Think about the costs of running a gambling company. You’ve got the office costs, staff costs, any licensing costs for software. Then on top of that you’re obviously going to want to make a profit for shareholders and have bonuses for some staff.
All of that cost and profit is how much the odds are in the favour of the gambling company.
There was a brief time where I kind of felt the pull to gamble. Nothing major I ever really leaned into but more so the occasional thoughts of “if I had the extra cash, maybe I would”
Until I read up on the world a little more and learned what they do to the rare people who DO end up consistently beating the house.
You get banned. They close your accounts.
It took me a while to realize but whole thing is a scam top to bottom. VOO & chill.
Yes, I know in the U.K. there was suggestions that the companies also shared the details of these rare people with each other. I.e people getting their accounts banned by multiple companies in a short period of time.
Only thing I’ve learned is that they are so dependent on encouraging you to go into the app as often as possible that they give a lot of free money. In the same way casinos give you free credit assuming you’ll stay longer. So I use the first time promos on an app, coupled with the stupid boosts and then immediately withdraw whatever comes back.
It doesn’t make you rich, but if you already pay a lot of attention to a sport anyway and are resistant to gambling then it can be a little fun and make you a few hundred at their expense. As long as you realize you are only winning because the free money allows you to lose more and still come out ahead. You aren’t good at gambling. The odds are normally terrible. Don’t try to do it more
Yeah, the most I’ve ever considered betting is something long term like season long win over/unders for NBA teams, or maybe a small bet with a large potential payout like my team winning the championship. Absolutely not interested in any of the things the betting firms push to get you hooked, like daily bets, in-game bets, etc. Ironically the advertising is what wards me off the most, as it’s clearly so predatory/trying to get you hooked. And I absolutely have no desire to start gambling when most of these gambling ads (at least on podcasts) are accompanied by a required list of state-specific gambling counseling services, one of which even includes the phrase “HOPE IS HERE.”
Yeah, think I’ll just keep with my usual set-it-and-forget-it investment strategy.
I don't know much this is true anymore, but I believe a few years ago many of the big companies were operating at a loss because of the sheer size of their marketing budget -- namely in the form of boosts, promos, and bonuses. So they get you in the door with a chance to actually make money in the short-term, while slowly turning the spigot off and limiting the small number of people whose only intention was to exploit those promos, boosts, and bonuses. Meanwhile they target the biggest fish among the losing bettors to extract as much as they possibly can while doing the bare minimum to cover their own ass in the name of "responsible gaming"
I’m curious why the term “investment” is even being used here, as it is so wildly incorrect.
As a parent to Gen Z young men, we constantly drive home the point that gambling is money that you spend, not money that you earn back. Have fun, but only budget money that you can lose. And never, ever put a betting app on your phone. This is a parenting hill I will die on.
They’re the generation that was born into a suddenly digital world without ever having had the chance to educate and equip themselves with the critical-thinking skills necessary to defend themselves from the ocean of online misinformation poured into their eye sockets every waking hour of the day.
My son is only 4 so I haven't had to really deal with this yet. It may be an unpopular opinion, but I don't really think people should view losing money as entertaining especially on an app (I get it more if it's a once a year casino nightwith your buddies). I'll try to impress that on my son that there are other ways to entertain yourself, but just gambling when you know you will lose in the long run shouldn't be one of them.
For me i've always hated losing money so the idea that I could bet on a game and somehow enjoy it more even though i know it was a bad bet is ludicrous to me. I know a lot of people (erroneously) think they're making good bets, but many others are clear-eyed about it and know they're losing over time.
My perspective is a bit different as I was a profitable +EV bettor over a huge sample size and at my peak i was betting $5k-$10k per day. Never once did i place a bet based on vibes or what I thought would happen. I just can't really relate with that mindset, but I feel like that's kind of dangerous for me as i can't make my son view things the same way I do.
I personally really like playing poker or blackjack, but never with real money. The friends I play with just gamble fake “points”, and whoever has the most points at the end of the night gets bragging rights. Which is really no different from any other game people play.
Poker is a somewhat different beast because you're playing against other people, and presumably, you can become better at the game than they are.
Sure, the house takes a cut of every pot, but unlike every single other game at the casino, in Poker there are not built in odds that guarantee long run losses against the house.
So long as you're a better poker player than your opponents.
