That's the beauty of gambling from a macro perspective though: you don't need scripted outcomes. The house wins either way. In fact scripted outcomes would be bad because not only is there heavy reputational stakes that could go south in a hurry, but that enables people to beat the house odds. If anything this seems like an incentive to keep things on the straight and narrow.
Necessary disclaimer since people will try to assume my position through my analysis: I don't like sports gambling, have never done it, and I hate that the ads have taken over.
There is a long, long, long history of gambling houses that are based on gambling on specific outcomes being unable to resist dipping into the revenue stream they can get from fixing the outcomes. Once the outcomes are fixed (even only probabilistically), they can tilt the house take in their favor.
It is true that, abstractly, this is a bad idea in the long run for many reasons. However, it's a good idea in the short term. It's a really good idea in the short term, at least from a superficial analysis. And we can expect that someone is going to do that superficial analysis. It only takes one in the entire industry.
A simple glance at history in this space says that the odds that someone is going to do this are for all practical purposes 1. The only question is whether it is already happening, and with high likelihood the correct question is how much it is already happening. It always starts small and they get bolder and bolder. None of this is subtle. None of this requires some sort of careful read of history carefully parsing out a tiny hint here and a whiff of a suggestion there. It's the completely obvious and repeatable strange attractor for gambling at this scale. As is the fact this will eventually blow up in some sort of scandal, after which it will end up heavily regulated again, until another generation or two goes by and forgets why gambling was fenced off.
Most of the cycle has happened once already within my personal lifetime. Major League Baseball had a pretty bad blowup in the late 1980s. Although as with some other vices, the fact that it is sitting there, in your pocket all the time, hooked up to Skinner-box mechanics in real time, is a new twist.
For bonus points society can also get to rediscover why simply banning it has never been all that successful either. Fencing it off seems to be the stable outcome that minimizes damage.
In the meantime the name of the game is to stay clear of the blast radius, and if you are a pro-social type, to try to figure out how to help the people who will get badly, badly hurt in the meantime until society puts the pieces together again.
Are you talking about fixing conducted by the exchange / bookmaker, or just gambling-related fixing in general? The latter is of course happening, and I'm sure you're right that there will eventually be more public scandals. (And I agree with you that sports betting is very socially harmful.) But I thought the conversation was about fixing conducted by legal betting exchanges (sorry, 'prediction markets'), and I don't think your claims hold in that context.
Prediction markets dont take positions so there is no way for them to make money depending on who wins. When they create their own market making firm like FTX did then its time to worry about match fixing.
The idealized form of a prediction market doesn't take positions.
This is a long, long, long way from "prediction markets don't take positions".
Plus they don't have to in order to create the effects I'm talking about. We've already seen plenty of what people are calling "insider trading", though it may not legally match the usual meaning of the term. All that is necessary is that it becomes clear over time that making bets is a sucker's game because the events aren't just ambiently happening but being forced by somebody with a lot of money to make. It isn't particularly important whether those bets are made by people who directly work for the prediction market itself.
Minus several decades in rare cases but it’s going to be increasingly common.
Gambling always brings corruption. With on-premise casino games this is limited to inside of a single building owned by people who have a vested interest in keeping things looking honest.
With sports betting, there are huge incentives to collude or even act alone which are very hard to distinguish from legitimate play.
Internationally, horse racing, cricket, rugby, and (oh boy) soccer continue to have huge problems.
But I do agree with increasing the friction involved in signing up and depositing money.
It should not be possible to 1) sign up for kalshi, 2) complete identity verification, AND 3) deposit and place a $2000 real money bet --- within 5 minutes of downloading the app.
It's just way too damn easy. Let's at least make people wait 24 hours before placing their first bet... or something.
And stop allowing deposits with credit cards. This is most important.
(Controversial take) The way I look at it, let's say 20% of users are addicts and who will jump through any hoop they need to in order to gamble. Very difficult to help this group. Banning won't stop them from betting.
The other 80% probably aren't addicts. They're people who like placing a fun $20 now and then. Which is fine. But let's not accidentally turn them into addicts by gamifying every aspect of betting. It shouldn't be so easy. And it shouldn't feel like I'm playing a video game.
And we really don't need push notifications from Kalshi reminding us to place bets every single day. (Not an exaggeration, I'm currently getting daily push notifications)
I think this is a reprehensible industry with no upsides. I'm also against banning it, out of principle - who says I'm right when I say there are no upsides? But:
* any sort of advertising should be banned
* it should be regulated so that excluding yourself actually works and is easy to do
Seeing 'official prediction market partner' on the news is something else <barf>
> The way I look at it, let's say 20% of users are addicts and who will jump through any hoop they need to in order to gamble. Very difficult to help this group. Banning won't stop them from betting.
