An all-too-often ignored maxim of professional gambling is that the real pros make their money by luring marks, not beating sharks.
That is, even if you’re a very good poker player, you can’t count on surviving as a pro by winning against other very good players. The one secure way to make a living at poker is to be able to consistently persuade other players who are not very good to play against you.
The gambling addictions of novices and other inexpert players are a great boon to the betting industry, of course. But it has an immense repertoire of other strategies as well, from trying to persuade women (who are vastly underrepresented among card-game gamblers, although not so much among lottery or slots players) that sitting in with the guys at the poker table is some kind of “feminist” achievement, to promoting online gaming as a party activity, to getting what effectively amounts to endorsements and promotion from university administrations, as described in the OP.
There’s a fourth outcome, although it might not be common. I know someone who spends an absurd amount of money on the lottery - scratch-offs, quick-draw, pick 4, you name it. He spent about 25% of his pay on it * , lost that job, ended up with a lower paying job, had to take a second job to finance his lottery habit . Went to one GA meeting, claimed they told him bowling was gambling and never went back. . He’s 59 years old and working two jobs and will most likely never be able to retire - but hasn’t entirely destroyed his life. He might be better off if he had - if he had been unable to pay his rent ten or fifteen years ago and had to move in with his mother, it might have forced him to acknowledge that he has a problem.
* although he always claimed it wasn’t that much but couldn’t say where the math was wrong
What’s the old saying? If you sit down to play poker, look for the sucker. If you can 't spot them in fifteen minutes, it’s you. More seriously, one of the most common pieces of advice poker coaching literature will tell you is that if you don’t see in fairly short order that your table has weaker players, you should switch tables.
In every other gambling game, everyone is a sucker. The thing is that most people who play a little blackjack or roulette are fully aware the odds are slightly against them, and are able to walk away when they’ve had some fun and gone through an assigned sum of money. Sports gambling, however, gives people the illusion they can outwit the bookie. Men, especially, run facefirst into Dunning-Kruger, thinking they know more about sports than they really do and have figured out Tennessee is totally underrated in tonight’s game.
In fact, the number of people with the insight, skills, discipline and time to defeat sports gambling is miniscule, and it’s shrinking all the time. Back when Bob Voulgaris won millions and millions betting on pro basketball, casino sportsbooks were relatively primitive in their own understanding of the odds. Voulgaris was able to find clear, obvious flaws in the system. Now, they know fifty thousand times what they knew just 20 years ago. They have no flaws in their system a normal person could find.
But I personally know guys who’re convinced they’ve just now figured it out, and somehow get unlucky every Sunday. And now sports betting is on your damned phone.
Sports betting, when done for profit is hard work. As you say, the bookies are much smarter now, so it’s hard to find an edge.
The pros I know almost exclusively bet college basketball. The theory is that so many games are played that bookies can’t spend the time to really analyze them all. This creates an opening for people willing to spend immense effort studying matchups, venues, injuries, and other issues that can give them a chance to beat the spread. Betting on superbowls is for suckers.
From what I recall, the very best sports bettors can only beat the spread by maybe a couple of points - about the same as the very best stock pickers. The variance is huge, and because you make relatively few bets (you might only find an edge in one game in ten that you study), you can go long periods of time losing, even though you are making good choices with positive expectation.
Likewise, you can win for a long time even if you aren’t making +EV bets. That makes it hard to evaluate your own decision-making. And with fewer bets per year, to make real money you have to place very large bets. Thousands of dollars per game. It’s not for the faint of heart, or anyone who would sweat the money.
Another class of pros are the guys who go to hometowns for ‘big games’ and offer ludicrous odds. Homies will bet even money on their home team even if the true odds are 2-1 against. A pro can take a whole bunch of bets like that, then make offsetting bets with a bookie and guarantee a profit. With that guarantee they can then take as much as people are willing to bet, with no risk.
What bettors don’t want to hear is that sports players, like racehorses, are essentially large and expensive roulette balls.
Fluctuations in skill level can sometimes give one competitor a genuine significant advantage over another, but as soon as that happens, everybody knows it. Most top-level competitions are sufficiently randomized by small chance events to make betting on them untenable as a reliable source of profit.
As with poker, the only really consistent way to make money on sports betting is to keep persuading others more ignorant and/or stupid than you are to bet against you.
It’s a little more than that. For example, there are times when a bookie will find their bets coming in lopsided for one team. The bookies will then adjust the odds to attract bets to the other side to even the betting. If they don’t, they are essentially betting with their own money.
However… If their lines get too far out of whack from everyone else’s, they can get ‘middled’, and that’s really dangerous. A bettor bets with you one way, and bets with another bookie the other way. If the difference in the lines between the two bookies are greater than the spread, it’s guaranteed profit. That means the gambler can bet huge with no risk.
So bookies don’t always have lines that represent the true odds, and that’s an area that can be exploited. It used to be much more lucrative before the internet, of course. Pro gamblers used to have FAX networks passing around betting lines from various places so they could look for middles.
Anyway, the point is that the lines are not always correct, because the bookies move the odds around to keep the wagers balanced unless they feel strongly enough about a situation to wager their own money.
This is essentially crazy times. What is next selling tobacco use by the tobacco companies? I will assume that is already a thing. This really seems to be a way of herding potential naive suckers to slaughter. The students attending college don’t believe that their good old school would ever expose them to anything damaging…
I am old. I still remember way back when I went to college in the 1980s the first time I saw my school letting credit card companies advertise to students 2 to sign up for credit cards 2 weeks before spring break. What could go wrong?
Of course back then it was $300-500 only in credit.
There was this kid whose thesis advisor encouraged him to, or at least did not discourage him from, paying for tuition/expenses via playing poker. Only problem is (besides skill, and while he was not bad at all, he could have earned the same amount of money doing something else, plus what kind of bankroll does a student even have to work with?) is that gambling dens mean spending late hours in smoke-filled rooms, not really ideal for one’s studies.
I’m curious whether he was a booster of this legislation or a detractor. Chief executives sign lots of stuff they don’t necessarily agree with. I’m not nut-picking here, I genuinely don’t know what his attitude is.
For sure if he was a big proponent, it seems likely NCAA picked him at least partly for that reason.
‘ …Our administration first filed legislation to legalize sports wagering in the Commonwealth several years ago, and I am glad to be able to sign this bill into law today,” Gov. Charlie Baker said Wednesday…’
