GAMBLING - Is it good?

xpost

Games to win if your not a pro.....most of them.

Slots
Blackjack
Roulette
Craps

there isn't much skill involved in any of them.

sports:
I bet parlays on the ponies and baseball. and also random baseball bets (ie, $20 that a-rod will not bat .300 this year, 3:1 the mets will go further than the yankees this year, etc.).

xpost:
craps is a new orleans style dice game where you bet on a variety of different numerical results.

Why is it so tempting to take all the money I've made on Ebay lately, drive to Shreveport and put it one craps roll?

Bert Gordon: Eddie, is it alright if I get personal?
Fast Eddie: Whaddaya been so far?
Bert Gordon: Eddie, you're a born loser.
Fast Eddie: What's that supposed to mean?
Bert Gordon: First time in ten years I ever saw Minnesota Fats hooked... really hooked. But you let him off.
Fast Eddie: I told you I got drunk.
Bert Gordon: Sure you got drunk. You have the best excuse in the world for losing; no trouble losing when you got a good excuse. Winning... that can be heavy on your back, too, like a monkey. You'll drop that load too when you got an excuse. All you gotta do is learn to feel sorry for yourself. One of the best indoor sports, feeling sorry for yourself. A sport enjoyed by all, especially the born losers.
Fast Eddie: Thanks for the drink.

anyone else into this? i signed up to l*dbrokes the other day, put £10 in my account and bet away on the roulette table. im now up to £40 (after taking back my initial £10 stake) - actually £50 as l*dbrokes kindly give you £10 to bet on the games. im been using these winnings to bet on horse racing, greyhounds and occasionally the confusing but exciting financial market thing - they have this 5 min game where you bet on whether the markets go above or below a certain figure by the time the 5 minutes is up.

im doing pretty well at the moment and my plan is to take out all my winnings at the end of the month. if i lose it all before then i have to wait til the start of next month (gonna stick to a max of £10 deposit each month).

just wondering if i should be aware of any pitfalls or tricks in either of these games? im sticking to the things with low odds, usually betting on favourites and im currently doing ok at betting say £10 midway through a tennis game with odds of 3/10 (where i make a £3 gain) - is this wise or will i come a cropper soon? im very wary of becoming hooked but at the same time its some big big fun. i think next i might start playing on the stock market but not sure where to start - doesn't seem as easy to get into as roulette and greyhounds and the like.

put your scare/success stories here!

following latest post, if i bet on 1/5 bets only (betting fiver pound and receive £1 winnings) is that likely to result in a lifetime of £££££?

also have a friend who makes a full living out of ganbling on football matches. some theory about how once it beyond a certain time (74mins or so) the chance of the scoreline changing are so small that it can be manipulated to ensure decent results most of the time. just asked him for more info, will report back

you used to be able to make good money on online sportsbooks by "middling" (find two books with a big difference in spread and buy/sell points until you can't lose money, but win big if you hit the perfect middle)

http://phildellio.tripod.com/gambling.jpg

I really should have put my kid’s college fund on Biden.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/12/trump-betting-markets-sportsbooks-offshore-2020-election-gambling.html

i made more betting on the results after the election than i did from bets placed before the election. probably the closest thing to time travel i'll ever experience, being able to bet on an event whose outcome i already knew. felt like having the sports almanac in back to the future, very fun

I follow a few smart poker guys on Twitter and they were scrambling hard to dump as much cash as possible on Biden that night. I wanted to do the same but it's too hard for me to get money on those sites. I did bet the max on the one I was on though so that was nice. I finally got paid for it yesterday, lol

the odds for Biden were very decent on the eve of the election. I had nary $50 to spare so I missed out on the bonanza

Most appalling thing going on in sports right now:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sports-betting-gambling-ads-gretzky-mcdavid-matthews-nhl-1.6710407

Lol @ that Brian Masse guy... "well well well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions"

"We're all trying to find the guy who did this"

"Me sowing: Ha ha, fuck yeah!

Me reaping: Well this sucks. What the fuck"

"Every bet with BetMGM has a potential for greatness," Gretzky says to the camera as a lion made of ice explodes out of a frozen fountain behind him.

thinking bout all the wasted potential of my lousy sports bets from the last 18 months while eating beans out of a can

pretty wild story, nfl employee uses team’s credit card to “fund a luxury lifestyle” and be really really bad at fantasy sports:

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/39104551/amit-patel-jaguars-theft-high-stakes-daily-fantasy-player

One veteran DFS player, who communicated with ESPN on condition of anonymity, said they believe ParlayPicker is "the biggest loser ever on FanDuel."

