Organized crime?
Requiring the sports books to offer the same lines to everyone (and probably mandating that the lines be no more than X apart basically only allowing the bookie to take reasonable fee on the spread between them) and banning advertising would improve the situation quite a bit. The sharp money will rapidly guarantee that the lines are basically right which makes the dumb money betting for random reasons a lot closer to 0EV than it is currently.
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Europe and Vegas somehow made it too
Anyways sure seems like the issue people have is the massive slew of ads for gambling opposed to the actual gambling
Maybe I didn’t watch enough Sopranos to get how the mob works but we’re saying sports betting is the reason why they’re a thing??
We definitely shouldn’t be making it as easy as possible for problem gamblers to access, or triggering their cravings as often as humanly possible.
I’d be fine with banning most forms of advertising honestly. It’s pretty obvious it’s terrible for everyone who isn’t an advertiser.
It was arguably one of their biggest hustles let’s not downplay it.
Was it? I legitimately don’t know but would find that surprising based on every mob show and movie spending significantly more time following other hustles.
people who really wanted to find a bookie didn’t have a lot of trouble finding one, there wasn’t large-scale gang warfare.
how much organized crime is driven by gambling? There are certainly organized crime outfits that engage in it but that’s more of a sideline for guys, it’s not the regular driver for the mainline organization.
I mean illegal bookmaking and the attached shylocking business were covered extensively in the Sopranos, but yes absolutely illegal gambling was worth billions a year to organized crime all the way through the mafia shadow economy era (1925-1990 roughly). Junior literally bitches that Tony gets too much credit for how good business is in one of the middle seasons because ‘this economy is so good you got slur for asians and housewives betting football’. The first thing they give Christopher as a made guy is literally a sports book to operate. Every episode that involves the big poker game is also illegal gambling. This is all before we even talk about how good for loan sharking (shylocking is the technical term) illegal gambling is, it’s literally the #1 driver of new customers, and shylocking in turn is one of the main tools organized crime uses to get leverage on the people they need to run other scams.
Unsurprisingly they also did a lot of rigging sporting events through things like point shaving.
Basically any time you prohibit a large industry that has a lot of natural demand you give organized crime a shitload of money. Illegal gambling is one of the foundational businesses of organized crime in America to the point where it was the place many of the major bootleggers got their start prior to prohibition… and it continued after prohibition for decades.
Why do you think the mob was such a major investor in Atlantic City, Cuba, and Las Vegas? They were the major established gambling operators at that time who else would have even known how to run a casino?
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This would be more true if Apple actually had a monopoly on phones. They don’t. You may be able to say they have a monopoly on the phones people want, or good phones, but they are only 1/3 the market share of Android. This is just stupid legislation.
I definitely think the Apple store needs to update their policies but I don’t think they are as out of line as everyone makes them. When it first opened it was a fantastic deal for developers, it handled a lot of the nitty gritty stuff that small developers didn’t want to; payment processing, returns, download bandwidth, taxes stuff like that. At the time most software was sold in boxes and the people who put the software into the boxes and distributed it took more than 30% of the sales. They didn’t realize how much money their platform was going to bring in and then got hooked on that sweet, sweet cash. It is still probably a deal for most developers at 30% but it’s probably time to drop down closer to their operating cost.
Treat it like cigarettes, limit how and when it can be advertised and make the sports books pay for rehab services for people who need it. Hell, make them pay for education as well.
I don’t even care about the ads. I care that they literally ban anyone who wins.
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Lottery already does that in a lot of states which honestly is kinda fucked up IMO but I guess vastly better than it going to MGM shareholders
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It would be nice if regulations were written by the users of the product instead of the creators of the products so that kind of shit wouldn’t be as common.
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Banning sports betting seems like a doomed idea but I can see hard limits on advertising for it working out
There also need to be some pretty significant pro consumer things done about the way these books are managed. They seriously are banning every winning player, refusing to pay out on props that go wrong (for them) by claiming it was an internal error, and a whole bunch of other total and complete bullshit.
All of that doesn’t sound problematic until you realize that these guys are basically advertising with the sole purpose of finding dumb problem gamblers and taking their money as rapidly as possible through a variety of super shady methods.
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