Sports Betting Apps Are Even More Toxic Than You Thought

(bloomberg.com)

79 points | by JumpCrisscross 12 hours ago ago

52 comments

  • bentt an hour ago ago

    The fact that ESPN itself has a sports betting app tells you all you need to know about the perversion of sports now that gambling is blessed by the government.

    I think I can live with the legalization of sports betting if there are strong restrictions against marketing and advertising. If you want to ruin your life that's your decision, and you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market. But the way that advertising has its tentacles in our culture now... it's bad.

  • jfoutz 10 hours ago ago

    The article appears to break gamblers into 3 groups.

    1) casual players

    2) problem players

    3) professional gamblers.

    so basically casual players gamble something like 50 bucks a year. Problem gamblers get money however they can (and although it's unstated and I have no evidence, I think this is where the actual money comes from). And finally, people that can snipe the mispriced bets, and make a lot of money.

    Feels sort of submarine-ish. Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll. The pros eat up casino margins.

    I dunno. Feels like a "I run a business, but I'm not really good at it so we need laws to force the pros out". Please don't regulate me, but regulate who can play.

    Interesting that it's in Bloomberg. Interesting that the casinos are so bad at laying odd they lose. I have no sympathy for anyone but the addicts. Those folks are sick and need help.

    • JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago ago

      > Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll.

      The fact that the pros are simulating problem players because then the betting apps give you more leeway, e.g. by "send[ing] you bonus money" and raising your limits, paints the picture quite effectively in my book.

      > Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll

      To what degree is this true? Sure, a casino with a massive spend on free alcohol and structure needs a high profit margin to return its capital. But betting apps don't have those costs.

      • dkrich 9 hours ago ago

        This is backwards. Casinos offer huge cross subsidization opportunities like getting people to spend lots of money in clubs and bars or gamble on games like slots that have a huge house edge while apps have near zero cross subsidization opportunities and massive overhead. An app running at draftkings scale costs a lot to operate.

        I’ve believed for a long time and continue to that the math on these businesses just doesn’t work. Eventually they won’t exist because they aren’t profitable.

        • JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago ago

          Fair enough, I'm not knowledgeable about casino economics. Focussing only on the gambling, however, I'm scpetical they need whales.

          • WorldMaker an hour ago ago

            They have shareholders expecting massive year-over-year revenue growth and are directly comparing themselves to the free-to-play/mobile gaming space where whales seem plentiful, so of course they are optimizing for whales long-term over sustainably building a low margin overhead product. You can see this almost directly in many of their advertising plans, Draft Kings and the others advertise just like the mobile games space. (They just have fewer places they can show their advertisements from old gambling advertisements laws.)

      • jfoutz 10 hours ago ago

        You nailed the key point my muddy intuition (and the article) failed to express.

        Pro gamblers simulate problem gamblers, so they can bet more.

        I said, "Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll"

        > To what degree is this true?

        I don't know the ROI. It's hyperbolic, I'll freely admit that.

        But I think there is an important point. We let problem gamblers gamble more, and it's not fair pros take advantage of that dark pattern.

        • JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago ago

          > don't know the ROI. It's hyperbolic, I'll freely admit that.

          Being a bookie is making a market. As long as you do your maqth right, your potential for losses are capped--lots of small bets are actually less risky in this respect. Problem gamblers are a cherry on top, far from essential to any gambling enterprise, particularly not one making a two-sided market.

          > We let problem gamblers gamble more, and it's not fair pros take advantage of that dark pattern

          The pros are the beneficial bacteria checking how much the apps can prey on the problem gamblers.

          • phs318u 9 hours ago ago

            When the "cherry on top" (problem gamblers) is responsible for half your revenue (from the Bloomberg article), then that's not just a cherry. That's half the cake. And it's a really, really, big cake.

            • JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago ago

              It's still cake! The implied assertion is gambling enterprises need problem gamblers. That if you restrict their ability to prey on problem gamblers, nobody gets to casually gamble.

