[lumb63]

I was a big proponent of legalizing sports gambling before it happened here in the US. After that, one of my best friends lost 5 figures on sports gambling that he really couldn’t afford to lose. I’ve also watched sports talk shows degrade to simple betting tips, and TV is now borderline unwatchable due to the pharmaceutical and gambling ads. To me, a few regulations/restrictions seem useful. I think broad legalization went too far.

One regulation would be banning gambling advertising, for the same reason why smoking ads are (I think?) banned. It is especially nefarious how companies lure in new customers with free bets, often with unscrupulous cash-out conditions, in order to get people hooked. It’s the equivalent of ads providing someone a coupon code to get several boxes of free cigarettes, at which point they get hooked.

Another change I’d like to see is the end of mobile gambling. I’ve never done it, but from watching friends do it, it was far too easy to deposit money, or borrow money on credit, and bet it frivolously. At least if such behavior is confined to a casino, there is some larger barrier to entry for people.

I do not know if this is true in other states, but certain states have the ability for an individual to self-institute a gambling ban at all facilities in the state. I’m not sure if this applies to gambling online. If not, then it should. And if other states don’t have it, then they would greatly benefit from it.

It also seems somewhat fair to me to tax the casinos and other companies profiting from gambling and using that money to fund services for people who become addicted. If you’re going to help create a problem, you should have to help clean it up.

[bombcar]

Requiring gambling to be done at established facilities or even the sports facility itself and limiting the bets to five dollars or some nominal amount would solve 99% of the problems.

[acdha]

The other thing I’d add is a mandatory system where people can tell the company not to allow them to bet with a lengthy time delay (say 90 days) to remove themselves from the list. Most people with problems know they have them at least some of the time and it’s important to give them tools to prevent moments of weakness.

[seaal]

Self exclusion is something that is handled by each states gaming enforcement department. All 34 states that have a self-exclusion program also have wildly different policies.

[8note]

Is this mitigated by time to get between states?

[mnahkies]

They have a system for this in the UK https://www.gamstop.co.uk/ - though I only know it exists from TV adverts (presumably they are legally obligated to run these)

[verdverm]

Limiting it to a licensed location, instead of app or website, and requiring cash instead of credit would likely be sufficient.

[gosub100]

I'm pretty sure the owners of the licensed locations were principals in getting the online betting scene going. I am guessing here, but it seems likely they saw that it's inevitable that off-shore online sports books will exist, so they were driven to capitalize on it legally (from the US).

[ipaddr]

Why not just ban it? I fail to see the point of spending all of this money administering an industry with such a low total income. That would lose money every year and keep increasing.

[dredmorbius]

A total ban ... on legal gambling ... would likely lead to at least some increase in illegal gambling, which of necessity allies itself to organised crime.

That's not an iron-clad argument, as legal gambling can still have mob ties, and tacit permission of some illegal gambling might still permit some level of oversight. And of course, legal gambling doesn't ensure reasonable or effective oversight or regulation.

By establishing known, legal, and possibly even bettor-favourable facilities or systems, gaming becomes something which might have some level of oversight. The increase in online gambling does severely cut into this argument though.

Another challenge, in the U.S., comes in the form of reservation casinos which can operate independently of other state prohibitions on gambling, which means that total eradication is at the very least difficult.

But that is an argument which might be made in answer to your "why not just..." question.

(I'm generally not a fan of gambling in any of its various forms. I'm cognisant of its pervasiveness and some of the worse aspects of it.)

[doetoe]

According to the article, the other way around didn't happen: the legalization didn't decrease illegal gambling

[dredmorbius]

That would put a damper on things.

Though the pre-2018 situation was that personal (that is, not intermediated by a company) gambling was legal, which provided an out.

Again: I'm positing the argument, I'm not advocating for it. And it does appear to be counterfactual.

[NeutralCrane]

This is true of other vices as well. Many have argued that legalized sex work will decrease the amount of human trafficking, when reality has shown it actually increases it.

