comparable.

by ginko

4/4/2026 at 10:31:01 PM

It does. A large part of the country participates in that one.

by retired

4/4/2026 at 9:16:35 PM

I strongly suspect if one were to dig a little deeper there would probably be some common factors between loosening financial regulations, community economic problems, credit issues of people in those communities, and impetus to gamble.

by jjk166

4/5/2026 at 9:25:59 AM

Gambling is a symptom of pre-depression or fulminant one. It's a defensive mechanism, quasi suicidal, in an attempt to distract the person from the real problems. It's the behavioural equivalent of drug addiction. Advertising it is sad for the victims and should be illegal. But... money

by tsoukase

4/5/2026 at 4:37:54 PM

I’m not sure that explains the sort of casual gambling on anything at all people might do among friends.

by kjkjadksj

4/4/2026 at 6:37:47 PM

Is there a causal relationship? If so, in which direction does it flow?

by gbacon

4/4/2026 at 10:05:59 PM

I think the issue is a lot deeper than the article suggests.

The problem is, society is fucking broken. The middle class is being decimated. People are going to take their destinies into their own hands, as seen by the growth of daytrading and sports betting. With wages being destroyed, billionaires avoiding taxes, COL skyrocketing for the middle and lower classes, and jobs evaporating, who's going to fucking blame someone for trying to figure out how to use what they know (in this case, sports) to make money?

Plus, this generation has seen another class of gamblers (big banks) get bailout after bailout without any problem.

Sports betting is the symptom, not the root cause that needs to be addressed.

by NickC25

4/5/2026 at 4:34:49 AM

I just don't think that theory of causation works even if we assume the premise for the sake of argument. Both daytrading and sports betting are much larger now than in 2009, when I hope we can agree wages were destroyed and jobs were evaporating on a scale we can hardly imagine today.

by SpicyLemonZest

4/5/2026 at 1:10:59 AM

I’m a pretty right leaning libertarian. That said there are some hills I’ll abandon like smoking bans and this being legal.

by Vaslo

4/4/2026 at 4:54:04 PM

[dead]

by black_13

4/4/2026 at 5:17:17 PM

[flagged]

by JaceDev

4/4/2026 at 6:15:09 PM

[flagged]

by skyskys

4/4/2026 at 6:30:21 PM

Also most people’s way into poverty.

by deadbabe

4/4/2026 at 6:17:45 PM

I hope this is trolling?

by actionfromafar

4/4/2026 at 6:27:51 PM

14 minute old account with a blurb about people being mind controlled in their bio.

by unethical_ban

4/4/2026 at 7:12:54 PM

[flagged]

by anonym29

4/4/2026 at 5:36:36 PM

American citizens have willingly given up their freedom and allowed themselves to be captured by corporate control.

by bmitc

4/4/2026 at 5:01:52 PM

Gambling can be a fun way to make a game more interesting. Some people can't stop there, but government lost any moral high ground when they legalized state lotteries.

by SoftTalker

4/4/2026 at 6:30:34 PM

There are significant, real differences in betting on a random number generator once a week and betting constantly on the real outcomes of individual behaviors. Most notably with sports, institutionalized prop bets destroy the integrity of the game.

At least with win/loss, the ability to outright manipulate the outcome for financial gain by players, coaches and refs is a lot harder to accomplish without detection. Prop bets? Who knows if a player or ref or coach made a decision on who gets the first 3pt basket of the second half?

by unethical_ban

4/4/2026 at 7:54:01 PM

Yeah I've never made a prop bet, or even a points bet, that feels too degenerate to me. I have occasionally made a $10 money line bet on a game and that does make it more interesting to me in that now I have a small stake in the outcome. YMMV.

And people do spend stupid amounts of money on Powerball tickets too. I just think if the state is running a numbers racket, that they don't have much of a leg to stand on when they want to regulate other gambling.

by SoftTalker

4/4/2026 at 5:15:37 PM

>but government lost any moral high ground when they legalized state lotteries.

What's the implication here? "In for a penny, in for a pound", so might as well legalize every other form of gambling?

by gruez

4/4/2026 at 5:19:04 PM

I think so. If you're going to regulate sports betting (and I think there are good arguments for doing that), but you yourself run a lottery which is a tax on people who don't understand probability, then you are just preaching in a "do as I say not as I do" kind of way.

by SoftTalker

4/4/2026 at 5:34:18 PM

The difference between the ability to make bets 2-3 times a week for a dollar or two and the ability to drop $500 every play of a sporting event is dramatic.

by HWR_14

4/4/2026 at 5:43:34 PM

What about someone buying $50 of scratchers a day? Why conflate a reasonable habit on one thing with an unreasonable habit on the other when both can obviously be done reasonably or unreasonably?

by kjkjadksj

4/5/2026 at 5:45:31 PM

That's in between. I would be fine doing away with scratchers as well. But having to go to seek out the tickets is better than your phone reminding you it's tip off in 3 minutes and you have a free $20 to bet on prop bet.

by HWR_14

4/5/2026 at 7:46:17 AM

This. There's a lady that comes in to my local 7/11 and spends at least $200 on lottery tickets every week. There's no limit for people who really like to buy lottery tickets.

by laughing_man

4/4/2026 at 6:34:47 PM

That describes someone with maybe an irresponsible but manageable gambling habit, not a gambling addict.