              I know nothing about gambling. But I know a lot about market making and the math of being a bookie. And basaed on that, I don't think the claim is true.

              • phs318u 5 hours ago ago

                Well, I don’t know much about market making but as a member of Gamblers Anonymous since 1998 I’ve seen just about every kind of devastation caused by every kind of gambling. In the last few years I’ve seen a significant increase in the number of very young men coming to us. Here in Australia, the gambling industry absolutely is laser focused on targeting young men using every psychological trick in the book, including such pernicious features as “Bet With Mates (tm)” which is explicitly designed to use peer pressure to lock in and escalate those in the group who may otherwise pull out.

                If we accept that almost 50% of revenue comes from 80% of gamblers (a diverse cohort) while the other almost 50% comes from 3% of gamblers (a far more uniform cohort), then of course betting companies would be absolutely defending against any change (regulation) that would impact the 3%. Furthermore they’d be remiss in their duty to their shareholders if they weren’t trying to migrate gamblers from the larger cohort to the smaller.

                • Yeul 3 hours ago ago

                  It will just be like meth and painkillers: everyone pretends there isn't a problem for years until it gets so bad that the government has to step in.

              • kasey_junk 7 hours ago ago

                I also no nothing about gambling and a lot more about market making.

                One major difference that may change the math is the tax rate. Illinois for instance just passed a 40% tax on sports betting.

      • victorbjorklund 6 hours ago ago

        The aqusition costs are extremly high for online betting and online casinos. If you pay 1000 usd to aquire one customer it is not profitable if they gamble 50 usd / year.

        • gcanyon 4 hours ago ago

          Then online casinos are a bad business and shouldn't exist, just like breweries shouldn't exist if they can't break even selling to casual drinkers and need alcoholics to make a profit, and gun manufacturers shouldn't exist if they can't break even selling to one-or-two-gun owners and need wannabe-commandos and survivalist cosplayers to make a profit.

          • hermannj314 an hour ago ago

            I worked at a biotechnology company, we had thousands of clients but five of them were 80% of our revenue. In your world, should that business not exist as well?

            I don't understand the princple that revenue should be uniformly distributed as a condition for existing. How would you enforce this?

            • gcanyon 33 minutes ago ago

              I’m not claiming revenue must be even.

              And I’m assuming that the five customers actually benefitted from your company’s work? If so, then they’re not really comparable to gambling addicts, alcoholics, and gun fanatics, right?

              We already (poorly) enforce (weak) laws requiring casinos not to prey on addicts.

              We already (poorly) enforce (weak) laws requiring bars not to over-serve and alcoholics to get treatment sometimes.

              We do almost nothing about gun addicts.

              But commenting that something shouldn’t be the way it is isn’t a claim to know how to fix it.

            • butterfly42069 39 minutes ago ago

              I presume one would just continuously uniformly distribute everything till they arrived at communism lmao

    • dustincoates 9 hours ago ago

      > and although it's unstated and I have no evidence, I think this is where the actual money comes from

      The article links to a WSJ article that says this group of problem players provides more than 50% of revenue to the betting companies despite being just 3% of all bettors.

      > Of the more than 700,000 people in the SMU panel, fewer than 5% withdrew more from their betting apps than they deposited... The next 80% of bettors made up for those operators’ losses. And the 3% of bettors who lost the most accounted for almost half of net revenue

      • DrScientist 3 hours ago ago

        > fewer than 5% withdrew more from their betting apps than they deposited... The next 80% of bettors made up for those operators’ losses. And the 3% of bettors who lost the most accounted for almost half of net revenue

        That's a deliberately misleading representation - they offset the 80 against losses rather then the 3%. In terms of net revenue the 3% are less than half net revenue - not more.

    • Yeul 6 hours ago ago

      This is why Vegas is all about entertainment not just rows of slot machines.

      • ebiester an hour ago ago

        Vegas is about entertainment because it brings people to the rows of slot machines. And ideally, from their perspective, traps a handful of whales from every cohort.

    • FireBeyond 9 hours ago ago

      > The pros eat up casino margins.

