Posts Tagged ‘betting’
“The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling”*…
The quote above, from Ambrose Bierce, was true enough until relatively recently. Business has embraced gaming. When the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, Americans, who had legally wagered less than $5 billion on sports annually. Last year, they bet $150 billion, most of it online (with the active involvement of leagues and the broadcasters who serve up their games). And now prediction markets are on the scene, widening the apperture for online casino-like wagering to include politics, the Golden Globe awards, the return of Jesus Christ and virtually anything else… which could be a problem.
Indeed, just this past week, Common Sense Media released a report on gambling by young boys that reveals (among other deeply concerning things) that 1 in 3 American boys ages 11-17 are gambling before they can vote. (Full report here.)
Gambling addiction has been an issue in the U.S. for decades. But with the onslaught of new ways to wager, the problem is surging. And as Benjamin Errett (observes in an amusing piece on “McGuffins“– objects, devices, or events necessary to plot and the motivation of characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself), it’s a particularly problematic problem…
There’s a compelling argument to be made that money is the true MacGuffin. George Ainslie [here], a psychiatrist and behavioural economist, makes that case in a very readable paper on addiction and regrettable choices. He gets right to the weird thing about gambling as a compulsive behaviour: Spending money for a chance of getting more money (with the likelihood of losing it) is illogically direct. (I too got stuck on this paradox in The Wit’s Guide to Gambling, and some part of my brain is still spinning on the roulette table.) If you simply must have cocaine or hot fudge sundaes or hot cocaine fudge sundaes, the immediate pleasure and later pain are in different modalities. And so Ainslie concludes that money is a MacGuffin because it’s “the object of a hedonic game that is justified by its instrumental believability but which is actually shaped by its production of satisfaction in its own right.” Ergo, capitalism is a Hitchcock movie….
– source
Ainsle’s essay, prepared for a conference on addiction, is eminently worth reading and pondering.
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As we turn our backs on baccarat, we might recall that it was on this date in 1960 that “Money (That’s What I Want)” by Barrett Strong entered the Billboard Hot 100. Written by Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford, the single was the first hit record by Gordy’s Motown Records (released on Motown’s Tamla label). The song peaked at #23 in April and was the only song recorded by Strong that reached the Hot 100, though Strong went on to write many of Motown’s biggest hits. It was, of course, covered by The Beatles, among many others.
And we might note that today is the first day of a “prefectly square” month…
“If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour… then you are the sucker”*…
Patrick Redford in the always-enlightening (and entertaining) Defector, on ESPN’s pivot to wagering…
Like an anglerfish lighting its lure, ESPN is attempting to use the shiny bauble of its broadcast rights and import within the sports media world to tempt people onto its gambling platform. The Worldwide Leader signed a 10-year, $2 billion deal with Penn Entertainment one year ago, on the theory that a fusion of ESPN’s brand with Penn’s sportsbook would make for a serious player in the sports gambling world. That theory, which has borne dubious results thus far, depends upon ESPN transforming itself into a gushing firehose of gambling sludge.
To that end, the company broadcast its gambling show ESPN Bet on regular ESPN for the first time this week, shuffling it over from lesser auxiliary ESPNs onto the main channel for the purpose of shoving the words ESPN Bet—also the name of the company’s sportsbook—in front of as many people as possible before football season. I watched both of this week’s episodes, curious what sort of impression the company would try to make. What strategies would it use to turn parlays into paydays? What I saw was an hour-long advertisement that made thin, watery attempts to justify itself as programming, which it is not. The point of ESPN Bet, italicized, is not to make you smarter about sports or give you good picks, but to divert the nascent gambler away from the two biggest sportsbooks in the country and onto ESPN Bet, plain text.
The show is hosted by Tyler Fulghum and Joe Fortenbaugh. It adheres to a very simple pattern: Here is something you can bet on (e.g.: NFL Comeback Player of the Year, the Cincinnati Reds, Israel Adesanya); here are the odds; here is an affirmative or negative case for why to bet or not bet on or against those odds. There are various gimmicky setups that don’t so much disguise this basic loop as they merely vary its cadence…
…
… Something as abstract as LSU and Miami’s making the College Football Playoff four months from now is already banal talk-show fodder on its own; ESPN Bet‘s outlook is even more refracted. The topic is not whether one or both of those teams make the CFP, but rather how correctly those teams’ respective chances of making the CFP are calibrated on this gambling app. The drama, to the extent there is any, is located not in anything that happens on the field or court, but essentially in arbitrage. ESPN Bet is SportsCenter, but about a number instead of a game.
The ostensible point is to make you, the viewer, a more informed gambler so you can make money. There are a number of lies being told here. The most obvious one concerns the topline nature of the operation: Casinos exist to separate you from your money, not to help you take theirs. No matter how spiffy Fortenbaugh’s mustache is—personally, I think he looks cool; Ray Ratto says he looks like “Ronald Colman in a 1953 black-and-white movie” and clearly means this as a bad thing—and how convincing he is about the solidity of the Orioles money line, anyone who is thinking about this rationally has to know there is no algorithmic way to beat the computers. Rather, if there is, it will not be broadcast in public by the very entity that stands to lose money off anybody learning it. There are sharps and there is everyone else, a dissonance that makes ESPN Bet‘s false performance of gambling knowledge all the more icky.