Investment has very clear gambling component. Call it "risk" if you want, but growth in the value of anything is at least partially tied to its unpredictability, and unpredictability of outcome is a fundamental component of gambling. Even the "safest" investments have risk in them, due to the fact that they're being chosen because the risk profile is guessed to be the better choice over the other investment options available. That randomness is impossible to escape with
That being said, the "gambliness" of investing is a spectrum. If you're 20 years old, pumping 10% into your retirement profile is much safer than doing that at 65. For day traders, profit comes from accurately guessing the movements of prices that usually fluctuate based on events independent of a company's behavior, so it's widely known that they are effectively gamblers. Nearly every asset has both investors and short-sellers, each believing that they are making a "best guess" for its movements. That doesn't happen without unpredictability.
Additionally, investment valuations are feeling more and more detached from performance of underlying assets, especially in proportion to an asset's visibility. Even the big fish have been heavily buying into crypto, which is not tied to tangible goods or backed by governments and is one of the most gambley of all major "investment" markets.
Exploiting this world of risk juggling are generations of scammers/fools that have gotten rich off of lucky investments or friendly investing environments and then claim to have developed "systems" that can help anyone beat the market. Investment/financial media feeds right into these fools/hucksters, helping them publicize their narratives in order to put butts in the seats, so to speak.
All of this leads to people (especially young men) feeling like the investing is just a crapshoot. Then along comes Kalshi and Polymarket, who are branding themselves as "prediction markets." They start getting in bed with major sports leagues, vomiting their messaging everywhere. Financially semi-illiterate youngers with dreams of striking it rich happily buy into that narrative, naive enough to think they're smarter than all the other fish in the sea but not realizing they're just chum for the sharks.
The issue is Gen Z has grown up expecting instant results for everything, and with zero ability to stay focused on the same task over a long period of time unless the "task" is ever changing like a video game or social media feed.
You even introducing gambling as a viable economic choice in the first place is a major issue on its own.
Guess news agencies use to articulate that way to keep it that way… They use “investment” so people think it will make a return while its just betting but if you say that all those betting company shareholders wont make money, who i guess are also shareholders in many other influential companies or have family and friends in those - ever noticed that many companies have a lot of similar owners
Apps aren’t the problem. I’ve seen too many degens at my local land based casinos. People just can’t control themselves to these very addictive behaviors and actions. There’s a reason it was banned in all states except for Nevada and Atlantic City for generations
I used to have a small gambling problem, honestly just deleting the apps from my phone fixed so much, like it wasn’t even funny. Just removing that one click to open the app. Knowing it’s deleted and not on my home screen removed so much temptation.
Imagine being on a diet and there’s fast food and cake on the table, sometimes you just gotta get it off the table.
It beggars the imagination that people consider sports betting an investment. For starters, it's a negative sum game with significant tax/vig being taken by the house. When all of this was done through physical casinos, the rare advantage bettor had a chance because he could place bets anonymously through either himself or employees. But now? All of this is meticulously tracked by the house and anyone who wins enough for long enough will see his account suspended. Almost by definition, anyone who is actually allowed to play is a long-term loser.
I guess the stigma is gone? Even as a kid, I realized that the degenerates playing Keno all day at the local 7/11 were not the sort of people to emulate.
It started long ago when speculation was started being called investment. That added to rather precise term: using resources to increase future production an element of gambling as suddenly betting on future prices become treated as one.
Next were future markets. They were created as an insurance policy, but they also become mean for commodification of gambling on financial markets. The moment they started being investment rather than insurance: they were gambling for really rich.
By this point selling normal gambling as investment wasn't that hard... Because for most people there's no difference aside of label.
We either would have to impose strict language, making e.g. gold a speculation, and corn futures an Insurance not investment... Or, well, we can see.
The problem is that people like him are extremely talented and extremely rare. They have a drive and intelligence that most people don't. It's like a kid believing he'll be the next Juan Soto and pull big bucks in the major leagues. It's not impossible, but the odds are so long against it that you're better off doing something else.
The modern era of betting involves keeping close track of every bettor's winnings. It's well known that these apps do "soft" cutoffs of accounts that are winning too much.
Whereas people who are big losers or known gambling addicts are actively targeted as marks. Casinos were historically some of the first guys do to microtargeting of individuals using database marketing because it is so incredibly lucrative for them to find whales.
I imagine you can circumvent that somewhat by using someone else's account. But quickly you'll burn through anyone who will allow you to do that. The game is rigged in every way. And that's assuming the games themselves are on the up and up (looking at you, NFL!).
There are roughly two types of advantage gamblers.
The first are originators who use advanced modeling to actually create their own source of truth which can beat sportsbooks' odds. The truly talented ones are in this category and this is far more scalable as they could potentially beat books that are known to be sharp and offer very large limits (like Pinnacle).