"He was legendarily bad," the person added.

lol

"Mr. Patel did not use the Jaguars' VCC to fund his lifestyle, but in a horribly misguided effort to pay back previous gambling losses that utilized the Jaguars' VCC program," King said.

lol shit like FanDuel is notoriously hard to win regularly, depending on which competitions he entered.

it's a lot harder when your opponents have access to pick the same players you do and it's just about who assembles the 'best' lineup.

like if you wanted to become a hardcore gambler, after asking you to rethink your decision-making, I could point you to much easier-to-win bets than that

isn't FanDuel overrun by bots who enter like thousands of variations of the same lineup? or is it not like that anymore?

I play online poker where you can look people up and even at the $25 cash table buyin level (where I'm at) you see people losing horrific sums of money. gotta wonder what keeps them motivated day in and day out

It's good if you're the house.

isn't FanDuel overrun by bots who enter like thousands of variations of the same lineup? or is it not like that anymore?

probably!

lmao oh boy: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/30/dave-busters-to-allow-customers-to-bet-on-arcade-games.html

to clarify, this isn't 'gambling' in the traditional sense, so it's not going to be like, people wagering $5 that they beat the idiot standing to their right at skee-ball, but 'skill based challenges', which I'd guess would be something like "break 50 on the basketball game and win $5" type deals. but already 'looking forward' to the first time an unruly customer tries to beat up one of the employees because the basketball game doesn't count a basket or skee-ball machine dispenses one ball too few.

anyway, the growing toxicity of gambling permeating mainstream life is nauseating to me, like friends of mine who've never really gambled or bet on sports before now talking about wanting to do it, meanwhile I just locked my account for six months to where I can't get back in.

can't wait for the next development - gamble on your kid's recess pickup basketball game!

(if it wasn't clear, I think it's a bad idea - unless they limit the number of $5 entrances into the skills competitions, I can see someone burning through hundreds of dollars trying to reach whatever milestone to win big)

to clarify, this isn't 'gambling' in the traditional sense, so it's not going to be like, people wagering $5 that they beat the idiot standing to their right at skee-ball, but 'skill based challenges', which I'd guess would be something like "break 50 on the basketball game and win $5" type deals.

maybe I'm reading the article wrong but it does seem like it's gonna be about betting the guy next to you? which seems kinda pointless since you could just do that manually? what you're saying seems kinda bad, like what's to stop Steph Curry from bankrupting the place then

I take my kids to places that have arcades - bowling alleys and some bars, the ones where you buy the card and scan it for each game, which earns "tickets" which you exchange for things in another vending machine. it feels pretty nefarious to me. because the kids there don't seem too interested in the actual games, they're interested in the skill challenge stuff where if you hit the button at the exact right moment you can win an Apple Watch or a PS5 or something. trouble is it's basically impossible to win, there's kind of an optical illusion going on which makes it seem easier than it is. that kind of shit ought to be illegal. I have managed to talk my kids out of playing those games but I see other kids waste $20 on those in a matter of like 3 minutes.

xpost it's hard to tell because in one article I read in the Post it talked about 'challenges' which suggested to me "score this number of points, win this amount of money", but this article does suggest more it's like betting against your friends.

which if that's the case, lol, you've got the 'pool hustler' scenario arriving to DNB, some lowly guy reluctantly accepting a $5 bet against you and then destroying you. and people cheating and shoving their opponents, getting in fistfights after, etc....

if it's a "skill based" thing it's obviously going to be rigged against the consumer, where some RNG element is gonna make it so at best you break even over time. kinda like those real money solitaire apps which intentionally gives you impossible deals so nobody can actually make any money

"oh weird the rim is crooked"

Just need to get an Ocean's 11 team planted throughout the Des Moines Dave & Buster's to derig all the games then call in the pros one night.

I have v much soured on gambling after it's permeated sports broadcasting in very creepy fashion. I opted to lock myself out of Hard Rock Bet for six months which means I can't get back into my account until its elapsed. it's like...it's one thing when I had to actually seek out betting lines/etc because I planned to place a bet.

now I go into the ESPN app and that shit is baked into the matchup summaries so it plants the seed even when you're just looking to see what the score is. that shit is just insidious. and it's caused me to be foolish in a way I had been avoiding. yeah, personal responsibility as well, but y'know....the shit is outright predatory.