I think this position is fundamentally incorrect. Banning gambling reduces the volume of money in gambling, making it hard to make big bets. You will never stop all gambling, but you can reduce how many people ruin their life with it.
The industry makes nearly all it's money from problem gamblers.
Know that these companies internally have models to predict how profitable you will be as a customer, so that they can best nudge those customers who are likely to be profitable.
This model is identical to if you trained a model explicitly to find problem gamblers. They are purposely building systems to find and exploit problem gamblers.
Because that is what the industry does. It finds and milks addicts. It is impossible for a for profit company to exist in this space and not somehow optimize towards finding and exploiting addicts. It's just more profitable. The people who drop a few hundred on a few hands of blackjack once a year cannot sustain an industry.
Extracting all possible wealth from 20% of the significant fraction of the population that plays has enormous negative consequences for all of society.
The only reason you don't ban gambling outright is that it's just too easy and straightforward to run an underground book, so it's a trivial market for organized crime to own. And that isn't good.
So you should have a state run institution that exists entirely to just barely serve the literal addicts, does absolutely nothing with the "income" (preferably just pays it all out, zero sum), and is rather unattractive to people who haven't gambled before. You make betting as boring as possible.
Those push notifications are tuned to trigger someone who might become a problem gambler. They are actively trying to get you addicted.
I don't think the equivalent of waiting periods make sense.
If anything they should just ban advertising. Simple, worked for smoking for the most part, and we have precedent as it's harmful. Why does every sporting event have so many ads and sponsorships by these betting companies.
The worst thing about these sites is that they're necessarily net negative. If you win regularly, you'll be kicked off these platforms. They only want dumb money. True prediction markets are different since they're don't market makers and just enforce the contracts and there are people on each side. But the whole draft-kings type gambling markets are just awful
you know how, some bars, you can go on the porch and smoke a cigarette? others allow weed and it is illegal? and some ban smoking entirely (either, both) on the state or local level? sports betting was not SO bad when it was AC, Vegas and OTB... and maybe some shady weird dude whose name you got from some ghetto hustler that maybe had a few dozen clients. What is going on now is just disgusting. The sports is bad enough. People looking at odds for them doing or not something? seriously?
It should also not be possible to advertise it, and profits from it should be taxed above and beyond the level of what corporations that don't contribute to social malaise have to pay.
you're right, so why are we creating more ways for people to lose so much money?
Bit of a tangent from your comment but I heard the argument once that, 'well people who are already addicted would find a way to do it illegally, at least doing it this way makes it legal and protects them from people like the mafia' to which I agree but it also makes it easier for people who aren't already addicted to become addicted with how often it's advertised. It's like saying 'well listen, those kids were going to see others smoking cigarettes so instead of getting ripped off buying cigarettes from older kids who would mark it up, we started offering safe cigarettes at the school. They don't have to smoke them but at least when they do they'll be smoking safely.'
To a degree I'd argue gambling can be more insidious - it's quite hard to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars being an alcoholic or drug addict, and also quite a bit easier to hide from your family (until your husband or wife sees the credit card/bank statement I suppose).
i think we should also ban streaming video services, they're also really bad for society. want to watch sports? go to the stadium. want to watch a movie? go to the theatre.
The league must have the lowest esteem for its “fans”. It used to be that even 2 degrees separation from gambling killed a player or manager’s career (e.g. Pete Rose). Now the entire league is in bed.
Why are you even watching sports? It’s full of gambling , weed and porn ads.
Doesn't this weaken the argument that these prediction markets serve a distinct purpose other than gambling? I thought the idea was that prediction markets can help surface information, drawing on the wisdom of the crowd (some of whom might be familiar with the topic) to extract actionable insights. This is just sports betting, pure and simple... you can argue it's a market or a security, but whatever financial instrument you wrap it in, it's still just sports betting.
I mean, I agree, but whenever it comes up there's always someone who refuses to call a spade a spade... I'm curious how the pro-prediction market set would argue this is ok (other than to shrug and say "it's just one more thing to predict, why would we try to decide what can and can't be predicted?").
I swear about twenty years ago there was a minor controversy as a commentator said something like "you'll need to drop him from your fantasy team after that," as it was seen as promoting gambling.
Now players and teams will be displayed on screen with odds baked into the presentation and have it not even addressed by the commentator. Just normalized completely.
