basil
@itsbasil
i hung out with old friends yesterday who gambled on basketball all day long halfway through the day i was so bored i decided to signup for a free predatory $100 my whole life they’ve done this, i’ve never participated—a first try for everything, eh? honest question, how, on gods green earth, do people do this? bet $50 to win $50 is considered INSANELY good odds in this stupidity to make any decent returns you have to string unreasonable binary add-on bets together… this is quite literally the dumbest shit i’ve ever done, given there are 10 people on the floor at all times… almost everything is unaccounted for… don’t even get me started on football where uncertainty goes exponential risk $50 to win $60, $70?! against these parameters? with human referee interference?! with emotion weighted 10-fold? with timeouts & clock stops? this is super high risk & you can’t even make any good money doing it… seriously, why do people do this?! it’s absurd play table games or memes
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Monteluna
@monteluna
Good book on sports betting here, but the short and sweet is mathematically based on the Kelly Criterion, sports betting is a losers game. The issue is vig and fees bleed off your portfolio more than you can win. The entire industry is predatory, and it's pretty much that casino betting cartels are in bed with local politicians to just harvest money from stupid people who can't learn the math around financial derivatives. You have your dumbest friend from high school shoving $100-$500 into this black box a month that's guaranteed for him to lose money. Even if he dropped it into the options market on Robinhood, at *least* the options are priced appropriately and you get convex upside (in sports betting you do *not*, but they hack it with Parlays which are impossible to hit). The casino guys and state politicians both get a cut off this ridiculously garbage industry and no one appears to bat an eye.
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basil
@itsbasil
truly wild
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