I thought I'd pop into this as the most recent gambling thread to point out the current gambling scandal in the UK.
As you may know, UK general elections are not on a fixed date set in advance. Instead, the Prime Minister can announce an election at any time by giving about six weeks' notice. An election automatically happens without being called five years after the previous election.
An election was due to be called no later than December this year (meaning that the last possible date for polling day was in January next year), and had been expected to be held in October or November (an election campaign over the Christmas holiday would be very unpopular), as the economy was improving that that would give more time for the government to claim credit for that improvement. There were substantial books being laid by several bookmakers on the expected date of the election, generally allowing bets on the specific month of the election, and October and November were the favourites.
Rishi Sunak, the PM, unexpectedly called an election, making the announcement on 22 May for an election on 4 July. A July election was at 5/1 odds (ie bet £100, win £500 and get your stake back) until a few hours before the announcement (the arrangements for televising the announcement mean that it inevitably leaks). The day before the announcement, ie 21 May, a number of Conservative insiders (three have been named so far) and a police officer from Sunak's protection unit placed bets - fairly small ones, a few hundred pounds - on the election being in July. They were clearly people in a position to know that the decision had been made and this is may have been a crime under the UK's Gambling Act 2005 ("cheating at gambling").
The Gambling Commission is the regulator and is currently investigating; if they decide to act, they will make a referral to the Crown Prosecution Service who will decide whether or not to prosecute (whether there is a good case likely to obtain a conviction, and whether it is in the public interest to prosecute).
Politicians have routinely and openly bet on election results - even though they have access to internal party data, clearly giving them an advantage in knowing which elections their party is winning and which it is not winning - without that being regarded as a crime. But this is much more obviously corrupt; they had absolute knowledge of a decision that has been made but is not yet public.
Would a system to flag addicted gamblers with some type of mandatory break (increases in scale) help? Another idea: mandatory addiction course before you sign up? Another, a fee that provides access to addiction counselors?
I don't have any problem with this but don't have any skin the game either. My religion bans gambling which I primarily use as an excuse not to have to buy raffle tickets rather than a test of the limits of my faith. My grandmother was an addict of all kinds and her lottery and punch tab gambling was a part of my father's childhood poverty and something he had to bail her out of as an adult. It made it seem very sad and unfun and I've never liked it. I have a friend who has a small online gambling club because he is a sports nut and loves a good wager. But they just bet "brag points" that they all get assigned each month and the biggest loser each month as to buy the rest of them beers. He says he gets just as much enjoyment out of it as he did when he bet real money.
I think my only real critique is that we do a lot as a society to try to create friction between people engaging in specific acts of addiction that range from taxes on alcohol to banning heroine. But most research suggests that addictive behavior is generally more about what people are trying to avoid that the specific lure of the activity itself. People seem to use addictive behavior as away to escape strong negative emotions that they lack the capacity to address - loneliness, depression, anxiety, shame and to avoid facing trauma. People seem to engage in less of these behaviors where they have strong community ties, a sense of purpose in life, good emotional coping skills, and other ways to pursue the hit of the positive neurotransmitters we all like and crave like sports or arts. We don't do much to address that underlying issue.
I am sure that sports betting is up because people have mobile apps. I think we have learned that having access to addictive stuff in our pocket all day is bad on a number of fronts. But I also suspect it is also up because people are feeling increasingly isolated, fearful, and without strong community or deeper purpose. We might want to spend as much time and thought figuring out how to prevent isolation, build community, strengthen access to mental health therapy and emotional and social education, and access to more positive ways to get a hit of dopomine.
It seems that sports betting is just part of a larger gambling issue in today’s society. A lot of “ investment activity “ , particularly betting on highly speculative stocks and zero day to expiration options is nothing more than respectable gambling. Even the language of the financial press has morphed into gambling terms.