[dredmorbius]

I'd really like to see an in-depth analysis of multiple such cases of ... what to call it? Vice permissivity? And what effects stack up.

I strongly suspect that one element of legalisation is that it normalises the activity, which lowers all sorts of social and psychological barriers to participation.

Another is that it creates self-organised self-interest groups. This is actually a really great way to ensure the longevity of governmental programmes, with both positive and negative examples: welfare systems such as Social Security, Medicare, and the ACA in the US are all immensely popular with the elderly, a staunch voting block, to the extent that its general trend toward conservativism doesn't fully mute interest in social welfare. The military-industrial complex is another, and a recent discussion I'd heard of the Inflation Reduction Act highlighted the constituencies built in to support it even in deep-red southern US states.

In the case of legalisation of gambling, drugs, and sex work, what had previously been the purview of criminal gangs now becomes "ordinary business" (though the thought occurs that the distinction between the two may be less than is commonly understood). To the extent that established businesses prove to be highly effective at defending even the most indefensible of practices (tobacco, alcohol, asbestos, lead, plastics, fossil fuels) is well established, and the risks of that path should be strongly considered.

Another option is to decriminalise rather than legalise a practice, but focus on policing the most problematic elements of the practice. That might be the provider side (as with drugs and gambling) or the consumer side (as with sex work, targeting johns), or on going up-market and tightly limiting or prohibiting private aggregators (e.g., pimps, drug lords) rather than focusing on low-level actors (streetwalkers, individual workers, street crews within drug operations).

State-operated operations (gambling, lotteries, alcohol and tobacco sales, drug distribution *with integrated treatment), is another option, though it too isn't a surefire solution. My view is that lottery programmes in the US are out of control and a net negative, though in part that itself reflects the public-private partnership in the operation of many of these.

[ThunderSizzle]

It's a lot easier for the IRS to track your betting earnings when it's reported to them directly by the broker.

Of course doing it in a way so it can't be tracked keeps the IRS ignorant, which is a big deal to many people

[mnahkies]

Huh TIL that the usa taxes gambling winnings, and that you can offset with losses up to the amount of winnings (https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc419)

Guess it's good my luck was terrible in Vegas or I might've inadvertently committed tax fraud. Though now I'm curious if I had won a few hundred dollars would there have been tax due?

I'm pretty sure it's tax free in most countries.

[cyborgx7]

I don't have a strong opinion in the matter, but the argument is that banning things don't automatically make them go away. Banning things that people want to do will make organized crime spring up around it, which is often worse. The idea is, by allowing it in some limited legal way, you make it unprofitable for the organized criminals.

[MavisBacon]

Yeah and I think I believed in aspects of this line of logic when my state legalized sportsbooks. I believe in harm reduction in most regards. What happened though, in my opinion, is an increase in access wound up creating an increase in net harm. Just my assessment. Timing is worth noting, this was rolled out to users initially during quarantine times.

[andy800]

The only actual problem casino gambling, lotteries, and sports betting has been intended to solve is to generate revenue for state and local governments. Limiting bets to $5 would ensure failure for that purpose. Gambling addiction, crime, cheating, game fixing, etc are unfortunate side effects, but not real problems, in the eyes of lawmakers.

[Fauntleroy]

It would also result in way less profits, so we'd need something truly incredible to happen to see it through.

[marcosdumay]

> something truly incredible

That's one interesting way to say "government regulation".

[Petersipoi]

Government regulation that results in the government having less money is truly incredible.

[Xylakant]

Examples are not particularly hard to come by: All government regulations to reduce smoking, all regulations to reduce petrol cars. All regulations to ban drugs. All of those aim to reduce the sale of some item the government could or does tax. I’m sure more can be found.

[WeylandYutani]

Yeah but how do you do that when you have online casinos who are conveniently placed on some tropical island state?

