Addiction Markets

These services make a relatively smaller piece of their profit from "responsible" people with a lot of self-control. In many cases, the business is probably not viable without problem gamblers. Problem gamblers account for anywhere from 51% of revenue for sports betting apps, to 90% in the case of casinos [1,2] and the numbers seem to be getting worse.

[1] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DMHAS/Publications/2023-CT-FIN... [2] https://www.umass.edu/seigma/media/583/download

I can readily believe that to be true, but my point still stands, the person I'm replying to made a really sweeping and incorrect statement.

You don’t think it’s ethically and morally questionable to frequent a business that knowingly harms the majority of its customers?

I agree there’s a some sort of gray area here, but it feels awfully narrow… especially with the recent sports betting companies.

Whales provide the most value? You don't say.

"some gray area" is an understatement.

Sports betting companies structure their odds and order books to disadvantage most bettors. There are plenty of markets where that isn't the case.

It’s not whales, it’s compulsives. The stories are horrific. People have moved to non-gambling states, and the casinos send them nice letters saying, “We miss you! Here’s a coupon for a free flight to our state, you don’t even have to promise you’ll gamble, just come and have a steak dinner in us”

I feel like the goalposts have been shifted massively in this conversation. The original sentiment was "there's no way to responsibly gamble online", and that's all I was ever responding to.

I got curious and validated your source [1], to pull the exact quote:

"The proportion of Connecticut gambling revenue from the 1.8% of people with gambling problems ranges from 12.4% for lottery products to 51.0% for sports betting, and is 21.5% for all legalized gambling."

Without going into details, I do have some ability to check if these numbers actually "make sense" against real operator data. Will try to sense-check if the data I have access to, roughly aligns with this or not.

- the "1.8% of people" being problem gamblers does seem roughly correct, per my own experience

- but those same 1.8% being responsible for 51% of sportsbook revenue, does not align with my intuition (which could be wrong! hence why I want to check further...)

- it is absolutely true that sportsbooks have whales/VIPs/whatever-you-call-them, and the general business model is indeed one of those shapes where <10% of the customers account for >50% of the revenue (using very round imprecise numbers), but I still don't think you can attribute 51% to purely the "problem gamblers" (unless you're using a non-standard definition of problem-gambler maybe?)

I don’t want to derail the conversation, but I do want to make an analogy. I’m vegan, and I mostly go to non-vegan restaurants. I’m giving my money to businesses that mostly do something I don’t support.

The way I resolve this is “What if everyone did what I did?”. The restaurants would obviously have to change. I figure the type of demand I create is more powerful than how they might use the profit.

I think the same thing applies here. If everyone only gambled responsibly, these companies would all be in the responsible gambling business.

At the same time, I think sports gambling has completely gotten out of control and needs to be more regulated. More advertising regulation seems like a good place to start.

Those people will still gamble if gambling is illegal. Gambling did not start in the 1970s and the primary motivation for making it legal wasn’t revenue it was shutting down revenue streams for organized crime.

Trust me friend, almost nobody WANTS to spend $50k on a mobile game.

The stakes probably aren’t as high in mobile, but it’s otherwise the same dance.

I strongly doubt that the person you were responding to was asserting that "no person, at any time, in any circumstance, can ever gamble online without it being an irresponsible act".

But chances are that the original commenter was really using language in a more colloquial way, the way someone might say "the only responsible choice is not to use drugs". Someone saying that isn't making a statement that "no person ever, under any circumstance, can ever benefit from consuming any drug".

It's not an absolutist statement, but you are choosing to interpret it that way so that you can construct a response based on semantic pedantry.

Goalposts built around strawmen are almost designed to be shifted.

Same power law in the alcohol industry.