No apps, no advertising, cash only bets at a physical location, complete divorce of leagues/coverage and odds/betting lines - this is my sports gambling plank when I run for dictator for life.

We'll still let you make that degenerate bet on how many times the Fox crew cuts to Taylor Swift's luxury box but you're going to have to go to a seedy place next to a massage parlor to do it.

everyone knows that gambling is great for the people who are situated at the outflow end of the money pipeline. the more bets you place, the more assuredly you are just robbing your self and cramming money into the pockets of the people at the outflow end.

what's insidious is how the intermittent reward of bets you won changes your brain and implants the eager expectation of future winnings. the pleasure generated by the infrequent rewards outweighs the pain of the more frequent losses and your brain values that jolt of pleasure more than it values the money you lose.

no amount of intellectual understanding of that 'lizard brain' process can erase the primal fact of that pleasure once it has hold of you. it sucks.

yeah I like gambling even fully aware of all the ways casinos and such try to maniuplate you, having that shit spill out into everyday life though I think is very bad. even ignoring how evil it is it's just boring to watch. you turn on ESPN now and there will be like a 7 minute segment on whether Jayson Tatum will score over or under 30.5 points, there's no way to make that interesting unless you are putting money on it

like my best friend and mother, neither of whom ever considered gambling in their lives, have used gambling apps to place small bets. it suckers in new, less experienced blood.

and yes milo I wholeheartedly support your idea

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/sep/26/addicts-slot-machines-gambling-uk?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

“There was a woman, an OAP who was the chair of the local Rotary club.

“She was on the high-stakes machines from the minute they opened until the evening. She’d bring in cakes for the girls and everybody loved her.

“One day she came in and said she’d done all the Rotary club money and her husband’s severance. Just bawling her eyes out. Nobody said ‘Do you think you’ve got a problem?’”

it seems like just lowering the stake limits on FOBTs hasn't really been a game-changer, addicts just "self-extinction" themselves at a slower rate now.

fuck anyone who advertises for this industry, from chris rock to football pundits to third tier uk comedians.

^^^

I recall a Labour MP getting some flak after posting a pic of herself in a slots emporium owned by one of her big gambling donors. In her defence she was pleading that it wasn't all about gambling, this was also a community hub where locals could pop in for a cup of tea and a chinwag.

I do always detect a warm sense of community whenever I walk by the local Ladbrokes.

I have talked about this with friends IRL, they are both former ilxors and we were discussing our own “uncool conservative beliefs,” and I said that the pervasiveness of gambling culture and sports betting in our society is a sign of more rot and that I believe that all forms of gambling ought to be banned. I truly don’t care how reactionary or whatever that is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

im on board with every word of that

tax gambling income, thinkpiece fees and inheritance at 90% in my new society

decades ago I worked as betting shop manager for years. I saw the full spectrum of ugly behaviours that form around addiction and financial desperation. But this was before the New Labour bonfire of betting regulations 2005, because since then things have got a thousand times worse.

I listen to a *lot* of sports podcasts (I need help, honestly) and it reveals just how much the entire edifice is built on gambling and gambling advertising. It's insidious and predatory.

Disclaimer: I think gambling is shit and for cunts.

Tom Watson is a confirmed cunt and has a generously paid advisory role at Flutter UK & Ireland (betting and gaming giant). So yeah it definitely is for cunts - that much is right. But also it's quite staggering how completely captured by big gambling that Labour became post 2005.

i don't think gambling addicts are all c-words...

oh no I don't mean addicts are cunts

Same. It's the industrialised enabling nature of the whole industry. It's gross.

ah gotcha. sad article!

absolutely haunting article

Ray fucking Winstone, did you not make enough money from your day job? shameless piece of shit

I know this is as old as time and the booze industry does it, though perhaps not as flagrantly, but I hate the way the ads are constantly using the requirement for a warning or disclaimer as a further form of advertising, like "when the fun stops, stop" or whatever. I also hate the forcible attempts to turn types of gambling into English colloquial language like calling an accumulator bet "your ACCA" etc.

xpost I had to stop reading the article as it was upsetting me for some reason

the pervasiveness of gambling culture and sports betting in our society is a sign of more rot

I know I'm in a certain self-contained bubble because I know all that to be intrinsically true but what sports coverage I tend to take in usually doesn't have that as part of it, at least so immediately in the commentary and the like -- we're talking cycling coverage, track and field, etc, especially since a lot of it I can take in without ads. Where I noticed it there most was slightly unexpected, in that when it comes to the Tour de France, in recent years I've been enjoying the Australian coverage a lot (MUCH more so than the increasingly loud and overbusy NBC/Peacock coverage), though it means I do have to put up with a few local ad breaks, and some are for gambling. Not much, but they were there, and while there's a distancing effect by default, still not the greatest thing to see.

