11 Comments
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Ross Barkan's avatar

Agree with Ethan - gambling should be place-based. Let sports betting happen at casinos. I was skeptical of mobile sports betting before legalization but I am fully against now. Funnily enough, I used to be very anti-casino, but casinos are more of a social good than mobile sports betting. There's really no upside, from a societal perspective, to legalizing it on your smartphones. At least casinos can be pro-social. You can go with friends, have an actual experience, and leave. You never leave your smartphone. (For the record, I'm also against casinos since they're a lousy economic development tool.)

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Ethan Strauss's avatar

Btw, good Ohtani article by you

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Ross Barkan's avatar

Thank you!

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Martin Blank's avatar

What has never made sense to me and still doesn't is why sports betting companies can get away with providing worse odds on parlays.

Abstractly you would expect a well capitalized company to offer the same "hold" on any type of bet of almost any small size. So is there collusion? Why isn't there some insurgent entering the market and offering better odds on these bets? I realize there is more downside risk, but with a couple hundred dollar bets...who cares.

If you can give the moneyline -105, you can do the same with a 4 team parlay and should eat your competitor's lunch. Is the market that non-competitive?

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Joe's avatar

Bit of talking about both sides of your mouth, 1) learn from Europe and don’t promote sports so heavily (I agree with) and 2) people will stop enjoying sport or change the way they like it - which didn’t occur in Europe or Australia

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The Curious LP's avatar

Great podcast, Joe is awesome. One production note - the intro music is playing too long into the podcast. It’s weirdly distracting, at least to me. I’d fade it out earlier.

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Dylan's avatar

Great pod. Something I’m curious about and haven’t been able to get much clarity on—are the books limiting/banning winning bettors or just bettors that consistently beat the line? Or both?

Someone (who appeared to be quite educated on the subject) on a gambling Reddit forum suggested that a bettor that goes 6-4 but consistently beat the line is much more likely to get limited or banned than a bettor that goes 7-3 but placed all the bets 2 min before the game.

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Ethan Strauss's avatar

This last part might have something to do with the rule that you can get the best price early, but can get the most money down late.

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Joseph Symons's avatar

What if…Ohtani and his team were betting on Japanese and Korean baseball? Seems like they would have A LOT of insider information, but, it’s not MLB.

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Joshua M's avatar

I don’t want to be a Pollyanna here, but I think maybe the reason people remember the Pete Rose betting scandal and not last year’s college baseball betting scandal is that Pete Rose is one of the 50 best baseball players of all time and the number of people who care about college baseball rounds to zero.

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Albert's avatar

I live in Nevada and William Hill has ruined gambling here. They’re allowed to ban winners in Europe and they can do it here also.

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