1) A minor point, but a significant number of successful sports bettors aren't successful because they have their own models, it's because they are identifying market trends such as line movements on the sharpest books, and hitting stale lines on the duller "recreational" books that are slower to adjust, and beating CLV that way. These "top-down" bettors don't usually know *why* the lines are moving, but they see that they are, and that's good enough.
2) Gambling can be restricted without making it illegal. Indeed, all things considered, it may be best for sports betting to have a legal, state-regulated outlet. But there is another legal, extractive, and addictive industry that once could advertise on TV, and no longer can: smoking. If those rules can be changed for Philip Morris, they can be changed for FanDuel. Official marketing partnerships with the leagues should also be prohibited.
A friend, who was in recovery from addiction to alcohol, drugs and gambling, told me thst for a gambling addict the issue is not winning. It's not losing. He said that when he hit the jackpot, or a hand of poker, he never put the winnings in his pocket. He put them right back into the game, until he'd finally lost it all. I get the thing about adult consent, and don't know how to save addicts from themselves (except through 12 step programs), but it's time we recognized gambling addiction as being an illness, like alcohol addiction. That brings a different perspective on it, from the moral perspecive.
I think sports betting companies should operate like a stock market. They should be forced to take all legitimate participants at a given time (even sharps) with the same bet limit and offered odds. Purposefully limiting sharps should be illegal.
I'll say again what I usually say in these discussions: the keys to regulating enjoyable, addictive activities are to distinguish between doing and publicizing/advertising the activity, to identify and crack down on specific nuisances that sometimes attend the activity, and to make it easy for people to precommit themselves not to be tempted by it.
Whether it be alcohol, marijuana, gambling, whatever, the principles in a humane free society should be:
-- consenting adults who want the thing, and seek it out of their own accord, should be able to get it without excessive hoop-jumping and without fear of legal penalty;
-- people going about their lives in the public sphere should not have to either see the nuisance results of the thing, or be tempted by in-your-face advertising for it;
-- people who have an addiction problem should be encouraged and enabled to "lash themselves to the mast" by putting themselves on a blacklist that is hard to get off of once you're on it and that sellers of the thing are required to honor.
So for gambling, that means you can and should limit where and how big casinos are (including virtual ones) and how they advertise (including online), and heavily advertise and enable a no-gamble list, and you can do all that without any sort of blanket ban, so that those who really want to do recreational sports betting or slot machines or whatever can do so.
The regulatory uncertanty you mention is definately a huge factor for companies like DraftKings and FanDuel. They're spending massiv amounts on customer aqusition and trying to build sustainable buisness models while navigating this changing landscape. If states start pulling back on legalization or adding more restrictions, it could really impact their growth trajctory.
I'd suggest the most effective way to regulate gambling is to tax the holy s**t out of it. Tax everybody, the bettor, the house, companies that provide fantasy leagues, the Internet providers that allow access, and anyone who publishes betting lines to the public, the owners of sports teams and leagues that have deals with gambling companies. Suck the profit out of the business, and the supply of gambling opportunities will shrink. Direct all taxes to healthcare and education. It's a big business because it is so lucrative. Yes, it may go underground, but it will have a much smaller footprint than the monster we have now.
Wizards of the Coast fought a long hard battle to ensure that Magic: The Gathering tournaments would not be classed as gambling and they are not. They were able to demonstrate that Magic is a game of skill not of chance and almost every gambling statue regulates games of chance. For the same reason, bass fishing tournaments, cooking contests, etc. aren't considering gambling.
Scrabble is not a game of chance. While there might be Scrabble events that are operating as if they are regulated gambling events, they shouldn't be and could probably escape that trap if the organizers worked the problem.
I didn't say there was no chance in Scrabble. I said that legally speaking, it's a game of skill, not a game of chance. A game with a random element is not per se a game of chance. A game is a game of skill if the player's choices predominantly determine who wins the game. A game like Scrabble, where the random element occurs many times, and is not biased towards any player (or the "house") smooths out of the effects of the random draw and allows the skill of the players to dominate the determination of who wins.
I think that there is a really good argument that poker is a game of skill but only when you consider it in the context of a tournament or a reasonably lengthy seat in a cash game. A single hand of poker is a game of chance. You have to play poker across many hands for the element of skill to become dominant. 21 (aka Blackjack) is 100% a game of skill when played through a shoe full of decks.