[xemdetia]

I think that one of the issues that really hurts the advertising is that the sports betting adverts will pay above and beyond what anyone else pays and it prices everyone out. It's the same problem we had with crypto and cigarettes. They need to spend infinite money to normalize their desired behavior. I feel like advertising for casinos around there being interesting non-gambling activities (e.g. concerts) is the right kind of indirect advertisement, but by necessity the online slots and online sports betting is monotone towards the outcome.

[panarky]

Sports betting is a market.

Like any market, those with knowledge and power systematically enrich themselves by extracting wealth from those without.

If sports betting should be banned because it exploits those without wealth or knowledge, then other markets with many naive participants should also be banned, such as markets for stocks and crypto.

[dumah]

Sports betting is a negative EV zero-sum game motivated by an addiction, for a significant fraction of the population.

Investment in equities is principally a non-zero-sum positive EV game motivated by rational expectations for preservation and growth of wealth.

The fact that some financial actors have very good sharpe ratios or dominate capture of trading profits on millisecond horizons isn’t a significant detriment to the larger good resulting from retail investment.

[panarky]

If you support banning sports betting because it's a zero-sum game that is generally -EV for non-professionals in aggregate, and if short-term trading of stocks is also zero-sum and -EV for non-professionals in aggregate, then do you support also banning short-term stock trading for non-professionals?

[dumah]

I don’t know exactly what the right regulation would look like to restrict this specific kind of activity, but I don’t have a problem, in principle, with such regulation.

[znkynz]

Bookies don't take stakes from habitual winners. The "market" is rigged.

[chipsrafferty]

So every market should be banned?

[ItsBob]

> I’ve never done it, but from watching friends do it, it was far too easy to deposit money, or borrow money on credit, and bet it frivolously.

A data point for you...

I was on a train earlier this year and I was standing behind someone out with their wife/girlfriend. He had his phone in his hand the whole time with a gambling app opened (the green one, PaddyPower maybe?). I couldn't read the screen exactly but there was a list of fixtures for football matches and a button next to each one. From memory, I think each button was odds for the game, e.g. 10:1 Luton win vs Exeter or something.

Anyway, the point is that (again, from memory) at least 8 times in the journey, he opened and closed the app and clicked on 10+ of these odds buttons, while in conversation with his girlfriend who had put her phone away at the start of the journey.

I vaguely recall him checking his balance at one point too.

Anyway, I thought I'd back up your story by telling one of mine where I watched someone place 50+ bets on a 30 min train journey! It's frighteningly easy (emphasis on "frightening")

Edit: This happened a while back and I remember telling this story to people at the time so the numbers may be off but they're in the ballpark!

[parineum]

> One regulation would be banning gambling advertising, for the same reason why smoking ads are (I think?) banned.

Generally, a law that made it illegal to advertise age-restricted activities to audiences where a significant portion of the audience would be under-age should be a workable solution. Let the courts decide what that gray area of "significant portion" is on a case by case basis.

[computerdork]

Interesting, using the under-age argument to ban these ads generally - guessing this is how smoking ads where banned - seems like a good technical way to ban them generally to the overall population.

And even if we look just at under-age audiences, a ban for them make sense, since that for a decent-sized portion of teenage boys, sports is an obsession. Having them pummeled by sports-betting ads at an age when they are often exploring new things is probably not a good idea, as it will make betting (and for some of these, betting addiction) a part of their lives while they are young.

[digging]

Sure, but I think that falls a bit short of what's really at play here. Advertising anything which tugs at our animal weaknesses is unreasonably manipulative. Images of food (especially marketing images, which are photos of inedible objects masquerading as food), ads for sex, drugs, gambling - these are vices for a reason. Humans, generally, are weak to these things. Adults shouldn't really be exposed to these advertisements either.

[smeej]

We're also susceptible to bright colors and certain screen movement patterns and topic sequences, as practical the entire internet industry has figured out and has been using against us with competing degrees of success for about 20 years.

Humans are weak and easy to manipulate, and some more so than others. It seems like the question is always about the degree to which the governments ought to intervene to protect us from each other...and ourselves.

[computerdork]

Agreed, it's about the degree of regulation.