If you are serious about any of this, you know you’re being sold something. The show knows it’s selling you something, and while this is occasionally acknowledged—Fortenbaugh mentioned on Monday where the sharp money was going, which should prompt any viewer to ask what that makes them—the predatory artifice of ESPN Bet is only barely subtext. The specifics are interesting to the extent that they’re pushing a ton of football futures bullshit, as football is the most gambled upon sport in the U.S. But really, all that matters is that Fulghum and Fortenbaugh look you in the eye and say the words “ESPN Bet.” The show is straightforwardly an ad for the app, which ESPN executives have openly talked about on earnings calls.
The incentives are obvious. DraftKings and FanDuel have roughly equal shares of a combined 74.5 percent of the U.S. gambling market. ESPN Bet, meanwhile, controls a paltry 3.2 percent as of the second quarter of the fiscal year, which is down from 4.7 percent in the first quarter. They are getting crushed. ESPN Bet’s competitors are an order of magnitude larger because of first mover advantage, and the only strategic fulcrum ESPN has to utilize is its essentiality as a broadcaster. ESPN’s value proposition is that unlike DraftKings or FanDuel, it operates a vast media apparatus, one that can set itself on a gentle slope, sliding its audience inexorably toward gambling on their phones. An example of that approach’s noxiousness in practice, as Kathryn Xu wrote earlier this year, is the win probability graphic ESPN slaps on baseball broadcasts. But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s Penn CTO Aaron LaBerge on his company’s earnings call last week:
For example, when we have account linking in November, if you place a parlay on ESPN Bet, it’s going to appear in the ESPN app. You have to do no work. It’s going to be seamless. If anyone here has placed a parlay of more than two or three legs, you know that’s a struggle. And so, it’s just going to be like magic for you to actually consume that within ESPN. (source)
“Magic” is offensively lofty rhetoric to use about “consum[ing] that” when the sum total of “that” is losing $15 on a Jalen Williams-centric parlay without having to leave the ESPN appsphere. In the case of something like the Tigers’ birdbrained same game parlays, there is at least baseball (albeit Detroit Tigers baseball) at the core of the experience. Gambling content that is attached, remora-like, to the side of a sports-watching experience is annoying but ultimately ignorable. ESPN Bet is the gambling content shorn of the sports, like if your spam folder was a TV show.
Consider the question of what sort of audience ESPN Bet is even for. Anyone sharp and dedicated enough to actually make money on sports gambling is not getting their picks from two energetic guys on the TV. A viewer rational enough to know this is a sucker’s game will find ESPN Bet equally useless if not outright reprehensible. A viewer who wants to learn something about sports or have fun will find far better options.
What is actually sinister about this show isn’t its adjacency to gambling, but its nihilism. At best this is a show for nobody. Background music hums along behind the hosts throughout the broadcast, an obvious sign that this is intended less as programming you are meant to pay any actual attention to and more as something engineered to run in the background while you wait out an oil change or a connecting flight, a dog whistle audible to the most abject of marks. It is scarcely distinguishable from the commercials that break up its runtime, as it is itself a commercial. The show walks backward, away from the viewer, hoping to draw them into the void…
“‘ESPN Bet’ Is A Black Hole” (gift article) from @redford in @DefectorMedia.
See also: “Sports Betting Is Legal, and Sportswriting Might Never Recover.”
And for a different (and equally astounding/depressing) example of the outsized impact of money on sports see “Ex-Pac-12 Teams Will Face Some of The Worst Travel Distances in Power-Conference History,” from @Neil_Paine.
* Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) in Rounders
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As we look for the line, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that the World Wide Web was introduced to the world at large.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim) proposed the system to his colleagues at CERN. He got a working system implemented by the end of 1990, including a browser called WorldWideWeb (which became the name of the project and of the network) and an HTTP server running at CERN. As part of that development, he defined the first version of the HTTP protocol, the basic URL syntax, and implicitly made HTML the primary document format.
The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then– with the publication of this (likely the first public) web page— to the whole Internet 32 years ago today. Within the next two years, there were 50 websites created. (Today, while it is understood that the number of active sites fluctuates, the total is estimated at over 1.5 billion… more than a handful, gambling sites.)
“Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people”*…
Still, people do an awful lot of betting. Legal sports betting currently runs at almost $77 Billion per year in the U.S. and is growing by double digits; last year, 40 percent of people aged 18 to 44 gambled online (sports and casino wagering combined), nearly double the 21 percent of those aged 45 to 54. Illegal gambling (for understandable reasons, harder to gauge) is estimated at (at least) $1.7 Trillion globally, and also on the rise (in part because it’s such a handy way to launder money).
As football season gets underway, Jeopardy! champ (and gambler) James Holzhauer considers the ways in which a sports wagerer is like a stock market investor…
The sports betting marketplace has many parallels to the world of finance: both are essentially populated with speculators trying to make money by outsmarting everyone else. Some sportsbook conglomerates have even been run by people with experience on Wall Street. But how do the two compare side by side? Let’s look at some key similarities and differences between the two modes of investing…
Diversification, insider trading, derivatives, inflation concerns: “How sports betting and the stock market compare,” from @James_Holzhauer in @TheAthletic.
(Image above: source)
* W.C. Fields
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As we punt, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that Al “Scarface” Capone enlisted former rivals into partnership to form a giant co-operative organization to control the beer/spirits, vice, and gambling “industries” in Chicago. The Syndicate, as it was known, was headed by Capone and run by a cabinet, with each member controlling different areas of the business: alcohol sales, alcohol running, gambling, vice, and war on those outside the Syndicate.
The following year, Capone was charged with tax evasion; in 1932 he was convicted and sentenced to the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta; in 1934 he was transferred to Alcatraz.
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