There's nothing you can do to make roulette a game of skill. No matter how many spins of the wheel, your odds of winning will never change. There's no betting pattern or strategy that will improve them. There are edges in roulette but they're all related to defects in the equipment or the croupier's procedures.
I think you’re treating game of skill and game of chance as a binary, which makes sense for the legal sense in which you’re speaking but isn’t in the spirit of the discussion in this post, I think.
Yeah, the legal structures sometimes turn things into “contests” rather than gambling, but in cases where there is no sponsorship money (i.e it's not positive sum; the whole prize pool is supplied by the players), i’m comfortable calling poker or pool or darts or golf or MTG tournaments gambling. It’s definitely the clearest spot on the tough-to-tell line. And when there is positive sum, I don't think it's gambling (like the PGA tour, for example).
1. Scrabble isn't a "game of chance" like roulette, but it obviously involves a random element (what tiles you pull). That puts it, on the spectrum of skill and chance, somewhere between chess (no random element) and poker (good players win money in the long run, but the variance is super high).
2. What you consider gambling could be anywhere on the skill-chance spectrum. The law calls it gambling right around poker. Some people only consider it gambling if you have no impact on the outcome (so slots, roulette, and sports betting as major examples).
I hope self-promotion isn’t frowned on, but I’ve just started a Substack, Stoic Poker, about how Stoic philosophy can make us better, more equable poker players! I hope people who are interested in gambling as a hobby or a conceptual topic will check it out: https://open.substack.com/pub/stoicpoker?r=7ednr&utm_medium=ios
To draw a connection to the post, it seems to me that the Stoic approach to gambling—be it poker or sports or whatnot—would be to make the best (as in highest-EV) bets one can while being indifferent to the outcome. After all, once one has placed the bet, it’s out of one’s hands and so getting upset about a loss serves no purpose. The slot machine style gambling Matt is talking about, though, is based on defeating both of these goals: it’s encouraging people to make low-EV bets and also (through constant betting) encouraging them to chase losses, which is the opposite of the Stoic approach. From a philosophical as well as an economic perspective, with a slot machine, the only way to win is not to play.
Two things:
1) A minor point, but a significant number of successful sports bettors aren't successful because they have their own models, it's because they are identifying market trends such as line movements on the sharpest books, and hitting stale lines on the duller "recreational" books that are slower to adjust, and beating CLV that way. These "top-down" bettors don't usually know *why* the lines are moving, but they see that they are, and that's good enough.
2) Gambling can be restricted without making it illegal. Indeed, all things considered, it may be best for sports betting to have a legal, state-regulated outlet. But there is another legal, extractive, and addictive industry that once could advertise on TV, and no longer can: smoking. If those rules can be changed for Philip Morris, they can be changed for FanDuel. Official marketing partnerships with the leagues should also be prohibited.
A friend, who was in recovery from addiction to alcohol, drugs and gambling, told me thst for a gambling addict the issue is not winning. It's not losing. He said that when he hit the jackpot, or a hand of poker, he never put the winnings in his pocket. He put them right back into the game, until he'd finally lost it all. I get the thing about adult consent, and don't know how to save addicts from themselves (except through 12 step programs), but it's time we recognized gambling addiction as being an illness, like alcohol addiction. That brings a different perspective on it, from the moral perspecive.
I think sports betting companies should operate like a stock market. They should be forced to take all legitimate participants at a given time (even sharps) with the same bet limit and offered odds. Purposefully limiting sharps should be illegal.
I'll say again what I usually say in these discussions: the keys to regulating enjoyable, addictive activities are to distinguish between doing and publicizing/advertising the activity, to identify and crack down on specific nuisances that sometimes attend the activity, and to make it easy for people to precommit themselves not to be tempted by it.
Whether it be alcohol, marijuana, gambling, whatever, the principles in a humane free society should be:
-- consenting adults who want the thing, and seek it out of their own accord, should be able to get it without excessive hoop-jumping and without fear of legal penalty;
-- people going about their lives in the public sphere should not have to either see the nuisance results of the thing, or be tempted by in-your-face advertising for it;
-- people who have an addiction problem should be encouraged and enabled to "lash themselves to the mast" by putting themselves on a blacklist that is hard to get off of once you're on it and that sellers of the thing are required to honor.