The second are top-down bettors (or steam-chasers) who instead rely on an external source of truth (like Pinnacle) and seek to exploit misplaced odds on recreational books (like draftkings, fanduel, MGM etc). It is far easier to for example just know that when Pinnacle's NBA spreads lines move at 8am they will be sharper than what is listed on a recreational book. So if the gap between the two is large enough you can be reasonably sure that betting the outlier on fanduel will be +EV. In my experience i'd place a bet and usually within a minute or two the line would have adjusted on fanduel to reflect what Pinnacle had been showing. In those cases i'd feel very confident that I got good value there.
You can probably already see the problem with this. First it relies on actually identifying a correct source of truth for a given scenario and sometimes it's not enough to just say that it's good vs Pinnacle it's about how far away is the gametime, is Pinnacle sharp for college basketball or just the NBA? Is Pinnacle sharp for player props like touchdown scorers or just mainline? I discovered over time which markets were good and where, but I definitely had subsets that were not generating value and had to be abandoned.
So assuming you correctly identify your markets and are placing legitimately +EV bets the second rub is that it's very easy to identify and while I never had an account actually get closed, I did get limited everywhere I bet and in most cases it became not worth my time anymore. When fanatics limited me they included this message
> Your betting limits for all markets have been reduced by our trading team due to behaviors observed that align with a network of restricted users that signal potential arbitrage positions.
Fanduel limited me to 5% of what a regular person could bet, but that turned out to actually be surprisingly generous when dealing with major markets in major sports. So even though i was limited it was still enough that I could make decent side hustle money (though certainly not quit your job money) doing this. Fwiw the fact that fanduel still allows people they know are sharp to bet is also why fanduel is seen as the hardest recreational book to beat.
Scaling as a top-down bettor means finding a new supply of fresh accounts to generate profit out of. I never bothered with any of that.
Either way, this is all moot as an American who pays my taxes as the Big Beautiful Bill creates enormous liabilities for all gamblers, winning and otherwise, so I fully quit in 2026.
Haha thanks but i'm right in the middle of the bell curve in this area. I learned the principles well enough to have an edge, but there were far more sophisticated people than me.
It's not easy though. It's time consuming -- i was placing up to 40 bets per day depending on the season. So you need to have built a decent bankroll before it's really worth your time. It's super stressful as well, which shouldn't be a surprise. I'm pretty process oriented, but losses feel so much worse than wins. It sounds silly, but i'd get numb from winning, but losing disproprotionately stung.
Tbh i had always planned to bet again if they change the tax law, but at this point I might just be enjoying the peace of not being inundated with notifications and dealing with the ups and downs.
Nah this actually sounds way more interesting than the guys they paid to write an article after spending a year on Kalshi. Plus you make it sound way more accessible from the 0.001% quant guys. Not only would I love the book and all the explanations why you stopped. But you should call it winning on the middle of the bell curve or something.
Absolutely agreed - I mean you see it with all the day traders/options traders and even the influencer economy. The top 1% make amazing wealth, and the rest don’t make much and just endlessly grind for peanuts.
Eh some people really do it. There’s a kid in my apartment complex probably mid 20s he doesn’t have a job he just runs a sports betting podcast or discord or something
He will talk to you about probabilities all day tho
The thing is if you're smart enough to beat the books then you're probably smart enough to just have a 6 figure job with health care and without the risk especially since if anything changes in the gambling landscape then you might be left without an edge and a career.
Unless he's one of those super quant types that are actually creating models that are good enough to beat the books. That's super super hard though, but that's where the big money is.
we're using the term "investors" incorrectly here. This has to be part of some greater effort by the gambling industry to "normalize" gambling right? By calling them "investors".
You're not an investor, you're gambling. An investment has calculation and understanding of risk. Sports betting is literally expectation of performance for a human being without any greater factors. One singular random event like an injury ruins your "investment".
Nvidia loses it's CEO, but it still has all it's customers and revenue.
> This has to be part of some greater effort by the gambling industry to "normalize" gambling right? By calling them "investors".
Yes, precisely. This is why gambling apps refer to gambling as "trading" now. Trading what? There's no trade going on in the investment sense, because there are no underlying assets.
I think investors is being used because they cite polling data in the article that a scary large number of americans view sports betting as an investment opportunity.
Not surprising at all. Plus if you’re actually good at it to the point where you’re consistently making money, the Sportsbooks will cut you off or limit what you’re allowed to bet. They’re more than willing to take the money of people who don’t win. So, if you have a friend bragging about how much money they’re winning, if they’re not complaining that the sportsbook throttled them back, then they’re not actually doing that well.