What bothers me about this reaction is that it feels purely based on moral judgement not on any serious balancing of both the benefits to allowing wagering, the costs to passing laws against it weighed against the costs to allowing it.
I don't enjoy gambling but it gives some people pleasure and it doesn't seem like the UK is dysfunctional because it allows betting. Moreover, laws against gambling cause the same kind of rot in our police system that drug laws do.
We all routinely violate these laws and see it as perfectly acceptable when we bet on a bracket at our work or with friends. Yes, I agree that this kind of thing is practically different than a massive corporation taking bets but it's hard for the law to make that distinction and there are very real social costs when we make common activities technically illegal and count on the discretion of law enforcement to decide what to prosecute. It's far too easy to paint a threatening picture of people who aren't like us and use those laws against them not to mention the corrosive impact of police and DAs enforcing laws they routinely violate.
On top of this there are other less obvious negative effects of laws against gambling. For instance, they work to prevent useful prediction markets in many outcomes. As there is something of a fuzzy line as to where betting ends and legitimate financial instruments (derivitives) begin one effect of such laws is to prevent individuals from making the same kind of hedges (eg making bets on the movement of interest rates) that big players are allowed to take (maybe that's for the good or bad...not sure).
Of course there are also very real harms of gambling. Though, as always, there are important questions of whether the legal market supplants or encourages the illicit one, so I'm not saying I know that we shouldn't work to limit it (though the current system is a pretty awful worst of all worlds one).
However, I do think that it's not a question that you can answer really easily by a seat of the pants response. Indeed, I think we should have at least a minimal presumption in favor of liberty that requires at least a rough estimation of the quantative harms vs benefits, eg, look at the UK and estimate how many people say they enjoy the occasional bet vs how much higher their incidence of problem gambling ends up being.
Can you think of a comparative instance when the genie was put back in the bottle? I just don't see how you think you can wave a magic wand and get rid of mobile gambling. I think mobile gambling is colossally stupid and takes advantage of people who don't understand statistics and have poor impulse control, but I think it's insane to think that somehow you're going to walk that back.
Where the US finds itself now, is where we were in Australia 10 years ago, and let me tell you its going to get a lot worse. Mobile betting is super easy, and it is everywhere! What you call prop bets are called multis and they are very popular. So many providers trying to separate themselves from other, offering more and more persuasive offers, that are obviously very enticing.
Government regulation and involvement exists but does not appear to be very successful to date.
Taxes are collected on turnover, so some governments are conflicted. Too much is left to self-regulation and anti-gambling organisations,
Why not have the state directly manage sports gambling, like we have state lotteries? I’m thinking that a state monopoly would be easier to implement rather than regulating sundry private casinos, especially for complex things like progressive taxes and icing out problem gambling. I kind of like the idea, too, because it suggests the state as stationary bandit. Whereas the mob did sports gambling, now the state does it but they’re kind of the same hehe!
Professor Sunstein coined "sludge" as "making something harder to do" as a contrast or even a special case of "nudge" that alters the choice architecture.
Gambling companies engage in a variety of "dark nudges" [PDF]
Read my book, ‘Sports Betting for Dummies’ (Wiley, 2020).
States who legalized also funded big increases in problem gambling resources. Are we sure there are actually more people with problems? Or is it just the same number of people but we have better ability to detect them? (I’m not claiming one or the other is true - just asking the question…)
Banning mobile gaming is absurd. Here’s a better idea: make apps smarter. Force bettors to set deposit limits in size and frequency. Start new accounts with lower deposit and betting limits, let them work their way up. Force a 24 hour waiting period between deposit and availability. Make it like lottery tickets (in some states at least) where deposits can’t be made on credit. Check credit scores for bigger deposits. Have sports books share transaction data and have AI identify problem gambling patterns. Have a national registry of gamblers that’s shared by sports books, send deposit notices to bettors’ spouses. There are dozens of ways to cut risk down without ruining it for the rest of us.