That’s already happening, I’ve seen it in NHL games. The commentator typically addresses it because the broadcaster has a deal with the betting company and there’s a contractual obligation to make sure viewers see it and know where to get the app.
2007 I worked at MSFT, and they had a poker group. They were allowed to play in the communal spaces, but one of the restrictions was that there could be no variants in which a person placed a bet without seeing their hand. Under the Washington Admin Code for gaming, seeing your hand and betting made it a game of skill, betting (truly) blind made it a game of luck, i.e. gambling.
When I played Puzzle Pirates, it included Texas Hold’em Poker as one of the games for landlubbers. Many pirates found that they could amass large fortunes quickly at the tables, rather than slowly on the high seas. Many forum posters also explained how Poker Had Ruined the Game for sure.
Eventually, the high-stakes players graduated to “AoF” games by invite. You could go all-in on your hand, or fold it. That’s it; that’s the game.
Once in the mid-1990s I interviewed for a junior sysadmin job for a workstation VAR. I was rather reluctant to take the offer for many reasons. As soon as I came on-board, one of my coworkers explained that there was some kind of office betting pool and that it was not really optional, if I expected to maintain good relations. I declined anyway. Worst job ever.
What does "partnership" even mean in this context?
Does it just mean that the NBA will accept sponsorship money from these sites and how does that even work, since typically sponsorships want exclusivity?
You're allowed to think something is bad. We do not and cannot live without rules, we need to stop acting like every issue that nudges back and forth the line of where those rules start and end is the difference between absolute anarchy and tyrrany.
It used to be that horse punters were the only degenerates around. Now everyone is full-on degen. I typically find the phrase "late stage capitalism" stupid and overplayed. However, I think it applies. Only people who have given up hope get sucked into this stuff.
I've never used these bet markets. It seems everyone under 30 I talked to is very familiar with them, I see many young devs build projects around them.
I guess my q is this a generation gap? are we too old so we dislike it?
Necessary disclaimer since people will try to assume my position through my analysis: I don't like sports gambling, have never done it, and I hate that the ads have taken over.
It is true that, abstractly, this is a bad idea in the long run for many reasons. However, it's a good idea in the short term. It's a really good idea in the short term, at least from a superficial analysis. And we can expect that someone is going to do that superficial analysis. It only takes one in the entire industry.
A simple glance at history in this space says that the odds that someone is going to do this are for all practical purposes 1. The only question is whether it is already happening, and with high likelihood the correct question is how much it is already happening. It always starts small and they get bolder and bolder. None of this is subtle. None of this requires some sort of careful read of history carefully parsing out a tiny hint here and a whiff of a suggestion there. It's the completely obvious and repeatable strange attractor for gambling at this scale. As is the fact this will eventually blow up in some sort of scandal, after which it will end up heavily regulated again, until another generation or two goes by and forgets why gambling was fenced off.
Most of the cycle has happened once already within my personal lifetime. Major League Baseball had a pretty bad blowup in the late 1980s. Although as with some other vices, the fact that it is sitting there, in your pocket all the time, hooked up to Skinner-box mechanics in real time, is a new twist.
For bonus points society can also get to rediscover why simply banning it has never been all that successful either. Fencing it off seems to be the stable outcome that minimizes damage.
In the meantime the name of the game is to stay clear of the blast radius, and if you are a pro-social type, to try to figure out how to help the people who will get badly, badly hurt in the meantime until society puts the pieces together again.
The idealized form of a prediction market doesn't take positions.
This is a long, long, long way from "prediction markets don't take positions".
Plus they don't have to in order to create the effects I'm talking about. We've already seen plenty of what people are calling "insider trading", though it may not legally match the usual meaning of the term. All that is necessary is that it becomes clear over time that making bets is a sucker's game because the events aren't just ambiently happening but being forced by somebody with a lot of money to make. It isn't particularly important whether those bets are made by people who directly work for the prediction market itself.
Minus several decades in rare cases but it’s going to be increasingly common.
Gambling always brings corruption. With on-premise casino games this is limited to inside of a single building owned by people who have a vested interest in keeping things looking honest.
With sports betting, there are huge incentives to collude or even act alone which are very hard to distinguish from legitimate play.
Internationally, horse racing, cricket, rugby, and (oh boy) soccer continue to have huge problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal
There's a reason why we didn't do things we are currently doing, and it had nothing to do with "technology". We've been here before.
But I do agree with increasing the friction involved in signing up and depositing money.