I'm quite tired of people calling anything people spend their cash on as an "investment".
Donations are not investments.
Betting is not an investment.
Buying food is not an investment.
This inaccurate language creates a mental disconnect from the economic definition that savings == investment and cause a misunderstanding about what investing "is".
It has always been a good sign that society is closed to breaking when gambling goes up exponentially. You can trace this back to ancient Rome and probably even earlier. Every time. Everywhere. As soon as things are so messed up that people literally think, that gambling is their "best bet" to still make it, because trying the normal way will result in misery with 100% certainty anyways.
It's not mathematically possible to break even when the favorite has -180 odds and the underdog has like +130 odds.
Hell, people bet on the fucking coin flip in the Super Bowl that's priced at -103 or -104 odds. Despite the smaller amount of money lost, that to me is more degenerate than losing $100 because SGA had under 25.5 points today.
Gen Z have learned from millennials: slow and steady gets you no where. Spend all your money on lottery tickets because you either have 100mil or nothing, but having nothing is no worse than still having your shitty salary.
Im so annoyed with the conflation of investing with sports betting. I’m honestly completely shocked this verbiage is accepted socially (I mean I think it’s a ploy by the media).
Sports. Betting. Bet. Gambling is not an investment. I feel like 20 years ago this would’ve never been called accepted. And I was a baby then lol.
They compared money put in vs withdrawn from gambling sites to make a cash recovery index, with no way of measuring actual profitability because they can't see how much is being held on the gambling platform. This index is somewhere between useless and deliberately misleading- it makes no distinction between a gambling loss vs an easily accessible cash account.
There's no data on how much people are betting, either in raw numbers or as a percentage of their savings. This seems like the most important part to focus on- I don't care how many people spend $20 per month on entertainment, I care how many are losing a major chunk of their wealth to problematic gambling habits
Not Gen Z but I played about $100 made $100 profit and lost it all in 3 days. Stopped playing and deleted the app right away. I def felt the thrill and understand the appeal of sports betting in those 3 days.
aredddit | 12 hours ago
Of course they’re not breaking even.
Think about the costs of running a gambling company. You’ve got the office costs, staff costs, any licensing costs for software. Then on top of that you’re obviously going to want to make a profit for shareholders and have bonuses for some staff.
All of that cost and profit is how much the odds are in the favour of the gambling company.
Auggernaut88 | 12 hours ago
There was a brief time where I kind of felt the pull to gamble. Nothing major I ever really leaned into but more so the occasional thoughts of “if I had the extra cash, maybe I would”
Until I read up on the world a little more and learned what they do to the rare people who DO end up consistently beating the house.
You get banned. They close your accounts.
It took me a while to realize but whole thing is a scam top to bottom. VOO & chill.
aredddit | 12 hours ago
Yes, I know in the U.K. there was suggestions that the companies also shared the details of these rare people with each other. I.e people getting their accounts banned by multiple companies in a short period of time.
Levitlame | 11 hours ago
Only thing I’ve learned is that they are so dependent on encouraging you to go into the app as often as possible that they give a lot of free money. In the same way casinos give you free credit assuming you’ll stay longer. So I use the first time promos on an app, coupled with the stupid boosts and then immediately withdraw whatever comes back.
It doesn’t make you rich, but if you already pay a lot of attention to a sport anyway and are resistant to gambling then it can be a little fun and make you a few hundred at their expense. As long as you realize you are only winning because the free money allows you to lose more and still come out ahead. You aren’t good at gambling. The odds are normally terrible. Don’t try to do it more
fdar | 11 hours ago
Yes, but for a while it was possible to get quite a bit of money from them before they did, specially because bonuses offered were really generous.
BehavioralSink | 3 hours ago
Yeah, the most I’ve ever considered betting is something long term like season long win over/unders for NBA teams, or maybe a small bet with a large potential payout like my team winning the championship. Absolutely not interested in any of the things the betting firms push to get you hooked, like daily bets, in-game bets, etc. Ironically the advertising is what wards me off the most, as it’s clearly so predatory/trying to get you hooked. And I absolutely have no desire to start gambling when most of these gambling ads (at least on podcasts) are accompanied by a required list of state-specific gambling counseling services, one of which even includes the phrase “HOPE IS HERE.”
Yeah, think I’ll just keep with my usual set-it-and-forget-it investment strategy.
