I have lottery tickets in my pocket right now.
It’s not an all-the-time thing, but if I’m checking out at the supermarket and notice that the jackpot has crossed some fairly arbitrary threshold of “big enough” (around $200 million), and I have cash in the right denominations, I’ll throw a couple of bills in the machine for a quick-pick ticket. Right at the moment, I actually have three tickets— one for PowerBall, another for MegaMillions, both of which are close to $1 billion, and one for the little NY Lotto, because $5 gets one of each and only involves feeding one bill into the machine (which doesn’t take credit cards for obvious reasons, and has the single pickiest bill reader I’ve ever seen in my life),
This is a topic that comes up every now and then with colleagues in physics, many of whom are disdainful about any form of games of chance, and I’ll get a little teasing about it. The way I see it, though, it’s worth throwing away the occasional fiver for a few pleasant moments of fantasy about what I would do if a few hundred million dollars fell in my lap.
I mention this mostly because, like a lot of people, gambling has been on my mind a fair bit lately. The NCAA tournament is famously one of the peak seasons for casual sports gambling (though I didn’t enter any pools this year), and then there’s the evolving Shohei Ohtani story plus this new scandal about a lower-tier NBA player being investigated for what might be chicanery involving prop bets. All of which feels like Nemesis slowly overtaking Hubris after the enthusiastic embrace of sports betting by basically all of the major leagues and networks.
This has been an interesting period to be a sports fan and media consumer, in the apocryphal-Chinese-curse sense of “interesting.” I am generally disinclined to support prohibition of most things deemed vices, and as noted above, enjoy the occasional lottery fantasy, betting pool, or trip to Las Vegas. So when the whole legalization process started to ramp up, I was more or less in favor of opening things up. I even enjoyed the limited betting talk on the Bill Simmons podcast and other Ringer products back in the day. After a few years of steadily increasing gambling content, though, the whole thing just feels more gross with every passing day.
This is, admittedly, partly because the ads for FanDuel that run on every Ringer podcast are soooooooo creepy and annoying. It’s not just that it takes four 30-second skips to get past the ad read and associated legal notices (to say nothing of the five minutes of legal verbiage they’ve now banished to the end of the podcasts), it’s that the specific features they’re pushing are just plain evil. Every ad is pushing new bettors toward complicated parlay bets that combine three or four events to “boost” the payout, but those are the least likely bets to come through, and the ones where the odds calculations are most opaque. The house is going to win anyway, but with these bullshit multi-leg bets, they’re going to win even more because they can skew the odds in their own favor in ways that most people wouldn’t be able to detect.
The pitches are also just blatantly tailored to feed addiction— they all offer “guarantees” or “free bets” that involve non-transferable credit. So, sure, you can be spared the immediate loss of your $100 bet that four improbable things will happen together, but only in the sense that you get another chance to wager that same $100 on something idiotic. They’re so obviously trying to lure people into the apps and trap them there that they creep me right out.
So, to my mild surprise, I’m finding myself becoming more reactionary about the whole business of gambling. I’d kind of like a return of tighter regulation at this point, for the advertising if nothing else.
And these stories involving athletes are capital-N, capital-G Not Good. For the record, I don’t really buy the conspiracy theorizing that Ohtani was laundering his own gambling through his translator. History is not exactly lacking in examples of suddenly ultra-wealthy young men handing control of their finances over to friends who turn out to be shady, so I find it pretty plausible that the translator could’ve had expansive access to the accounts. If you want to talk about how the banks never would’ve allowed something so shady to go on, let me remind you that I lived through the mortgage bubble of 2008, and you’ll have to speak up to be heard over my Joker laugh. (For other commentary on this, I recommend Ethan Strauss and Nate Silver.)
The story about the NBA guy, though, is a step along the path integral to a really Bad Place— these dopey prop bets are so stupidly easy to manipulate that it’s not remotely surprising that somebody would try it. Yeah, this particular guy is pretty insignificant, but it’s not hard to see a path to this altering the outcomes of games. And I think he’s just the first (and maybe stupidest) example of a whole lot more to come.
So, yeah, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the whole business. Probably not uncomfortable enough to stop tuning in to the games and podcasts, but then again, I never would’ve guess I wouldn’t be watching college hoops in March, and yet…
Still rooting for my numbers to come up in the MegaMillions, though. Because, damn, it would be nice to have a supervillain lair on a volcanic island…
There’s your regular dose of “Old Man Yells At Cloud.” If you would like more of this, check the weather forecast and click this button:
And if you want to object to any of the above, or just pass on hot tips about multi-leg bets that can’t miss, the comments will be open:
What did I see in the first week of NC legalized sports betting? A player prop with over/under on turnovers. A college player! IMHO crossing not just one line, but really all of them.
That said, taking their free money and bonuses is no problem for me. With seven sites competing for business one strategy is taking the bonus bets and lay them off with other bonus bets on other sites. Sometimes with attractive middling results when their spreads don’t agree.
Or to spread that free money around in futures to enjoy for a while… If that $5 bonus bet to see Duke play NC State in the Elite 8 for $300 pays off, I’ll be happy in multiple ways. Kid winning a semester’s tuition on $10 bonus bet for NC State going all the way, we’ll take it. Free money multiplied by 4.5x if Duke wins a men’s lacrosse title, knock me out. Celtics to win the NBA, Cubs to win their division, pay me with your free money for what I want to see anyway and that gives me plenty of action to enjoy the rest of the season.
But betting on the type of next basket, next scorer, final score even or odd, I’ll leave that to those who I hope get help.
I'm with you. I thought that prohibition was absurd and arbitrary, and I guess philosophically I still do, but those prop bets are so manipulable (will the National Anthem go more than two minutes? Will the first shot attempt be a three? ...) and the ads so annoying, but more importantly, the web of debt some people will get into is going to be nearly incalculable. I have a friend whose family member got into a serious gambling addiction well before it was so easy and it is as bad as any addiction that there is. Prizepicks isn't going to break your kneecaps, but it will drain every account you allow it to, and of course young people in particular are susceptible. We both knew guys in college with Daddy's money and a cocksure attitude about their sports knowledge who would have gotten in real trouble with this. I like to bet a little in Vegas, knowing how much I can lose, and at least knowing that I'll lose $50 over three hours rather than ten minutes at the tables. And of course I write enough about sports, including wearing a journalist's hat that i could easily be tempted to believe that I am a sports knower with some special insight. Usually a weekend in vewgas disabuses me of that belief.