Could be in any context. I do it a little on UFC fights but that’s a relatively low amount and I can afford I to lose any time I do. It seems like it’s becoming a really wide spread problem though, at least in the US. At the same time I don’t see why it should be illegal. Granted I also don’t think any drug should be illegal.
Not necessarily with sports betting though: Then you have a legitimate possibility of being more well informed than the bookies. A casino is mathematically rigged such that you will lose over time, that doesn’t apply to games of skill (sports).
I don’t gamble myself, but I seem to remember reading that the average person actually makes a net win in football betting (that is, more than 50% of gamblers are winning). Apparently, the betting companies make it up because you have a relatively small fraction of people that are losing big, and losing consistently.
That’s a common misconception. Sports gambling is exactly like casino games. Odds are skewed in exactly the same fashion in the house’s favor, the payout is lower than the win probability. In the long run, the house always wins.
Also, as the industry relies heavily nowadays on trading where any event can alter the odds in real time, I guess the only way to cheat the system would be akin to insider trading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_of_bookmaking
Unless I’ve got some insider information on specific athletes or I’ve done enough statistical analysis to gain a statistical analysis to gain an advantage over the house, I don’t see myself getting positive expected value.
Also, it is in the interest of sports books for a rumor like that to propagate.
Oh, definitely. I’m not sure about this at all, please don’t take it as fact.
I completely agree with you. My point is just that with sports betting the playing field is actually fair, in the sense that anything can happen and that the bookies and the betters are considering the odds based on the same publicly available information. That differs significantly from games where the house is mathematically guaranteed to win in the long term, while the gamblers are guaranteed to lose.
Except that the payout for those bets are generally done so that the house takes a cut of the overall action. The vig is baked into the payout for sport outcomes; betting on all the outcomes equally isn’t going to probabilistically give you the payout equal to what you’d buy in.