      In games against the house, the house usually ensures that even with mathematically perfect play, that they will still have a margin (though, admittedly, it's a tighter margin than when a bachelor party is drunk and playing blackjack and hitting on 19 because "I'm feeling lucky!").

      Most pros play against the other players (i.e. poker, etc.), and the rake is the rake, regardless of that - the old adage, "If you look around the table and can't figure out who the chump is, you're the chump" stands, i.e. you don't have to beat the house, you just have to beat Bob who flew in from Iowa (not intended to insult anyone or anywhere, just more exaggerate the casual player).

      • orwin 7 hours ago ago

        No, advantage betting is pretty much only against the houses, not against other players. While people who know the sport and manage to bet misplaced lines can be winning over a season, advantage betting is the only way to reliantly have a positive EV. Casinos and now sport betting apps try to prevent professionals to use this, but with the number of shit you can now bet on, and since you don't have to tie an account to your real identity yet, it is becoming very difficult to catch that, especially if you muddy the water with dumb bets.

        • blitzar 5 hours ago ago

          Outside of the US where gambling on sports has been the norm for decades, the bookies tend to run square books and just earn spread + commissions. To the point where pvp exchanges have been the dominant destination for betting for 20 years or so.

          These article (and others like it recently) just make me think US sports betting operations are operating on antiquated business model.

          • orwin 4 hours ago ago

            Yes, this is only because american sports give "line bet" and "prop bets", that anybody can exploit if two apps aren't coordinated. You can do line arbitrage (middling is the easiest, but professionals use props with weird maths and specific knowledge to make a living).

            If you only offer to bet on the money line, it makes it way harder for professional gamblers.

            • blitzar 4 hours ago ago

              A football game in the UK for example has ~60 markets on exchange for a single game with bets on everything from the result, handicaped result (multiple lines), the number of goals, the times of the goals, scorers of goals, half-time results, yellow cards, red cards, number of corners, number of shots at goal, time of first thrown in etc.

  • snapcaster 4 hours ago ago

    These apps should be banned. Gambling is a social ill with such a limited upside and so much harm it can't really be justified

    • llamaimperative 2 hours ago ago

      Agreed -- I will continue to shout it from every perch I can: politicians who are actively working to proliferate these apps should be (at least journalistically) investigated. I would bet on this being a well-above-random signal of either a personal gambling addiction or corruption.

  • bettringf 10 hours ago ago

    I worked at a quant sports betting trading company, on occasion it would send the employees to place annonymous few grand bets at physical shops because it's such a problem getting people to continue accepting your bets if you are any good.

    And found out that the more you bet, the more percentage commission you pay to exchanges like Betfair, which is quite contraintuitive - commission goes up with volume, not down.

    I also learned a few tricks of the industry - when you open an online account they look up your address on Google Maps to see what kind of place you live in.

    • blitzar 5 hours ago ago

      My betfair commission was heavily discounted back in the day, but that was only on volumes of ~£50,000 a day, and a fair bit more on weekends. Nevertheless their commissions were outrageously high, but the scale of the liquidity they had available was amazing.

      • dgellow 3 hours ago ago

        50k a day, was that money you were betting? Or were you managing a betting service and betfair was the underlying exchange? I know very little about that world

    • bionsystem 10 hours ago ago

      > it's such a problem getting people to continue accepting your bets if you are any good.

      Why don't they just use those people to adjust their odds faster for everybody else ? Or do they limit the size you can bet rather than just banning you ?

      > I also found out that the more you bet, the more percentage commission you pay to exchanges like Betfair, which is quite contraintuitive - commission goes up with volume, not down.

      I guess they try to cream the most addicted people, seems quite intuitive to me.

      • bettringf 10 hours ago ago

        > Why don't they just use those people to adjust their odds faster for everybody else ?

        Volumes are not huge like in finance, you will lose more on the bet that you will make back in your marginally improved odds.

        > I guess they try to cream the most addicted people, seems quite intuitive to me.

        The professionals, not the addicted. The addicted expire quickly and they typically don't use exchanges anyway.

