Addiction Markets

Incredibly damning, yes

Sports, too. Recent post from the President of Upper Deck talking about it: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jmash_everything-speculative-...

I feel like it only became rampant in recent years. As a 90s kid no one cared about the card packs. We all assumed they'd be junk cards and a waste of $7 or whatever. No, the move for card people back then was to wait for the card show and just buy the cards you actually want from a card dealer.

The thing is now people are marketing the pack opening. You have social media accounts of them pulling cards from packs and getting all hyped up about it. Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s but thats because the unboxing as an experience wasn't marketed by anyone at all. People just wanted cards they thought were personally cool in some way.

And likewise expansion of markets in the internet era means people start to have shared values of what is a valuable card based on market price vs just being interested in some certain cards out of your own interest.

The Pokémon card mania in particular is deeply weird to me. I play Magic at a local card shop a few times a month and it’s always full of people playing Magic, D&D, or various board games. I don’t think I’ve seen a single person playing the Pokémon card game. So who’s buying the valuable singles? What’s keeping the market afloat? It’s bizarre.

And Robinhood etc.?

I used to really enjoy magic. Then at some point I couldn’t keep up with the constructed meta. So I switched to drafting. But now it seems like everything is so gamified that playing the game isn’t enough anymore. Now you need to play all the time both in the shop and on mtg arena and it’s like designed to keep you hooked. I hate it. I really just can’t be bothered to play anymore. It’s no longer fun it’s just a grind.

I think there's a massive difference between card packs - which have been as you describe for decades - and the recent boom in sports betting. Most people don't even know what MTG is, or that there's even a market for those cards. Everyone now knows that you can bet on any sport you want - and if some reports are to be believed, a large percentage of people are participating.

Anyway, this is why I play MTG online - same with 40k, although there's no gambling there. Just too expensive to play either IRL even if I wanted to.

Great video. The convergence between traditional stock market finance and casino gambling is going to seriously scar a generation.

Polymarket is not even close to the same thing. Sports betting allows a blessed few corporations to run rigged markets and intentionally prevent price discovery by keeping the smart money out.

Polymarket uses open orderbooks where you match against someone else who wants the other side of the trade just like the stock market. Prices are set by the market, as they should be.

Wasn't this posted a minute ago and on the front page?

Am I going crazy, or was it just... disappeared from there??

> the only “responsible” choice is not to gamble online

I don't gamble at all in any form, but I still firmly disagree. Some people enjoy gambling in a way that never hurts them-- I've known countless friends and coworkers who talk about doing a bit of it in Vegas or what have you. You're saying every last one is a degenerate gambler somehow concealing it totally from me? They know they're not going net positive on the experience, usually lose some money, and get some entertainment.

There's a saying about this: abusers give vice a bad name. People should be free to gamble if they want to, and certain checks should be put in place for people who choose to gamble so much it is ruinous to themselves.

We’re not supposed to take anything from it, it’s a simple legal liability thing. (And maybe actually mandated by law?) It’s like mandatory workplace trainings: they do almost nothing to prevent people from acting badly, but they let employers say “look we told our employers not to do this!!! it’s not our fault they did it anyway!!”

(More apt comparison is obviously alcohol commercials saying “please drink responsibly”)

They are legally required to include that. They don't actually care.

Casinos and gambling institutions absolutely and purposely optimize to attract and capture more problem gamblers.

The evolution of digital slots is a great example of this. An average person could have a little fun with an old fashioned basic slot machine, but the modern ones are so aggressively optimized to trigger addiction and keep addicts going that if you aren't vulnerable, they are massively offputting.

But they don't care, they don't have any desire to serve "Normal" people, and trying to make gambling more fun for people who aren't vulnerable to gambling addiction isn't something they do.

Because nearly all profit comes from addicts.

> Wonder how all of the focus seem to happen at the same time

Because this practice was made legal very recently in most places in the US and a concomitant advertising boom has saturated the media. Before the last few years, your average American couldn't bet on sports without visiting a casino sports book in person, or having a bookie (i.e., entering into a risky relationship with organized crime). TV sports coverage now openly refers to how you can use their analysis to make bets.

I find it odd that almost nobody ever refers stock trading as gambling. While for most persons it is nothing else.

Think of it in terms of public health not morality. Heart disease is one of humanities oldest killers but we still want to fix it. We also dont want to ban deep friers as we value freedom. Similar for gambling. We do want to discuss what to do when vice becomes no longer nice.

Standard bible thumping. You will notice that there is also an emphasis on traditional family values as well both in the media and in the positions of politicians.