Maybe it's because of pay-at-the-pump popularity now but have you never seen someone standing off to the side of the main gas station counter surrounded by a pile of scratch offs? People exist who will drop their entire paycheck on them in a single day. I've also seen people buy irresponsibly large stacks of Powerball tickets and not just the "oh, I like to fantasize about winning so I buy a ticket each week since you can't win if you don't play". It's gambling all the same.

by evilduck

4/4/2026 at 9:07:32 PM

The predominate reasoning for a long time now has been lotteries are addicting and bad but a small demand is guaranteed. Therefore, in the name of maximizing social benefit, only the government should run them and the profit is used to funds something less partisan (e.g. education, parks, conservation, gambling addiction services)

For these private betting firms, it's open season trying to find whales like mobile gaming, and there's no end to their greed and exploitation.

by bl4kers

4/5/2026 at 6:52:31 AM

I think this is a little myopic. There are degrees to this. It is very rare to see anyone chase their losses to a lottery ticket. I have literally never heard of anyone doing that in my life. If anything, you see some poor place overspend a bit on those tickets. With all the other types of gambling, you see people being wiped out. I think the details matter.

by dinkumthinkum

4/5/2026 at 4:27:45 AM

You regulate other vices (alcohol, tobacco). Limiting gambling to govt owned lotteries or licenced operators is no different, you can set limits on harm, remove the profit motive if the govt operates it, and (at least where I live) the state lottery funds a large number of community grants.

Regulating it also removes demand for underground or foreign online gambling.

by ikr678

4/4/2026 at 5:57:20 PM

Does it really make games more interesting? If anything, doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game?

Is anxiety interesting?

And if you only bet a negligible amount of money, then the outcome of the game doesn't really matter all that much.

by chistev

4/4/2026 at 8:41:46 PM

> Does it really make games more interesting?

> If anything, doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game?

> Is anxiety interesting?

Yes. Adding anxiety generally makes things more interesting. Think of watching a story or a film or a game play out. Good stories often involve giving the reader some anxiety. Tension. Not knowing what's going to happen, but being somehow invested in it ... to stay engaged.

by emptybits

4/4/2026 at 8:41:21 PM

> doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game?

I don’t generally like gambling. On a recent trip to Vegas I socially gambled with friends and won about $5k, but then lost $500 of it and was more annoyed about losing that sum than the net amount gained. Such is my personality.

That said, a friendly game of poker is absolutely more fun with a $10 buy-in or whatnot. So I can see the general idea holding water. What we don’t need are (a) ads or (b) large bets.

by JumpCrisscross

4/5/2026 at 1:49:16 AM

I am staying away from sports betting, but I have done fantasy football a few times. I was constantly on edge from it all, even when I was winning! Constantly thinking of who I needed to pick up, who to trade, which matchups were good, it was a time sink.

And I ended up losing to my 10 year old nephew for the championship game!

by roland35

4/5/2026 at 7:48:44 AM

Personally I suspect American football viewership would collapse if you actually managed to ban all the gambling people do on it, from office pools to Vegas lines.

by laughing_man

4/4/2026 at 5:13:22 PM

Fun turns to disaster when you lose. Sadly, many can't control it, destroying entire lives in the process.

(Not passing judgment)

by dolphinscorpion

4/4/2026 at 6:19:21 PM

"Someone did a bad thing, now we must do all the bad things."

by actionfromafar

4/4/2026 at 5:46:06 PM

Gambling seems like a rational choice, when all the ”traditional” rational choices just lead into a mountain of student debt, not being able to afford a home, and general failure to launch

Summed up very nicely in https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy

by nikanj

4/4/2026 at 6:43:14 PM

How could it possibly be the rational choice if the ev doing so is so ridiculously negative?

Having student debt doesn't justify throwing away the rest of your residual income

by revlsas

4/4/2026 at 7:01:16 PM

What's the ev for going to college once you factor in graduation rates?

People that get two or three years of college debt and no diploma have a big hole to fill and a small shovel.

Anyway, I think ev isn't the right tool to model gambling behavior; dollar utility isn't linear. It's more about a small spending for a large potential. But then you get into repeated small wagers and such.

by toast0

4/4/2026 at 9:59:55 PM

College graduates make over $1 million in their lifetime compared to high school graduates.

> Anyway, I think ev isn't the right tool to model gambling behavior; dollar utility isn't linear.

You're right. The more money you have, the less utility it gives you, which makes gambling for a windfall an even worse decision. Worse still if you include taxes.

by Aunche

4/5/2026 at 3:07:38 PM

I always thought those numbers were dubious because you are mostly comparing people who are capable of getting a degree with those who aren’t.

by tonyedgecombe

4/5/2026 at 5:20:05 PM

What about college dropouts?

by toast0

4/4/2026 at 7:47:41 PM

If I borrow a lot of money to start a business and then don't start the business I would also be in the hole. So, don't do that?

by jeffbee

4/4/2026 at 7:09:20 PM

you can always go back and finish later...that's what I'm doing.

by Acrobatic_Road

4/4/2026 at 7:52:21 PM

My school expires credits after 7 years.

by toast0

4/5/2026 at 6:19:34 AM

-If I don’t gamble, I’ll live my whole life as a poor serf

-If I gamble and lose, the same wage cuck life awaits me

-If I gamble and win, I may actually ascend and have the kind of life I aspire to

by nikanj

4/4/2026 at 7:56:39 PM

Seeing gambling as rational choice is spectacular fail of logic. It is an emptional choice of action.

by watwut

4/5/2026 at 1:19:57 AM

Was "emptional" intentional, or a typo? Apparently it's a real word.

> From emption + -al Adjective (obsolete, rare) Capable of being purchased

by caditinpiscinam

4/6/2026 at 4:58:43 AM

I also did a double take on this one! New word discovery. Sharing the same root as e.g. 'Emporium' I would assume.

by atom058