IKillZombies4Cash | 12 hours ago
And the endless TV advertisements paid for by losers
onzichtbaard | 12 hours ago
but if you invest in gambling you are the shareholder right?
aredddit | 12 hours ago
The article is about them gambling but considering it investing.
However to give them credit ‘only’ 26% considered in part of their long term plan.
onzichtbaard | 12 hours ago
oh ye gambling itself is a total scam, its a bit sad that so many people still gamble
Foolgazi | 11 hours ago
If you invest in the business that owns the gambling app, yes
lbutler1234 | 3 hours ago
It's very simple.
Gambling companies would not be in business if they were giving money away.
Doortofreeside | 7 hours ago
I don't know much this is true anymore, but I believe a few years ago many of the big companies were operating at a loss because of the sheer size of their marketing budget -- namely in the form of boosts, promos, and bonuses. So they get you in the door with a chance to actually make money in the short-term, while slowly turning the spigot off and limiting the small number of people whose only intention was to exploit those promos, boosts, and bonuses. Meanwhile they target the biggest fish among the losing bettors to extract as much as they possibly can while doing the bare minimum to cover their own ass in the name of "responsible gaming"
Visual_Specific_1691 | 3 hours ago
Not to mention the billions in Ads that are on every podcast and sports broadcast.
Stinkycheese8001 | 9 hours ago
I’m curious why the term “investment” is even being used here, as it is so wildly incorrect.
As a parent to Gen Z young men, we constantly drive home the point that gambling is money that you spend, not money that you earn back. Have fun, but only budget money that you can lose. And never, ever put a betting app on your phone. This is a parenting hill I will die on.
Xtj8805 | 8 hours ago
Its a scary reason. The article shows polling data of a scary amount of sports gwmblers who believe their bets are actually investing.
KRandMG | an hour ago
Gen Z was incredibly unfortunate.
They’re the generation that was born into a suddenly digital world without ever having had the chance to educate and equip themselves with the critical-thinking skills necessary to defend themselves from the ocean of online misinformation poured into their eye sockets every waking hour of the day.
Doortofreeside | 7 hours ago
My son is only 4 so I haven't had to really deal with this yet. It may be an unpopular opinion, but I don't really think people should view losing money as entertaining especially on an app (I get it more if it's a once a year casino nightwith your buddies). I'll try to impress that on my son that there are other ways to entertain yourself, but just gambling when you know you will lose in the long run shouldn't be one of them.
For me i've always hated losing money so the idea that I could bet on a game and somehow enjoy it more even though i know it was a bad bet is ludicrous to me. I know a lot of people (erroneously) think they're making good bets, but many others are clear-eyed about it and know they're losing over time.
My perspective is a bit different as I was a profitable +EV bettor over a huge sample size and at my peak i was betting $5k-$10k per day. Never once did i place a bet based on vibes or what I thought would happen. I just can't really relate with that mindset, but I feel like that's kind of dangerous for me as i can't make my son view things the same way I do.
u60cf28 | 6 hours ago
I personally really like playing poker or blackjack, but never with real money. The friends I play with just gamble fake “points”, and whoever has the most points at the end of the night gets bragging rights. Which is really no different from any other game people play.
kornforpie | 5 hours ago
Poker is a somewhat different beast because you're playing against other people, and presumably, you can become better at the game than they are.
Sure, the house takes a cut of every pot, but unlike every single other game at the casino, in Poker there are not built in odds that guarantee long run losses against the house.
So long as you're a better poker player than your opponents.
FunetikPrugresiv | 4 hours ago
Investment has very clear gambling component. Call it "risk" if you want, but growth in the value of anything is at least partially tied to its unpredictability, and unpredictability of outcome is a fundamental component of gambling. Even the "safest" investments have risk in them, due to the fact that they're being chosen because the risk profile is guessed to be the better choice over the other investment options available. That randomness is impossible to escape with
That being said, the "gambliness" of investing is a spectrum. If you're 20 years old, pumping 10% into your retirement profile is much safer than doing that at 65. For day traders, profit comes from accurately guessing the movements of prices that usually fluctuate based on events independent of a company's behavior, so it's widely known that they are effectively gamblers. Nearly every asset has both investors and short-sellers, each believing that they are making a "best guess" for its movements. That doesn't happen without unpredictability.
Additionally, investment valuations are feeling more and more detached from performance of underlying assets, especially in proportion to an asset's visibility. Even the big fish have been heavily buying into crypto, which is not tied to tangible goods or backed by governments and is one of the most gambley of all major "investment" markets.