I'm just flashing back to when Blair was lobbying for super-casinos. Like no he didn't get into politics for committing to illegal wars or selling a nation's civil liberties out to make a personal fortune. Before his premiership sputtered out he wanted to leave a super-casino legacy. Tbh I don't even fucking know what a fucking super-casino is. 8 storeys of 24 hour table games and thousands of slot machines, so heavy with coins that the floor is bulging ... yeah baby!

I've made a decent chunk of change playing online poker so I can say gambling 'works' for me though I agree its pervasiveness has gotten way way out of hand especially when it comes to sports, I find so much of ESPN's programming unwatchable because of that shit, like who cares if a receiver will have more or less than 2.5 catches or if a QB will throw over 245 yards, it's not interesting in the slightest unless you have money on it, it sucks and the underside of gambling addiction can be so ugly. poker is still fun though.

Absolutely insane that with no public discussion whatsoever, sports betting became legal almost overnight nationwide. Whereas when state lotteries became a thing in the 1970s and 1980s there were at least referenda or state constitutional amendments that promoted public discussion and at least a veneer of democracy. Promoters of State lotteries would sell it as “hey the money will go to state coffers for public education.” Now we have entirely privatized sports gambling, casino gambling, and online without the fig leaf that it’s “for a good cause”.

never been happier to be a grateful recovering gambling addict, just over 6 years now

Congrats, sleeve. Beating any addiction is tough work

sports betting became legal almost overnight nationwide.

another unfortunate result of the internet erasing limits and boundaries

I recall a Labour MP getting some flak after posting a pic of herself in a slots emporium owned by one of her big gambling donors. In her defence she was pleading that it wasn't all about gambling, this was also a community hub where locals could pop in for a cup of tea and a chinwag.

I used to work for a gambling shop a very long time ago where they had free tea and biscuits for customers. We’d have to crowbar people out of there at closing time, because fuck knows providing free food and drink and access to a toilet wasn’t encouraging them to do anything like leave for a second to get some actual food. Their family? Didn’t fucking exist during that time, I heard the calls ringing out. Probably my fondest memory of working there, along with the way a customer abused me for being “unlucky” because I was the person who took his awful choice of bet?
https://i.imgur.com/MZNUtVv.jpeg

heh! the bookies scene and those priceless interactions with the happy punters (aside from the odd death threat or accusation of being a Jonah) ... probably the same everywhere the world over!

What is a Jonah in this context?

when you work in the bookies some gamblers say it is your fault as a humble betting shop operative, that it is all your fault their bets keep being shit ones!

lol

Feel gambling is kind of weird in its modern form. Like my dad would be fairly into horse racing tho he's not posh or whatever, he also raised greyhounds with my granddad so that idea of the track and betting appeals to him. I would go with him to the races a fair bit when younger, and it was really fun. Like you bet on every race and have a few pints etc, a good day out. Good people watching and a real cross section of society.

It never felt compulsive or purely about the gambling, though I do wonder tho if even the races now is just a massive cocaine fest, based on some of the videos you see of Cheltenham or whatever.

I know the difference between observing people just having an allotted amount to punt and then happily walking away whatever the result between the serious problem gamblers (on a sliding scale of seriousness from "haven't got the busfare home" to taking self-exclusion action), just from years of experience of watching punters in the bookies. And the in control and happy gamblers were about 1% of the regular customers!

Yeah same, if it was just normal people who could handle it it wouldn’t be so profitable

I’m team harm reduction in almost everything - people are going to gamble, better to have it in a regulated form than with Johnny Legbreaker. Ban apps, ban advertising, all bets must be made in cash at a physical location.

People can still ruin their lives with it but it’s much tougher than using a debit card with an app that’s running all manner of promotions to convince people it’s free money.

i think abt this quote/sequence from owning mahoney, a p good movie btw, w/r/t gambling & those addicted:

Psychologist: How would you rate the thrill you got from gambling, on a scale of one to 100?
Dan Mahowny: Um... hundred.
Psychologist: And what about the biggest thrill you've ever had outside of gambling?
Dan Mahowny: Twenty.
Psychologist: Twenty. How do you feel about living the rest of your life with a max of twenty?
Dan Mahowny: Ok. Twenty's ok.

