As with poker versus slots, one may require more time/work to become a reliably winning player, but the payoff is larger. With slots, you pull the lever and you're done.

Ultimately, though, gamblers of all kinds find these sorts of things fun in some way, otherwise they wouldn't continue to throw away money. It's addictive because it triggers some sort of reward center in the brain, and simply participating provides not only fantasy but also a sense of drama and unknown in an otherwise very predictable life.

full disclosure: not a gambler and rarely play the lotto

Seems like over the years the way they've dealt with card counters is by tweaking the game, though. They've added decks, they shuffle sooner, they shuffle when you increase your bet or when a new player sits down and plays for nontrivial amounts, and lately with continuous shuffling machines.

1. Field has 2 or 12 pay triple and the other pays double

2. 5x odds bets or better allowed.

3. Minimal / no restrictions on place bets. ( some table don't let you do place bets on 6 or 8 )

And then follow these rules:

1. Only do field, place, or come bets

2. Always have your place and odds bet "working" - you will have to tell the dealer

3. If a number is rolled that you have an existing place bet on convert it to a odds bet.

4. Limit the total amount of money on the table - one 7 will wipe everything.

5. If you feel nervous, take all the money off the table that you can. Let the last few remaining bets play out and then walk away.

6. Lastly, and most importantly limit yourself to a specific amount of time or rolls. This is especially important if you are winning.

> Only do field, place, or come bets

The house edge on the field with those rules is 2.78%, which isn't bad, but isn't great. Ideally you want one that pays triple on both 2 and 12 (good luck finding that!) because then the house edge is 0.00%

All the rest of your bets are either 0% or 1.4-1.6% house edge.

Also, if you're really worried about one seven wiping you off the table and don't mind being contrarian, play the don't. While the odds are basically the same (slightly better actually) in the long term, I find the short term odds much better (because of the aforementioned deadly seven).

However if you value the social aspect of the game or your casino player rating, don't play the don't. :)

Also impossible for the casino to make a subtle rule or behavior change that negatively affects the odds.

I personally don't know why casinos bother worrying about card counting. All they really have to do is increase the number of decks and/or increase the reshuffle frequency.

Or if they really want to stop it but some house rules that say that the next bet can't be any more than 2x the previous bet.

Sure they might miss that person that is going to go all in on one last draw. But whatever. Besides gambling revenues are down and non-casino revenues (like shows) are up. So maybe Las Vegas will stop being a gambling mecca and just be an entertainment hub.

I got so angry when I see a blackjack table with a 6 for 5 payout on a blackjack and the lack of surrender.

If you count cards on a small hand shuffled shoe, even with a basic system it is relatively easy for a player to have a fraction of a percent edge. Good players can have a few percent edges.

However, most casinos nowadays use large shoes and frequently (or even constantly) machine shuffle the cards. This effectively almost completely negate card counting.

It's perceived the smaller shoes are better since they are easier to county, but with a smaller shoes the count can't swing as far one way or another, so with a large shoes there is a high probability of getting better odds.

The main thing they do is not play through the whole shoe, i.e. they shuffle before they get all the way through. This prevents the count from being allowed to swing as far as possible.

I think the guy who explained it to me was talking about a combination of counting, pattern recognition and other such strategies, hence my confusion.

I agree with you, but I also gamble when I go to Vegas. I think when people say lottery players are dumb they are mainly pointing to the 'spend a large percentage of my paycheck each week on the lottery' group. When the jackpot is this big and is dominating pop culture, buying a ticket is just part of being entertained by the whole thing.

Fantasy sports is more like poker. Yes, it is a game of chance, but it is primarily a game of skill. Maybe most people don't have enough skill to make a difference, but given enough time, it can be acquired and you can have +EV.

Also, in poker and fantasy sports, you don't play against the house. They just take their cut, and you play against other people.

Note, I'm excluding blackjack from skill-based mainly because you are playing against the house, so its by their rules, and if you start winning, they'll kick you out.

But it is a good game for bored STEM undergrads, just like online poker is a good game for bored computer science undergrads. I had a few guys on my year who lived completely off online poker games while in university. They deployed custom-made scripts to automate playing on multiple tables at the same time, and probably did some other things that they didn't tell me. It's the same thing with fantasy sports, except you spend most of the time maintaining complex spreadsheets.

If very few people win all the money, it is most definitely a game of skill and not a game of chance,

Look at horse racing. At an off-season harness track where the purse is low and horses all suck, the professional handicapper loses a lot of his edge, as you never know when one horse is going to have a great day.

At the Belmont/Preakness/Travers/Kentucky Derby, a pro has a huge edge, as they generally can call the winner with precision -- the pros are betting on the finishing order via exacta bets. The crowd tries to picks the winning horse, and in the event of a win, makes a lousy $0.50 on a $2 bet :)

That's like the definition of self-contradiction.

They game the system by automating lineups that allow them to play multiple games a day.

For many people it's the other way around. They were already obsessively watching ESPN - fantasy sports betting just gives them an additional reason to do so.

In the end, grinding out your characters stats are just running scripts with a nice GUI on top. It's the experience that provides the value, not the result.

DFS, OTOH, is a quasilegal (at best) industry with new, rapidly scaling, tech-heavy firms.

The fact that both are gambling is really a side issue to how they relate to HN's focus and biases.

I kind of thought that was the point. If you just want to win money their are, as you said, lots of easier ways of doing that. But that would be less fun.

If someone without a lot of skills is wasting his money on the lottery and that's bad, why is it ok to bet on college basketball? It's a zero-sum game.

Especially with this new model of "take my money, and sell my eyeballs". Old time bookmakers just took their vig, the corporate version wants you soul too (consume media = buy subscriptions + watch ads).

It's really an insidious business!

Structurally, this seems similar to thinking that drugs should be legal, but taking drugs is silly.

Seems pretty different to me enough to illicit different reactions.

a) makes me believe that your assumption that "winning fantasy sports betting is far, far more likely than winning a lottery jackpot" is incorrect, and in fact for an average Joe, the reverse is the case;

b) suggests that the biggest advocates of fantasy sports will be people who believe they're good enough with Excel and statistics.

Yeah I know meant winning the big jackpots not the few dollars here and there many people win.

Most of the comments on this story are pretty straightforward attempts to apply some analysis to the problem (with no real hostility behind them)

But in a way, a lot of things are gambling - up to and including investing, particularly in startups. The desirability of a particular form of gambling in society is tied to the negative effects it has on people (e.g. how easy is it for a player to get addicted), and how exploitative the organizations operating a given game are. Under those metrics, fantasy sports are very much like lottery or one-armed bandit, and very much unlike investing.

And hell, it's not just about being condescending to people. I'm perplexed by how people tolerate, and even vocally support companies that intentionally fuck over poor people.

Cutting right to the more meta part of the discussion, it's just false equivalency constructed that hits both a desire to dump on sports fans and find a way to make an absurdly irresponsible habit practiced mostly by lower income people more palatable.