Exploiting this world of risk juggling are generations of scammers/fools that have gotten rich off of lucky investments or friendly investing environments and then claim to have developed "systems" that can help anyone beat the market. Investment/financial media feeds right into these fools/hucksters, helping them publicize their narratives in order to put butts in the seats, so to speak.
All of this leads to people (especially young men) feeling like the investing is just a crapshoot. Then along comes Kalshi and Polymarket, who are branding themselves as "prediction markets." They start getting in bed with major sports leagues, vomiting their messaging everywhere. Financially semi-illiterate youngers with dreams of striking it rich happily buy into that narrative, naive enough to think they're smarter than all the other fish in the sea but not realizing they're just chum for the sharks.
discosoc | an hour ago
The issue is Gen Z has grown up expecting instant results for everything, and with zero ability to stay focused on the same task over a long period of time unless the "task" is ever changing like a video game or social media feed.
You even introducing gambling as a viable economic choice in the first place is a major issue on its own.
yusrandpasswdisbad | 8 hours ago
I read it differently: Over half the Gen Z folks who invest in equities are also gamblers.
StandardAd7812 | 4 hours ago
The average investor earns money in most periods.
Sort of like being the casino.
Trying to outperform the market is closer to gambling.
KRandMG | an hour ago
Bogleheads of the world unite.
miucamht | 6 hours ago
Guess news agencies use to articulate that way to keep it that way… They use “investment” so people think it will make a return while its just betting but if you say that all those betting company shareholders wont make money, who i guess are also shareholders in many other influential companies or have family and friends in those - ever noticed that many companies have a lot of similar owners
Muted-Woodpecker-469 | 5 hours ago
Apps aren’t the problem. I’ve seen too many degens at my local land based casinos. People just can’t control themselves to these very addictive behaviors and actions. There’s a reason it was banned in all states except for Nevada and Atlantic City for generations
MobilePenguins | 4 hours ago
I used to have a small gambling problem, honestly just deleting the apps from my phone fixed so much, like it wasn’t even funny. Just removing that one click to open the app. Knowing it’s deleted and not on my home screen removed so much temptation.
Imagine being on a diet and there’s fast food and cake on the table, sometimes you just gotta get it off the table.
shiningdickhalloran | 12 hours ago
It beggars the imagination that people consider sports betting an investment. For starters, it's a negative sum game with significant tax/vig being taken by the house. When all of this was done through physical casinos, the rare advantage bettor had a chance because he could place bets anonymously through either himself or employees. But now? All of this is meticulously tracked by the house and anyone who wins enough for long enough will see his account suspended. Almost by definition, anyone who is actually allowed to play is a long-term loser.
Fabulous_Cat_1379 | 11 hours ago
Predatory ads run 24/7 on every platform calling gambling different terms like speculation, trading, and investing. It is disgusting
Palchez | 11 hours ago
Calling it investing is grossly laundering addiction.
shiningdickhalloran | 10 hours ago
I guess the stigma is gone? Even as a kid, I realized that the degenerates playing Keno all day at the local 7/11 were not the sort of people to emulate.
p_pio | 11 hours ago
It started long ago when speculation was started being called investment. That added to rather precise term: using resources to increase future production an element of gambling as suddenly betting on future prices become treated as one.
Next were future markets. They were created as an insurance policy, but they also become mean for commodification of gambling on financial markets. The moment they started being investment rather than insurance: they were gambling for really rich.
By this point selling normal gambling as investment wasn't that hard... Because for most people there's no difference aside of label.
We either would have to impose strict language, making e.g. gold a speculation, and corn futures an Insurance not investment... Or, well, we can see.
Jhat | 11 hours ago
It baffles me that people don’t understand this. Obviously the majority of people are losing money, how else would these businesses be making so much.
shiningdickhalloran | 10 hours ago
The thing is that advantage gamblers DO exist. This guy is one of them and did it for a long time before moving into the Dallas front office:
https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/gambler-quietly-using-nba-betting-095128691.html
The problem is that people like him are extremely talented and extremely rare. They have a drive and intelligence that most people don't. It's like a kid believing he'll be the next Juan Soto and pull big bucks in the major leagues. It's not impossible, but the odds are so long against it that you're better off doing something else.
SuperSpikeVBall | 8 hours ago
The modern era of betting involves keeping close track of every bettor's winnings. It's well known that these apps do "soft" cutoffs of accounts that are winning too much.
Whereas people who are big losers or known gambling addicts are actively targeted as marks. Casinos were historically some of the first guys do to microtargeting of individuals using database marketing because it is so incredibly lucrative for them to find whales.
shiningdickhalloran | 8 hours ago
I imagine you can circumvent that somewhat by using someone else's account. But quickly you'll burn through anyone who will allow you to do that. The game is rigged in every way. And that's assuming the games themselves are on the up and up (looking at you, NFL!).
