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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30411 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life

The online gambling deals have helped athletic departments recoup some of the revenue they lost during the pandemic. The partnerships bring in extra funds that schools can use to sign marquee coaches and build winning sports teams. Mr. Haller, Michigan State’s athletic director, said in a news release at the time of the Caesars deal that it would provide “significant resources to support the growing needs of each of our varsity programs.”

The partnerships raise questions, however, about whether promoting gambling on campus — especially to people who are at an age when they are vulnerable to developing gambling disorders — fits the mission of higher education.

Some aspects of the deals also appear to violate the gambling industry’s own rules against marketing to underage people. The “Responsible Marketing Code” published by the American Gaming Association, the umbrella group for the industry, says sports betting should not be advertised on college campuses.

promoting gambling to 18 year olds is the latest way in which college sports are distorting the goal of college. at uc boulder, the school gets $30 every time someone downloads an app and makes a bet. the faculty managed to ensure that this money went to the right causes, though:

“We came up with the idea that the money from the referral bonus could actually go toward diversity and inclusion and equity efforts at the university, in particular because a lot of the money in athletics are made from underrepresented minorities,” Mr. Hornstein said. A spokesman for the university’s chancellor, Philip DiStefano, confirmed that some of the money will be used to expand mental health and diversity initiatives.

I am honestly amazed with how quickly the 'vice' of gambling has seemingly become accepted as a mainstream practice with virtually no pushback from the either main political party, even the one that would presumably see gambling as exploitation of vulnerable populations (I'll let you decide which one that is!).

Seems like for the longest time sports betting was this shady thing you could only do via bookies in Vegas, then seemingly overnight there were DraftKings ads EVERYWHERE.

I'd add on to that all the hype around the Powerball and Poker championships these days.

Oh, add in that Gambling sponsorships and livestreams were becoming so ubiquitous that Twitch had to ban them. Fucking KIDS being advertised at here.

Can't forget that the EU is trying to reign in video game lootboxes, which also have become insanely common. Again. Kids.

ESPECIALLY when you put all this against the backdrop of the Crypto market being called out as just one big complicated casino.

Well, guys, if you're absolutely fine with college students taking on debt to bet on sports teams, you really can't complain if they're taking on debt to bet on magic internet dollars with Shiba Inus or fancy jpegs of apathetic monkeys. The complaint really seems to be that you're not getting a cut of the action.

And, finally, you've got the CFTC refusing to approve prediction markets for elections, for completely opaque reasons. Plenty of approved markets for literal natural disasters but something as important as an election vote count? NOPE.

All in all, a very confusing environment regarding what is gambling and what isn't gambling, and which types of gambling are legitimate and accepted and which are, I guess, sneered at and relegated to seedier venues.

sports betting

To be fair, i don't think betting should be considered gambling at all.

The outcomes are not random. You can predict them if your model is good enough. It is playing with money but the core sentiment among is practitioners is either putting their money where their mouth is or trying to come up with the best model for something with an artificial risk/reward mechanism. With your eyes squinted enough you can make the case that trading certain financial contracts are no different.

Basically I do think there is some overlap in the demographic that pours their life savings down the roulette table and those who bet it all on a team. But that overlap is small.

Anything is gambling if your model is poor enough.

And entities like DraftKings are only profitable if people's models are poor enough that they'll take some illl-advised bets.

The only thing that really separates casino games from financial markets are the fact that casinos control the rules so the house always wins whilst in the financial markets in theory this isn't the case.

Which does make the financial markets even wilder than casinos since in the casino you (probably) won't see the roulette wheel spontaneously explode and kill like six people, and the games aren't tied together in such a way that the entire system melts down if one game is compromised.

Does the book actually risk much in a typical sports betting operation? I thought the whole point of floating odds prior to the event was to make as much of the betting effectively pari mutual as possible. If the house always wins because they get 10% of the bet, that's a lot more like the position the exchanges take in financial markets.

Parimutuel only really gets used for horses these days, and even that's being eroded as fixed odds gets switched on. I've worked in the industry for a variety of different operators, in different roles, and generally the book's bankroll is so absurdly deep compared to the individual bettor that there's no significant sweats on day-to-day betting.

There's been some cases such as Mayweather-McGregor where there was an infinite supply of McGregor bets at large prices where a hypothetical win would have been very bad for the industry, but that's atypical. Trump-Biden was also another one of those down here in Australia where books had a sufficient potential liability on Trump they were literally encouraging arbitrage.

books had a sufficient potential liability on Trump they were literally encouraging arbitrage

What does "encouraging arbitrage" mean here?

Certain operators had a 8-figure liability on Trump so they pushed their price on Biden high enough that users could lock-in a small guaranteed profit by betting Biden with them and Trump on competitors.

I assume that means "scoop up the other bet for stupid cheap and potentially get a stupid-high return," but I'm only more familiar with the typical economics definition of "arbitrage."

I'm not even familiar with that. Only know it in terms of settlements, e.g. company v. union under third party (the arbiter). Guessing it's "price arbitrage" meaning profiting off price discrepancies. But not sure how it relates to betting under the circumstances OP described, maybe it's the same thing.

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