And not sure where you sit on this, but for me personally, gambling ads cross a line as gambling has major negative effects to public well-being, especially to those who are the most financially in need.

[smeej]

I'm one of those people who has become convinced that device addiction has ruined the capacity to think or pay attention for an entire generation from the time they were most vulnerable, and we haven't even begun to realize the negative consequences of that. But yeah, gambling ads are bad too.

[computerdork]

HN doesn't let me reply to your reply so will reply on your early comment (think too many levels of nesting?). But I agree about your comment on devices, smartphone addiction is having negative impact people's mental health - smartphones are a super-useful tool, but too much screen-time has led to detachment from the real world and depression.

[hnick]

I had a small laugh when I read your comment and imagined legislation for fighting attention-grabbing sites, requiring them to all look like this site.

Want to see an image? Follow a link, sir. It is far too distracting to have it simply be there, between the words, enticing us.

[ikr678]

Legislation about plain packaging for other vices, like cigarettes, has been successful in Australia.

The idea was to destroy the 'brand value' and positive associations that cigarette companies have worked hard to build.

It does work, but I dont know that the concept would translate to digital media that well.

[hnick]

Yes I live here and it seems quite successful. Most smokers I see now in my area (not counting vapes) are foreign Asian students who didn't grow up with it.

I don't think it'd work well online for similar reasons, the internet is global, it would just disadvantage local companies for no real gain due to our population. It would have to be a concerted global effort. I think there is quite a bit of overlap with accessibility too (simple and quiet is easier to parse for computers and humans than confusing noise), so maybe a push in that direction.

[digging]

Sure, there are many other forms of advertising that are irresponsible in the public sphere.

> It seems like the question is always about the degree to which the governments ought to intervene to protect us from each other...and ourselves.

Of course. That's why I defined the degree I was advocating for

[NemoNobody]

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6017302A/en

[smeej]

Wow, I'm glad I clicked this. Feels kind of like you buried the lede not giving the title: "Subliminal acoustic manipulation of nervous systems"

[matheusmoreira]

Is this based on actual science? How effective is this?

[gosub100]

> Images of food (especially marketing images, which are photos of inedible objects masquerading as food

I agree with your overall point, but this is incorrect. I'm pretty sure there is already a law that says they cannot have fake food in commercials, at least for restaurants. There have been articles explaining how they take a "stock" hamburger (ok, they call it a "sandwich", technically) and dress it up for the commercial. But the interesting part is that the food photographers are constrained to using only ingredients from the store, they cannot use paint or plastic to represent the food. One of the little details I remember was they would use a brush to draw the ketchup to one side of the bun to make it look like it was liberally applied. It's quite interesting how they achieve the final goal - even though it looks NOTHING like the product that is delivered to the consumer.

[pests]

> I do not know if this is true in other states, but certain states have the ability for an individual to self-institute a gambling ban at all facilities in the state

In Michigan this is part of the Responsible Gaming program. You can opt out for certain lengths of time and they will not let you back for any reason. It's on a per-casino basis though, not some global list.

You can also get restricted if you ever claim to support that you need the money, have to pay bills, can't wait on the withdraw, etc.

I made a mistake once, while upset at some promo conditions not being clear, that I was "counting" on it. I meant I was counting on using it to gamble more (lmao) but they thought I meant for bills and ended up having to go through a special process to get my account back.

[PoignardAzur]

Honestly, if the employees were that trigger-happy, it sounds like the system was working well.

[swoorup]

So save people from their own irresponsibility?

[mtlguitarist]

This is an unfair framing of it. Addiction is a mental illness and these companies are preying on the mentally ill to make money. They rely on them ruining their own lives and others' to make a profit.

[swoorup]

It seems more like a problem that should be solved elsewhere? Are there cases where the company forces you to gamble?

How do you draw the line between someone who wants to gamble recreationally and someone who does it because they are addicted without harming the recreational parties?

[nytesky]

Yeah there is so much gambling discussion on sports show, it’s a complete waste of time to actually hear about sports.