Gamblers are making a personal choice to bet their money, other gamblers should not be made to bear responsibility if that gambler’s choice turns out to be a poor one. Gambling addicts obviously exist, but they are playing the same game everyone else is. If you want to protect addicts from harming their finances, change the rules to accommodate that goal (betting limits, credit/finance checks, outright banning of gambling) rather than expect other gamblers to follow undefined rules that may or may not protect other gamblers from themselves.

But you're right in that the vast majority of players in gambling (including the house) are either (a) being fleeced, or (b) fleecing others. When the majority of users/members of a particular system are either victims (in some sense), or profiting off victims, I question the amorality of that system. So traditional morality called gambling "immoral" for good reason, I think -- if only because of this emergent, victimizational behavior it encourages.

It seems to me that economic regulation exists primarily to--and functions ideally when it successfully does--protect the vulnerable and prevent victimization. So it seems right and good to me that gambling is outlawed in most of the US.

Hell, I’ll bite here and assert the same as my parent comment: the folks who dumped their life savings into crypto made a personal choice. I fail to see how the rest of the market bears responsibility to those who lost their “investment”. So long as everyone is playing by the same rules, there’s no way you should be ethically responsible from benefiting from other’s losses.

You signed up for the risk when you chose to play. Do you believe that if I dump my money in a stock and it tanks, investors who benefit from that are now responsible for the money I’ve lost?

In fact, if you're winning more than you're losing, you're decreasing the profit of the bookie. You are therefore making it a less worthy venture for them to hold these ethically-negative gambling events. If you were to win enough, the bookie would lose money from the venture, eventually resulting in them no longer hosting gambling events.

So actually, winning money off of bookies is an ethically good behavior, since it's negative feedback for them enabling other gamblers with "uncontrollable behavior" to lose their money.

Not if it's a parimutuel betting [1] system, as described in the story. The Hong Kong Jockey Club takes a flat 17% cut. The rest is exchanged between winners and losers. This is no different from playing poker at a casino, where the house collects a rake but otherwise the players only win money off one another.

Note how in the story, the Jockey Club contacts Benter and offers assistance rather than blacklisting him. If he were decreasing the profit margin of the bookie, as you call it, they would have ample reason to cut him off. In actuality, he was increasing their profits (but not their margin, which remained a flat 17%) simply by increasing betting activity. This is something poker sites have also hit upon, and as a result they've developed sophisticated rewards programs for their top players.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parimutuel_betting

Or, to put it another way: any time you win a bet, you (and the bookie) are helping gambling addicts to take one step closer to "hitting bottom" and thus getting on to the first phase of recovery—acknowledging that you have a problem.

(This is the complement to the argument that charity for drug addicts is a bad thing, insofar as it delays the addict longer in the self-harming, not-prioritizing-getting-well phase of addiction. In the gambling addict case, charity would be, in effect, "giving them another pile of chips"—obviously a bad idea, no?)

121) Last time player had a happy meal

122) Amount of times drunk at training

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499) Hours spent playing FIFA 20 on console

500) Fashionability of latest hairstyle

I can count on one hand the number of funded companies over the past six or seven years, and I can think of only one that has exited. Might have something to do with vice provisions dictated by LPs, but it certainly seems like a ripe growth area.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-30/sports-ga...

Do "social" casinos count? Zynga is all over that and went public in 2011, Big Fish was acquired by Aristocrat in 2017, and I'm sure there are others.

If you throw ethics to the wind, there's no reason to make a real gambling app/service when you can give gamblers the same dopamine feedback loop without ever needing to pay them real money.

Personally I think there's only so much time left for gambling (in lootboxes, social casinos, or even sports betting) before it gets shutdown by regulation. There's very little pragmatic argument for allowing it to exist in the first place, other than classic prohibition arguments like "personal freedom" and "black markets still exist." Valid, but I think the harm of industrialized gambling through digital platforms outweighs the benefit of taxing it and allowing a black market to exist, but that's just me.

For example, even in a fair game the house will eventually take a gambler's bankroll provided the house's bankroll is practically infinite [1]. That's a thought experiment, but it works in practice when you are dealing with gambling addicts that won't walk away from the table.

Secondly, those gambling addicts, or "whales" as they call them represent something like 0.15% of players bring in 50% of the revenue [2].

And lastly, I would have agreed with you a few months ago, before I heard this story [3] on NPR about how Big Fish was targeting people and using predatory practices to keep them on the game. It reminded me of a twisted version of AOL's customer retention practices that they were sued for a decade ago.

There's also the whole notion of casinos/gambling disproportionately impacting low income communities and how you can't start a gambling business without tons of capital, so it serves as an efficient funnel of money from the poor to the rich. And it's really naive to think that someone going broke affects that person alone. God help them if they have a family.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/03/01/why-its-s...

[3] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-social-casinos-leverag...

Which just struck me as a perfect point for your argument. So I guess I'm smelling what you're cooking.

And where N was differing ranges such that you ccould gamble in the pick a number between 1-10

Or go to a diff room when N was between 1-100, and others like 1-1000 etc

And the anti was diff for each and the payoff diff based on paying out from the antis (i dont. Know how to spell anti)

The only issue is that you can't scale well but this only becomes an issue when you need to put down tens of million a week (i.e. when you have $50m+).

The barriers to entry are also getting higher as competition is increasing in the space (although limits are probably going up too). One big issue right now is data. If you bet on soccer (the sport with the highest limits), you need to spend at least $100-200k/year (before hiring programmers) on data to become competitive.

then after 2 years you would have billions of dollars. yeah right

The issue, as I said initially, is that you aren't scalable past $100m or so (without connections to the Asian books, which some people above have...apparently, some of the guys are able to put down multiple millions on most European soccer leagues...which isn't available to most). But yes, most of the funds run by the above people have been making 100%+ for years.

A lot of the market is not tradable though. On one end of the market, gambling is often a state monopoly with high spread and high margins (if not prohibited entirely), while on the other end there are large trades going on in private or closed circles.

(I cant recall the name of the company that makes these super highend net cards, which hedgefunds prefer)

LOL.

In sports, you can study your opponent to predict what they might do. In business, you can really only study what your opponent did during the actual game so to speak. For example, Microsoft can't wait for Sony to release the PS4 in order to develop a game plan for the Xbox. Both have to put forward their best effort regardless of what the competition may or may not do. In sport, you are training to beat 1 opponent, in business you are trying to appeal to the whims of the multifaceted consumer which aren't nearly as concrete.

I would assume that people who post to Hacker News, as a rule, are less risk averse than the general populace due to Hacker News being more focused, in my mind, in the entrepreneurial side of technology.