Sports betting is popular because people like to do it (duh!) Even before legalization it was still an 11 or 12 figure industry in the United States, largely unregulated. Bringing the industry into the daylight means more resources available for problem gamblers and it actually reduces the chances and scale of gambling scandals. (The industry really only works if bettors believe games are fair).
We could ban recreational swimming to reduce drowning deaths to near zero. The world would survive if we filled in every swimming pool and made lakes and beaches off limits. We don’t do that because swimming provides tremendous utility to billions people. So we accept some downside and do our best to mitigate risks…
What Ben fails to do is make any attempt to balance cost and benefit. Like any recreational activity sports betting provides utility in the form of enjoyment/pursuit of happiness…just as there is some non zero risk of harm. If you make the goal ‘zero harm’ you wipe out much of the benefit. If 1000 people have a healthy relationship with mobile betting for every one that has an unhealthy one…I think it’s worth a conversation to see if there’s something better than just shutting the whole thing down.
Where I would start is banning in-game betting and significantly curtailing prop bets.
In-game betting encourages addictive behavior and also is a big playground for match-fixers. Ditto prop bets. As for parlays, notice how heavily they’re promoted by sportsbooks; they’re hugely profitable for the book.
The saturation has turned me from an occasional "fun" bettor who ran March Madness pools into someone who is just grossed out by all of it. I don't see it as a societal good or a right so I'd support any ban or regulation just because it's annoying. But I'm also the guy who would still watch football if it became flag football, drink "alcoholic" beverages even if the alcohol was removed, and "bet" on something with only my ego at stake. I just don't find risk pleasurable.
I thought I'd pop into this as the most recent gambling thread to point out the current gambling scandal in the UK.
As you may know, UK general elections are not on a fixed date set in advance. Instead, the Prime Minister can announce an election at any time by giving about six weeks' notice. An election automatically happens without being called five years after the previous election.
An election was due to be called no later than December this year (meaning that the last possible date for polling day was in January next year), and had been expected to be held in October or November (an election campaign over the Christmas holiday would be very unpopular), as the economy was improving that that would give more time for the government to claim credit for that improvement. There were substantial books being laid by several bookmakers on the expected date of the election, generally allowing bets on the specific month of the election, and October and November were the favourites.
Rishi Sunak, the PM, unexpectedly called an election, making the announcement on 22 May for an election on 4 July. A July election was at 5/1 odds (ie bet £100, win £500 and get your stake back) until a few hours before the announcement (the arrangements for televising the announcement mean that it inevitably leaks). The day before the announcement, ie 21 May, a number of Conservative insiders (three have been named so far) and a police officer from Sunak's protection unit placed bets - fairly small ones, a few hundred pounds - on the election being in July. They were clearly people in a position to know that the decision had been made and this is may have been a crime under the UK's Gambling Act 2005 ("cheating at gambling").
The Gambling Commission is the regulator and is currently investigating; if they decide to act, they will make a referral to the Crown Prosecution Service who will decide whether or not to prosecute (whether there is a good case likely to obtain a conviction, and whether it is in the public interest to prosecute).
Politicians have routinely and openly bet on election results - even though they have access to internal party data, clearly giving them an advantage in knowing which elections their party is winning and which it is not winning - without that being regarded as a crime. But this is much more obviously corrupt; they had absolute knowledge of a decision that has been made but is not yet public.
Would a system to flag addicted gamblers with some type of mandatory break (increases in scale) help? Another idea: mandatory addiction course before you sign up? Another, a fee that provides access to addiction counselors?
I don't have any problem with this but don't have any skin the game either. My religion bans gambling which I primarily use as an excuse not to have to buy raffle tickets rather than a test of the limits of my faith. My grandmother was an addict of all kinds and her lottery and punch tab gambling was a part of my father's childhood poverty and something he had to bail her out of as an adult. It made it seem very sad and unfun and I've never liked it. I have a friend who has a small online gambling club because he is a sports nut and loves a good wager. But they just bet "brag points" that they all get assigned each month and the biggest loser each month as to buy the rest of them beers. He says he gets just as much enjoyment out of it as he did when he bet real money.