The last series of Against the Rules (the Michael Lewis podcast) is a really good, hard look at the weird modern beast of online sports betting in the US. One of the throughlines is how so much of it is somehow connected to New Jersey

One of the truly sick things about it that I always probably vaguely guessed at but never actually knew before listening to that is that these companies (FanDuel and Draft Kings) have extremely well-tuned algorithms that they are - in all states, to varying degrees - supposed to use to identify problem gamblers, cut them off, offer them avenues for help etc. And what they actually do is the opposite. If the algos identify that you're falling into losing patterns and betting big, they make you a "VIP", offer you tickets to things, give you personal service in the form of an actual person who talks to you on the phone, all sorts of inducements like this. On the other hand, if they identify that your bets are too good - that you're consistently winning more than other people - they will either cut you off or limit your stakes.

oh man

that is so fucking ruthless, I can't even imagine. just having video poker machines in the bars in my neighborhood was enough to get me hooked in late 2000.

heard today that in states that have legalized online sports betting, bankruptcies have gone up 25%. that’s from this podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-6-vip/id1455379351?i=1000677665971

http://archive.today/we4MF

the latter link is an article from last year

what Tracer is saying is correct - the more sophisticated poker sites have been doing that for a while. bad players get a lot more rakeback and are offered tons of bonuses while good players get throttled in a number of ways that are, to say the least, pretty underhanded (granted, I understand why poker rooms want soft games, but they can be so opaque in their actual methods)

there are sites out there that track players lifetime win/loss totals...its wild to look up a dude who sucks and find they lost around 20 grand playing $50 buyin tables...can only imagine the shit they do to keep them there. I mean I get emails constantly from them and they clearly don't want me there

I wonder how bipartisan the big gambling industry is when it comes time to donate to campaigns

MLB has a huge problem, it started last season with the interpreter of the game's biggest star and now has spread to individual players including 2 of the guardians relief pitchers one of whom was an all-star.

yet even still, there are countless ads for DraftKings, FanDuel and various other betting platforms being shoved down fans' throats.

and it's impossible to ignore that one team is proposing moving to Vegas...

the grossest thing about it is now it's basically addiction recruitment. Gambling used to be a thing that people that were already looking for action had to seek out, and while it was still an awful and predatory system, you weren't flooded with the shit in the mainstream.

Now these commercials are totally geared at the casuals, like the one commercial with Post Malone where they basically say "who cares if you don't know anything about sports? throw a little money down!". not only has, as milo z astutely said multiple times across threads, gambling become too easy to do, removing the barriers that would often keep people from doing it (like having to physically go to a casino)...but now they're actively coming for normies in an aggressive way that they haven't done before.

I struggled with it for years without all of that (still do). fortunately I've self-excluded from just about every major site, but anybody with poor impulse control (like me) can become an addict fast, especially if they don't have an idea of how it truly works. My mother getting sucked into placing bets on football despite having no money was the final straw. i didn't place my first bet until almost my 30s.

then tehre's the aspect of gamblers issuing death threats to players who 'underperform'

Here's some hope though:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/02/americans-increasingly-see-legal-sports-betting-as-a-bad-thing-for-society-and-sports/

And this is very much worth noting:

Some of the biggest shifts in attitudes about sports betting’s societal impact have come among young Americans – especially young men. Today, 47% of men under 30 say legal sports betting is a bad thing for society, up from 22% who said this in 2022.

As a Bluesky poster who shared this said, "Didn't really take long for young men to figure out they're the ones on the menu, huh."

the current UK culture sec, Lisa Nandy says “gambling brings joy to millions” but can ruin the lives of “some people in particular.”

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G2KlpM0W0AAJdf6?format=jpg&name=900x900

“gambling brings joy to millions”

fixed it

my brother has been an addict to different things for most of his life - drinking, smoking, substances. It was only ever gambling that caused him serious trouble. The first time he ever placed a bet on anything, he got £700 back on a tenner, and he chased that for a few years until he found himself with a loan he could not pay off. He's had to ban himself from every local bookmakers and every casino, and he won't even watch football on a dodgy stream because the pop-up adverts are all for William Hill. I'm so proud of him for not letting it continue to ruin his life. But it is a lot of work.

a drug addict might still have some money left for food and rent whilst feeding their addiction and might also be able to maintain a relationship along with their addiction. Gambling addicts can keep going until there is nothing left, will more likely completely torch a relationship much faster than a drug addict, before they get to rock bottom.