Doortofreeside | 7 hours ago
There are roughly two types of advantage gamblers.
The first are originators who use advanced modeling to actually create their own source of truth which can beat sportsbooks' odds. The truly talented ones are in this category and this is far more scalable as they could potentially beat books that are known to be sharp and offer very large limits (like Pinnacle).
The second are top-down bettors (or steam-chasers) who instead rely on an external source of truth (like Pinnacle) and seek to exploit misplaced odds on recreational books (like draftkings, fanduel, MGM etc). It is far easier to for example just know that when Pinnacle's NBA spreads lines move at 8am they will be sharper than what is listed on a recreational book. So if the gap between the two is large enough you can be reasonably sure that betting the outlier on fanduel will be +EV. In my experience i'd place a bet and usually within a minute or two the line would have adjusted on fanduel to reflect what Pinnacle had been showing. In those cases i'd feel very confident that I got good value there.
You can probably already see the problem with this. First it relies on actually identifying a correct source of truth for a given scenario and sometimes it's not enough to just say that it's good vs Pinnacle it's about how far away is the gametime, is Pinnacle sharp for college basketball or just the NBA? Is Pinnacle sharp for player props like touchdown scorers or just mainline? I discovered over time which markets were good and where, but I definitely had subsets that were not generating value and had to be abandoned.
So assuming you correctly identify your markets and are placing legitimately +EV bets the second rub is that it's very easy to identify and while I never had an account actually get closed, I did get limited everywhere I bet and in most cases it became not worth my time anymore. When fanatics limited me they included this message > Your betting limits for all markets have been reduced by our trading team due to behaviors observed that align with a network of restricted users that signal potential arbitrage positions.
Fanduel limited me to 5% of what a regular person could bet, but that turned out to actually be surprisingly generous when dealing with major markets in major sports. So even though i was limited it was still enough that I could make decent side hustle money (though certainly not quit your job money) doing this. Fwiw the fact that fanduel still allows people they know are sharp to bet is also why fanduel is seen as the hardest recreational book to beat.
Scaling as a top-down bettor means finding a new supply of fresh accounts to generate profit out of. I never bothered with any of that.
Either way, this is all moot as an American who pays my taxes as the Big Beautiful Bill creates enormous liabilities for all gamblers, winning and otherwise, so I fully quit in 2026.
Logiteck77 | 5 hours ago
This is you could write a book about it, level interesting. I'd buy it.
Doortofreeside | 2 hours ago
Haha thanks but i'm right in the middle of the bell curve in this area. I learned the principles well enough to have an edge, but there were far more sophisticated people than me.
It's not easy though. It's time consuming -- i was placing up to 40 bets per day depending on the season. So you need to have built a decent bankroll before it's really worth your time. It's super stressful as well, which shouldn't be a surprise. I'm pretty process oriented, but losses feel so much worse than wins. It sounds silly, but i'd get numb from winning, but losing disproprotionately stung.
Tbh i had always planned to bet again if they change the tax law, but at this point I might just be enjoying the peace of not being inundated with notifications and dealing with the ups and downs.
Logiteck77 | an hour ago
Nah this actually sounds way more interesting than the guys they paid to write an article after spending a year on Kalshi. Plus you make it sound way more accessible from the 0.001% quant guys. Not only would I love the book and all the explanations why you stopped. But you should call it winning on the middle of the bell curve or something.
Jhat | 10 hours ago
Absolutely agreed - I mean you see it with all the day traders/options traders and even the influencer economy. The top 1% make amazing wealth, and the rest don’t make much and just endlessly grind for peanuts.
haloimplant | 8 hours ago
and these companies limit their losses to such players by nerfing their accounts, suckers only
huehuehuehuehuuuu | 9 hours ago
Plague party plague party. We are screwed anyway with no way out. So just plague party. 🎉
soscbjoalmsdbdbq | 9 hours ago
Eh some people really do it. There’s a kid in my apartment complex probably mid 20s he doesn’t have a job he just runs a sports betting podcast or discord or something
He will talk to you about probabilities all day tho
shiningdickhalloran | 9 hours ago
He might be the rare dude that makes money at it. But without seeing the books, there's no way to know.
pants_mcgee | 2 hours ago
There are plenty of people happy to sell you the inside secrets of day trading as well.