And the fourth oldest vice is gossip, the original social media, talking trash while you pick bugs out of your friend's hair

I would entertain the possibility that there are at least some who cannot or will not avoid that kind of destructive behavior. The only thing you can do for them is deny access. I know that nobody asked for a lecture on 12 step, but number one is an admission that you do not have control.

Do you enable the majority who can manage risk, knowing some will be destroyed by it or deny it to everyone to protect the minority who can’t?

Has society ever addressed an underlying psychological problem successfully?

Because when it comes to the underlying psychological causes of homelessness and drug addiction and school shootings and violent extremism my impression is we don’t really do much.

These gambling businesses specifically target that 25M. You absolutely can make that much harder for businesses to do, and it will significantly reduce downstream misery.

I believe there are studies which show men are more likely to have problems with sports betting, but women are with slot machines. My anecdotal evidence (and it's bordering on statistically significant...) is that these studies are correct.

sure, and that should be addressed. But in the meantime, we shouldn't be making it easier for them to engage in that behavior and we shouldn't be making it easier for people to encounter industrialized gambling for the first time who would otherwise find the process too laborious to seek out on a whim.

> These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.

You should address that too, but gambling is frankly a parasitic business meant to exploit such people, and we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good by avoiding the re-abolishment of such a pernicious industry.

> people will just use some offshore website instead

No they won't, because moving real money to and from these shady offshore websites is a nightmare, and without enforcement there will be too much fraud in the system for the vast majority of regular people to bother.

Gambling is so prevalent today because 1) there is incessant advertising, including being overlaid on the game you are watching and 2) it is convenient, taking like 3 clicks and under a minute to go from scratch to placing bets. You can even use Apple Pay. Take away either of these and participation rates will plummet.

You don't even need to speculate, just look at the numbers. There were countless illegal and gray market gambling options available a decade ago, both online and in-person. How many people were participating back then? I personally didn't know anyone who bet on games outside of maybe the occasional trip to Vegas, and that too was just for the novelty of it. Today >50% of adults in the US are regularly betting online, and the number is growing every year.

This is a problem that literally had minimal societal consequences just a few years ago before the 2018 supreme court ruling[1]. I don't see why we shouldn't just try to move the laws back to how things were in 2017.

Source 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...

I'd ban all advertisement and put a market cap on these companies before mandatory breakups happens.

None of these companies should be worth a billion dollars.

My big fear is these companies are all getting rich which means they'll be able to buy political influence.

I'm pretty tolerant of a lot of vices. I also don't really have a problem with low levels of gambling. But the way these companies are setup is just sick. It's abusive the the public and erosive to society in general.

You can't kill murder; murder will always exist.

Surely, like murder, and other negative outcome behaviors, we can reduce the occurrences, right?

Even in your comment you can see the challenge with education and gambling. In practice the return on a dollar (just a different formulation of EV) is often legally mandated to be something around 0.9 and for many games is very close to fair.

But variance, not expectation, is where casinos get their edge. The “Gambler’s ruin”[0] demonstrates that even in a fair game the Casino will win due to their effectively infinite bankroll compared to the player.

You can also simulate this yourself in code: have multiple players with small bankrolls play a game with positive EV but very high variance. You’ll find that the majority of players still lose all their money to the casino.

You can also see this intuitively: Imagine a game with a 1 in a million chance to win 2 million dollars, but each player only has a $10 bankroll. You can easily see that a thousand people could play this game and the house would still come out ahead despite the EV being very much in the players favor.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin

If that were the case then the SCOTUS decision legalizing it nationwide would not have been as impactful as it was.

> I don't think you can kill corporate run gambling - people will just use some offshore website instead.

You can block it at payment rails. The reasonable amount of avoidance of controls around gambling laws is not zero [1]. You're making it hard for all but the most determined, who are free to lose it all.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... (Control-F "This extends beyond payments") Broadly speaking, we are not "solving" gambling with these ideas; we are, as a society and sociopolitical economic system, pulling levers to arrive at the intersection of harm reduction and rights impairment. Some gambling, but only so much, for most but not all.

(work in finance, risk management, fintech/payments, etc)

As someone who believes in legalizing all drugs and in general "personal freedoms", I'd add recreational drugs to this list.

The demand will always be there but there should be strong incentives to not incentivize use (e.g., the Purdue Pharma debacle). We're better served by having these markets addressed by legit players rather then criminal cartels.

I'm not sure what the best solution is, but unfettered promotion to consume is not the way.

Say it ain’t so Joe