It should not be possible to 1) sign up for kalshi, 2) complete identity verification, AND 3) deposit and place a $2000 real money bet --- within 5 minutes of downloading the app.
It's just way too damn easy. Let's at least make people wait 24 hours before placing their first bet... or something.
And stop allowing deposits with credit cards. This is most important.
The other 80% probably aren't addicts. They're people who like placing a fun $20 now and then. Which is fine. But let's not accidentally turn them into addicts by gamifying every aspect of betting. It shouldn't be so easy. And it shouldn't feel like I'm playing a video game.
And we really don't need push notifications from Kalshi reminding us to place bets every single day. (Not an exaggeration, I'm currently getting daily push notifications)
* any sort of advertising should be banned * it should be regulated so that excluding yourself actually works and is easy to do
Seeing 'official prediction market partner' on the news is something else <barf>
I think this position is fundamentally incorrect. Banning gambling reduces the volume of money in gambling, making it hard to make big bets. You will never stop all gambling, but you can reduce how many people ruin their life with it.
Know that these companies internally have models to predict how profitable you will be as a customer, so that they can best nudge those customers who are likely to be profitable.
This model is identical to if you trained a model explicitly to find problem gamblers. They are purposely building systems to find and exploit problem gamblers.
Because that is what the industry does. It finds and milks addicts. It is impossible for a for profit company to exist in this space and not somehow optimize towards finding and exploiting addicts. It's just more profitable. The people who drop a few hundred on a few hands of blackjack once a year cannot sustain an industry.
Extracting all possible wealth from 20% of the significant fraction of the population that plays has enormous negative consequences for all of society.
The only reason you don't ban gambling outright is that it's just too easy and straightforward to run an underground book, so it's a trivial market for organized crime to own. And that isn't good.
So you should have a state run institution that exists entirely to just barely serve the literal addicts, does absolutely nothing with the "income" (preferably just pays it all out, zero sum), and is rather unattractive to people who haven't gambled before. You make betting as boring as possible.
Those push notifications are tuned to trigger someone who might become a problem gambler. They are actively trying to get you addicted.
If anything they should just ban advertising. Simple, worked for smoking for the most part, and we have precedent as it's harmful. Why does every sporting event have so many ads and sponsorships by these betting companies.
The worst thing about these sites is that they're necessarily net negative. If you win regularly, you'll be kicked off these platforms. They only want dumb money. True prediction markets are different since they're don't market makers and just enforce the contracts and there are people on each side. But the whole draft-kings type gambling markets are just awful
If you want to add friction, just make sports betting IRL.
Also ban any gambling advertising.
Bit of a tangent from your comment but I heard the argument once that, 'well people who are already addicted would find a way to do it illegally, at least doing it this way makes it legal and protects them from people like the mafia' to which I agree but it also makes it easier for people who aren't already addicted to become addicted with how often it's advertised. It's like saying 'well listen, those kids were going to see others smoking cigarettes so instead of getting ripped off buying cigarettes from older kids who would mark it up, we started offering safe cigarettes at the school. They don't have to smoke them but at least when they do they'll be smoking safely.'
Why are you even watching sports? It’s full of gambling , weed and porn ads.
A degrading experience.
You forgot to include fast food ads, a mainstay of sports advertising!
Otherwise, I totally agree.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/donald-tr...
This is basically Suharto level of corruption.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E5crppxBn8
It's crazy how dramatic the shift has been.
Follow the money. It didn't happen by accident, it was a well orchestrated campaign.
Eventually, the high-stakes players graduated to “AoF” games by invite. You could go all-in on your hand, or fold it. That’s it; that’s the game.
Once in the mid-1990s I interviewed for a junior sysadmin job for a workstation VAR. I was rather reluctant to take the offer for many reasons. As soon as I came on-board, one of my coworkers explained that there was some kind of office betting pool and that it was not really optional, if I expected to maintain good relations. I declined anyway. Worst job ever.
It’s sad and worse than any headline is saying right now.
But also, this shouldn't be allowed in any major sport wife they use any kind of public funds.
Does it just mean that the NBA will accept sponsorship money from these sites and how does that even work, since typically sponsorships want exclusivity?
Now, just 5 years later I squarely believe nobody should be touching this stuff, it's basically worse than Blackjack or Craps in every way.
Never thought I would see myself aligning with the more "Puritan/Christian" values.
I guess my q is this a generation gap? are we too old so we dislike it?
Funny thing is that it actually is a turbocharged version of other forms of lottery (see the "makers" vs. "takers" part).