So for gambling, that means you can and should limit where and how big casinos are (including virtual ones) and how they advertise (including online), and heavily advertise and enable a no-gamble list, and you can do all that without any sort of blanket ban, so that those who really want to do recreational sports betting or slot machines or whatever can do so.
The regulatory uncertanty you mention is definately a huge factor for companies like DraftKings and FanDuel. They're spending massiv amounts on customer aqusition and trying to build sustainable buisness models while navigating this changing landscape. If states start pulling back on legalization or adding more restrictions, it could really impact their growth trajctory.
I'd suggest the most effective way to regulate gambling is to tax the holy s**t out of it. Tax everybody, the bettor, the house, companies that provide fantasy leagues, the Internet providers that allow access, and anyone who publishes betting lines to the public, the owners of sports teams and leagues that have deals with gambling companies. Suck the profit out of the business, and the supply of gambling opportunities will shrink. Direct all taxes to healthcare and education. It's a big business because it is so lucrative. Yes, it may go underground, but it will have a much smaller footprint than the monster we have now.
The Scrabble tournament is probably not gambling.
Wizards of the Coast fought a long hard battle to ensure that Magic: The Gathering tournaments would not be classed as gambling and they are not. They were able to demonstrate that Magic is a game of skill not of chance and almost every gambling statue regulates games of chance. For the same reason, bass fishing tournaments, cooking contests, etc. aren't considering gambling.
Scrabble is not a game of chance. While there might be Scrabble events that are operating as if they are regulated gambling events, they shouldn't be and could probably escape that trap if the organizers worked the problem.
Of course chance is involved in Scrabble.
I didn't say there was no chance in Scrabble. I said that legally speaking, it's a game of skill, not a game of chance. A game with a random element is not per se a game of chance. A game is a game of skill if the player's choices predominantly determine who wins the game. A game like Scrabble, where the random element occurs many times, and is not biased towards any player (or the "house") smooths out of the effects of the random draw and allows the skill of the players to dominate the determination of who wins.
I think that there is a really good argument that poker is a game of skill but only when you consider it in the context of a tournament or a reasonably lengthy seat in a cash game. A single hand of poker is a game of chance. You have to play poker across many hands for the element of skill to become dominant. 21 (aka Blackjack) is 100% a game of skill when played through a shoe full of decks.
There's nothing you can do to make roulette a game of skill. No matter how many spins of the wheel, your odds of winning will never change. There's no betting pattern or strategy that will improve them. There are edges in roulette but they're all related to defects in the equipment or the croupier's procedures.
I think you’re treating game of skill and game of chance as a binary, which makes sense for the legal sense in which you’re speaking but isn’t in the spirit of the discussion in this post, I think.
Yeah, the legal structures sometimes turn things into “contests” rather than gambling, but in cases where there is no sponsorship money (i.e it's not positive sum; the whole prize pool is supplied by the players), i’m comfortable calling poker or pool or darts or golf or MTG tournaments gambling. It’s definitely the clearest spot on the tough-to-tell line. And when there is positive sum, I don't think it's gambling (like the PGA tour, for example).
2 things:
1. Scrabble isn't a "game of chance" like roulette, but it obviously involves a random element (what tiles you pull). That puts it, on the spectrum of skill and chance, somewhere between chess (no random element) and poker (good players win money in the long run, but the variance is super high).
2. What you consider gambling could be anywhere on the skill-chance spectrum. The law calls it gambling right around poker. Some people only consider it gambling if you have no impact on the outcome (so slots, roulette, and sports betting as major examples).
I hope self-promotion isn’t frowned on, but I’ve just started a Substack, Stoic Poker, about how Stoic philosophy can make us better, more equable poker players! I hope people who are interested in gambling as a hobby or a conceptual topic will check it out: https://open.substack.com/pub/stoicpoker?r=7ednr&utm_medium=ios
To draw a connection to the post, it seems to me that the Stoic approach to gambling—be it poker or sports or whatnot—would be to make the best (as in highest-EV) bets one can while being indifferent to the outcome. After all, once one has placed the bet, it’s out of one’s hands and so getting upset about a loss serves no purpose. The slot machine style gambling Matt is talking about, though, is based on defeating both of these goals: it’s encouraging people to make low-EV bets and also (through constant betting) encouraging them to chase losses, which is the opposite of the Stoic approach. From a philosophical as well as an economic perspective, with a slot machine, the only way to win is not to play.
Cheers for this. Great analysis.