      • bjourne 5 hours ago ago

        Top sports books do that already. Lesser sports books don't have enough liquidity to react in real-time. In fact a simple winning strategy is to check what odds Pinnacle gives and see if any bookie offers better odds (arbitrage betting). It will only work for 2-3 bets before you're rate-limited though.

    • hsbauauvhabzb 10 hours ago ago

      Are you able to tell us more about your operation? Size, scale, profitability etc?

  • jjtheblunt 11 hours ago ago

    Titles ending “than you thought” always, always come across as condescending nonsense.

  • focusgroup0 10 hours ago ago

    money quote [pun unintended]:

    >In states that allow online betting, they found, the average credit score drops by almost 1% after about four years, while the likelihood of bankruptcy increases by 28%, and the amount of debt sent to collection agencies increases by 8%.

    • christophilus 10 hours ago ago

      It’s interesting that a 28% increase in likelihood of bankruptcy doesn’t produce more than a 1% hit to the credit score.

      • JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago ago

        > interesting that a 28% increase in likelihood of bankruptcy doesn’t produce more than a 1% hit to the credit score

        FTA: "Much to the surprise of Hollenbeck and his collaborators, falling credit scores and increasing bankruptcy filings weren’t accompanied by an uptick in credit card debt and delinquencies. Financial institutions, it appears, are sheltering themselves from the fallout of online sports betting by lowering credit limits and otherwise restricting access to credit in states where it’s legal."

        TL; DR The people going broke either don't have a credit score [1] because they were too poor to be lent to.

        [1] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-repor...

      • bettringf 10 hours ago ago

        It can't be 28% for the whole state, that would mean a third of the population are degenerate gamblers.

        • bionsystem 10 hours ago ago

          No. Say 100 / 100 000 people are degenerate gambleurs at risk of bankruptcy. +28% would mean 128 are now at risk.

        • JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago ago

          > can't be 28% for the whole state, that would mean a third of the population are degenerate gamblers

          Not how likelihoods work.

  • nusl 6 hours ago ago

    Sports betting has the side effect of making things surrounding sports themselves more toxic.

    Betting being as pervasive as it is, and only increasing, causes more people to view and interact with sports with bets or money, and thus can react negatively toward their losing teams.

    If there's a large number of angry, vocal "fans" jumping down your neck every time you lose a game or make a mistake that caused their bet to fail, there's a lot of negativity fabricated where the team or player merely played the sport as usual.

    Teams are made of humans, and humans make mistakes. This is normal for any sport or activity, but when you've got a chunk of cash in the game it turns into not-normal reactions.

    This also bleeds into other forms of sport, like esport, and feeds into some already-negative online communities. Games like League of Legends or DotA 2 come to mind.

    I really, really dislike the way sports betting has gone and how it's corrupted everything it touches.

    Couple the above with the way these companies effectively prey on betters likely to lose money, and even encourage them to bet and lose more, while at the same time stonewall those that actually know what they're doing and make money, these companies are scum and should be eradicated.

    • WorldMaker an hour ago ago

      It also infects players and referees. It's harder to trust referees in a sport where you know what the big bets are, whether or not the refs are actually cheating to try to change the outcome it's hard not to feel that they might be.

      Baseball alone has had some prominent sports gambling by players in its past change the record books. There's a bunch of interesting arguments for and against that maybe the records for Joe Jackson and Pete Rose should be reinstated now that sports gambling is so generally legal in so many more states than their time. There's a bunch of interesting arguments of how many of today's players might be "on the take" as much as or worse than those historic gambling scandals.

      Other sports have their own histories with it. Sports are different when you are wondering if even players are betting for or against themselves.

  • joegibbs 11 hours ago ago
  • ChrisArchitect 10 hours ago ago

    Related:

    Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41659458

  • fuzzfactor 11 hours ago ago

    Does look like I would have to get a lot more toxic thoughts before I would be able to keep up :(

  • ChrisArchitect 10 hours ago ago

    Related:

    Should Sports Betting Be Banned?

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665630