: Does anyone else think sports gambling is kinda bad? 🫣 👉👈
I mean like, obviously, right, just like all gambling is bad? But I fixate on sports gambling for a few reasons. Number one, I confess, is that as a Dude I am naturally especially concerned about social problems that primarily affects Dudes and perhaps that means my bad feeling about sports gambling is disproportionate to the problem. But I trust the reader to know that when I say X is a problem I’m not saying X is a bigger problem than every other problem.
Number two is that, compared to other forms of gambling, sports gambling comes with the false promise of being a game of skill. Talk to a guy who is addicted to sports gambling (I have) and they will immediately tell you about their “strategy,” their supposedly privileged knowledge of which team is undervalued and what’s coming down the pipe—nevermind obvious arguments about how they are watching the same TV and social media as everyone else in the market and there’s literally zero hope that these judgments haven’t already been priced in.
Related to the “game of skill” perception is that sports gambling is socially self-reinforcing. By this I mean, if you win at normal gambling (slot machines or whatever), then other gamblers may congratulate you, but I don’t think they will ascribe your win to being really good at slot machines. They know, on some level, that it’s all about luck, and will congratulate you on the lucky break. By contrast, if you win at sports gambling—and everyone wins sometimes—then you know have bragging rights to say, “I just knew this was coming, after so-and-so’s injury, it had to play out like this,” and your gambling friends have little choice but to agree that you had made a smart bet even though in the long run you’re doing no better than chance.
Maybe the more apt comparison is between sports gambling and day trading. A lot of the same factors are present in trading stocks: A high degree of volatility, easy to enter the market and rack up (some) wins, easy to attribute the wins to skill and the losses to bad luck. And you know what? I know guys who turn up their nose at sports gambling because “the house always wins” but swear, with equal confidence, by their stock-picking genius.
Honestly, the day-trading epidemic might be more insidious yet than sports gambling because investing in stocks is something that you’re supposed to do to prepare for retirement—and there are a lot of ambiguous positions between the extremes of “boomer investing” in mutual funds and dangerous day trading, where the cocky investor can confidently tell himself that he’s exercising a lucrative skill and investing in his financial future but in fact he’s just … gambling.