I think my only real critique is that we do a lot as a society to try to create friction between people engaging in specific acts of addiction that range from taxes on alcohol to banning heroine. But most research suggests that addictive behavior is generally more about what people are trying to avoid that the specific lure of the activity itself. People seem to use addictive behavior as away to escape strong negative emotions that they lack the capacity to address - loneliness, depression, anxiety, shame and to avoid facing trauma. People seem to engage in less of these behaviors where they have strong community ties, a sense of purpose in life, good emotional coping skills, and other ways to pursue the hit of the positive neurotransmitters we all like and crave like sports or arts. We don't do much to address that underlying issue.
I am sure that sports betting is up because people have mobile apps. I think we have learned that having access to addictive stuff in our pocket all day is bad on a number of fronts. But I also suspect it is also up because people are feeling increasingly isolated, fearful, and without strong community or deeper purpose. We might want to spend as much time and thought figuring out how to prevent isolation, build community, strengthen access to mental health therapy and emotional and social education, and access to more positive ways to get a hit of dopomine.
It seems that sports betting is just part of a larger gambling issue in today’s society. A lot of “ investment activity “ , particularly betting on highly speculative stocks and zero day to expiration options is nothing more than respectable gambling. Even the language of the financial press has morphed into gambling terms.
What bothers me about this reaction is that it feels purely based on moral judgement not on any serious balancing of both the benefits to allowing wagering, the costs to passing laws against it weighed against the costs to allowing it.
I don't enjoy gambling but it gives some people pleasure and it doesn't seem like the UK is dysfunctional because it allows betting. Moreover, laws against gambling cause the same kind of rot in our police system that drug laws do.
We all routinely violate these laws and see it as perfectly acceptable when we bet on a bracket at our work or with friends. Yes, I agree that this kind of thing is practically different than a massive corporation taking bets but it's hard for the law to make that distinction and there are very real social costs when we make common activities technically illegal and count on the discretion of law enforcement to decide what to prosecute. It's far too easy to paint a threatening picture of people who aren't like us and use those laws against them not to mention the corrosive impact of police and DAs enforcing laws they routinely violate.
On top of this there are other less obvious negative effects of laws against gambling. For instance, they work to prevent useful prediction markets in many outcomes. As there is something of a fuzzy line as to where betting ends and legitimate financial instruments (derivitives) begin one effect of such laws is to prevent individuals from making the same kind of hedges (eg making bets on the movement of interest rates) that big players are allowed to take (maybe that's for the good or bad...not sure).
Of course there are also very real harms of gambling. Though, as always, there are important questions of whether the legal market supplants or encourages the illicit one, so I'm not saying I know that we shouldn't work to limit it (though the current system is a pretty awful worst of all worlds one).
However, I do think that it's not a question that you can answer really easily by a seat of the pants response. Indeed, I think we should have at least a minimal presumption in favor of liberty that requires at least a rough estimation of the quantative harms vs benefits, eg, look at the UK and estimate how many people say they enjoy the occasional bet vs how much higher their incidence of problem gambling ends up being.
Can you think of a comparative instance when the genie was put back in the bottle? I just don't see how you think you can wave a magic wand and get rid of mobile gambling. I think mobile gambling is colossally stupid and takes advantage of people who don't understand statistics and have poor impulse control, but I think it's insane to think that somehow you're going to walk that back.
Paternalism is never the solution but damn if the left ain't gonna try it every time
Where the US finds itself now, is where we were in Australia 10 years ago, and let me tell you its going to get a lot worse. Mobile betting is super easy, and it is everywhere! What you call prop bets are called multis and they are very popular. So many providers trying to separate themselves from other, offering more and more persuasive offers, that are obviously very enticing.