Doortofreeside | 6 hours ago
The thing is if you're smart enough to beat the books then you're probably smart enough to just have a 6 figure job with health care and without the risk especially since if anything changes in the gambling landscape then you might be left without an edge and a career.
Unless he's one of those super quant types that are actually creating models that are good enough to beat the books. That's super super hard though, but that's where the big money is.
jerkularcirc | 5 hours ago
“super quant types that are actually creating models” yea thats the multi-billion dollar company making these bets possible for you
Rymasq | 11 hours ago
we're using the term "investors" incorrectly here. This has to be part of some greater effort by the gambling industry to "normalize" gambling right? By calling them "investors".
You're not an investor, you're gambling. An investment has calculation and understanding of risk. Sports betting is literally expectation of performance for a human being without any greater factors. One singular random event like an injury ruins your "investment".
Nvidia loses it's CEO, but it still has all it's customers and revenue.
Rock-n-RollingStart | 10 hours ago
> This has to be part of some greater effort by the gambling industry to "normalize" gambling right? By calling them "investors".
Yes, precisely. This is why gambling apps refer to gambling as "trading" now. Trading what? There's no trade going on in the investment sense, because there are no underlying assets.
Xtj8805 | 8 hours ago
I think investors is being used because they cite polling data in the article that a scary large number of americans view sports betting as an investment opportunity.
zeroman987 | 8 hours ago
They normalized it by referring to the stock market as gambling or a casino or whatever over the last 30ish or so years.
DontGetTheShow | 11 hours ago
Not surprising at all. Plus if you’re actually good at it to the point where you’re consistently making money, the Sportsbooks will cut you off or limit what you’re allowed to bet. They’re more than willing to take the money of people who don’t win. So, if you have a friend bragging about how much money they’re winning, if they’re not complaining that the sportsbook throttled them back, then they’re not actually doing that well.
Mighty_Pen_1337 | 10 hours ago
As I've said, this is all simply another grift to steal more wealth from the middle class. Stupid people can't stop from giving their own money away.
TimSylvester_ | 7 hours ago
Betting is not an investment.
I'm quite tired of people calling anything people spend their cash on as an "investment".
Donations are not investments.
Betting is not an investment.
Buying food is not an investment.
This inaccurate language creates a mental disconnect from the economic definition that savings == investment and cause a misunderstanding about what investing "is".
Odra_dek | 11 hours ago
It has always been a good sign that society is closed to breaking when gambling goes up exponentially. You can trace this back to ancient Rome and probably even earlier. Every time. Everywhere. As soon as things are so messed up that people literally think, that gambling is their "best bet" to still make it, because trying the normal way will result in misery with 100% certainty anyways.
Then it's not long until fun times
titandude21 | 6 hours ago
It's not mathematically possible to break even when the favorite has -180 odds and the underdog has like +130 odds.
Hell, people bet on the fucking coin flip in the Super Bowl that's priced at -103 or -104 odds. Despite the smaller amount of money lost, that to me is more degenerate than losing $100 because SGA had under 25.5 points today.
Valuable-Ad2028 | 2 hours ago
Gen Z have learned from millennials: slow and steady gets you no where. Spend all your money on lottery tickets because you either have 100mil or nothing, but having nothing is no worse than still having your shitty salary.
kgtsunvv | an hour ago
Im so annoyed with the conflation of investing with sports betting. I’m honestly completely shocked this verbiage is accepted socially (I mean I think it’s a ploy by the media).
Sports. Betting. Bet. Gambling is not an investment. I feel like 20 years ago this would’ve never been called accepted. And I was a baby then lol.
Notoriouslydishonest | 9 hours ago
Here's the paper.
Two things I noticed,
They compared money put in vs withdrawn from gambling sites to make a cash recovery index, with no way of measuring actual profitability because they can't see how much is being held on the gambling platform. This index is somewhere between useless and deliberately misleading- it makes no distinction between a gambling loss vs an easily accessible cash account.
There's no data on how much people are betting, either in raw numbers or as a percentage of their savings. This seems like the most important part to focus on- I don't care how many people spend $20 per month on entertainment, I care how many are losing a major chunk of their wealth to problematic gambling habits
Humble-Ambassador878 | an hour ago
Not Gen Z but I played about $100 made $100 profit and lost it all in 3 days. Stopped playing and deleted the app right away. I def felt the thrill and understand the appeal of sports betting in those 3 days.
Whaddduptho | 21 minutes ago
What makes them investors exactly?
I can't imagine opting to break even when the s&p produces a consistent 10%.
This is just straight up gambling they need to call it for what it is.