Government regulation and involvement exists but does not appear to be very successful to date.
Taxes are collected on turnover, so some governments are conflicted. Too much is left to self-regulation and anti-gambling organisations,
This article is important reading: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/03/a-massive-public-health-problem-australian-children-as-young-as-10-are-hooked-on-gambling#:~:text=Australians%20lose%20about%20%2425bn,capita%20losses%20in%20the%20world.
All the best
My next company will design apps for brick and mortar gambling spots.
Why not have the state directly manage sports gambling, like we have state lotteries? I’m thinking that a state monopoly would be easier to implement rather than regulating sundry private casinos, especially for complex things like progressive taxes and icing out problem gambling. I kind of like the idea, too, because it suggests the state as stationary bandit. Whereas the mob did sports gambling, now the state does it but they’re kind of the same hehe!
Professor Sunstein coined "sludge" as "making something harder to do" as a contrast or even a special case of "nudge" that alters the choice architecture.
Gambling companies engage in a variety of "dark nudges" [PDF]
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/16066359.2018.1474206
and there are some simple sludges suggested to counter these. For example state the house edge clearly to end users.
A hefty tax, made progressive on the amounts wagered.
Read my book, ‘Sports Betting for Dummies’ (Wiley, 2020).
States who legalized also funded big increases in problem gambling resources. Are we sure there are actually more people with problems? Or is it just the same number of people but we have better ability to detect them? (I’m not claiming one or the other is true - just asking the question…)
Banning mobile gaming is absurd. Here’s a better idea: make apps smarter. Force bettors to set deposit limits in size and frequency. Start new accounts with lower deposit and betting limits, let them work their way up. Force a 24 hour waiting period between deposit and availability. Make it like lottery tickets (in some states at least) where deposits can’t be made on credit. Check credit scores for bigger deposits. Have sports books share transaction data and have AI identify problem gambling patterns. Have a national registry of gamblers that’s shared by sports books, send deposit notices to bettors’ spouses. There are dozens of ways to cut risk down without ruining it for the rest of us.
Sports betting is popular because people like to do it (duh!) Even before legalization it was still an 11 or 12 figure industry in the United States, largely unregulated. Bringing the industry into the daylight means more resources available for problem gamblers and it actually reduces the chances and scale of gambling scandals. (The industry really only works if bettors believe games are fair).
We could ban recreational swimming to reduce drowning deaths to near zero. The world would survive if we filled in every swimming pool and made lakes and beaches off limits. We don’t do that because swimming provides tremendous utility to billions people. So we accept some downside and do our best to mitigate risks…
What Ben fails to do is make any attempt to balance cost and benefit. Like any recreational activity sports betting provides utility in the form of enjoyment/pursuit of happiness…just as there is some non zero risk of harm. If you make the goal ‘zero harm’ you wipe out much of the benefit. If 1000 people have a healthy relationship with mobile betting for every one that has an unhealthy one…I think it’s worth a conversation to see if there’s something better than just shutting the whole thing down.
Where I would start is banning in-game betting and significantly curtailing prop bets.
In-game betting encourages addictive behavior and also is a big playground for match-fixers. Ditto prop bets. As for parlays, notice how heavily they’re promoted by sportsbooks; they’re hugely profitable for the book.
Your final comment reminded me a supposed prayer by St. Anthony, "God please make me chaste, just not to soon."
It was St Augustine, no?
It was a little before my time, but I was told it was Anthony before he became a saint.
The saturation has turned me from an occasional "fun" bettor who ran March Madness pools into someone who is just grossed out by all of it. I don't see it as a societal good or a right so I'd support any ban or regulation just because it's annoying. But I'm also the guy who would still watch football if it became flag football, drink "alcoholic" beverages even if the alcohol was removed, and "bet" on something with only my ego at stake. I just don't find risk pleasurable.