Congrats to your brother, it's a fucking evil addiction.

An evil addiction supported and encouraged by successive British governments.

I think the Labour Party might be even more gambling funded than the Tories. Even under Corbyn I remember reading his deputy leader Tom Watson taking massive donations from bet365, skybet etc.. and you'd think a food addict like him might have some sympathy for people who are more susceptible to gambling addiction. Don't mean to fat shame but it's so fucking hilarious that he lost a lot of weight, wrote a book about what a triumph his diet was and how transformed he is, then he put all the weight back on again and some!

I think part of Ned’s “bubble” is that the sports betting stuff is still illegal in California. When I watch European tv and see people going to the betting shops or bars with slot machines, it definitely makes me appreciate where I live (as opposed to all the other things that are better in Europe). … Gambling is interesting because it takes a lot of different forms, and there is a lot of class and cultural baggage involved.

Like certain forms are banned that are most associated with immigrants, and yeah the animal cruelty arguments are legit, but there’s definitely a double standard.

Though the reason I clicked on this thread is because I have recently gotten into the most legitimate form of gambling in the US — playing the stock market. Like cheering on the share price of corporations the way “punters” cheer on horses.

Remember to leave the table while you are ahead, sarah.

I won’t even play the stock market. All of my investments are long term in index funds and/or managed mutual funds with brokerages who do all the gambling on my behalf. I have my vices that will definitely kill me eventually - drinking and vaping - but I will never touch a slot machine much less a card table or the fanduel app.

My grandfather on my dad’s side killed himself in Las Vegas after abandoning his family. Nope, not for me.

Oh I have a family history too so I totally get it. I am definitely not pro-gambling. And I am fairly conservative with my bets as it were. But it’s kinda crazy that there is a hagiography of successful investors because they are basically professional gamblers.

"i think abt this quote/sequence from owning mahoney, a p good movie btw, w/r/t gambling & those addicted"

I learn from Wikipedia that the film earned $1 million, "significantly less than its $10 million budget", which is ironic because the film seems to have lost more money than its subject. It's based on the story of Brian Molony, a Canadian bank manager who embezzled more than $10m from his bank in order to live like a King in Atlantic City. He appears to have lost around $5m.

The film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, who looks a like like Moloney - a tubby chap with a moustache - and Minnie Driver as his wife, although she dresses frumpily, but she's still Minnie Driver. I think the message of the film is that if you're a problem gambler who squanders a little bit of money and dies penniless you'll end up as a the subject of a Ken Loach film equals boring, whereas if you squander a vast amount of cash you get to be a bigshot, marry Minnie Driver, and then you have to pay back a bit of money, but you can also parlay that into a career giving interviews, although presumably you have to be careful to ask to be paid in cash.

I have a stocks and shares ISA, because stocks were the big thing during the dot.com boom and I'm a 1990s throwback. But that's only because regular ISA rates have only recently started to outpace inflation. Of course with a stocks and shares ISA there's always a risk that you might lose money. And there is the moral issue. Some people are wet when it comes to investing in Lockheed or McDonalds, despite the fact that those two companies are excellent investments. They pay dividends and are ingrained in the fabric of the United States, which is a country build on money. My attitude is that the money is real, and as long as you don't tell anybody about it, who is going to know? The money is the thing.

As for gambling, I bet money on the Grand National once. It was Rust Never Sleeps in the 1996 Grand National:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Grand_National

I picked that horse because of the name. Sadly he had to be destroyed because he broke his shoulder. Rest in peace, Rust Never Sleeps. You did in fact sleep. I also bet on the very first National Lottery, which I failed to win, and have not bet on the National Lottery since, thus saving myself roughly £3,000 over the course of thirty years. I remember that a couple of months after it started 133 people won the jackpot (vs 0 the previous week and 1 the week after), which was bizarre.

In the UK there's also the option of Premium Bonds, which is a quasi-lottery where you can't lose money, but you can't guarantee a return, although you probably will get one.

There are undoubtedly people with serious gambling problems daytrading Draft Kings stock on margin … gambling on gambling on gambling

Xp Lockheed and McDonalds dividends aren’t bad, but they aren’t great tbh … National Grid is much better

Related to stocks and shares, RobinHood (as I understand it) has gamified bonuses and so on, similar to what Tracer Hand described with the sports-betting apps.

And something Scott Galloway has pointed out a few times about gambling: unlike other addictions, a person can get much deeper in trouble with it without showing outward signs to the people around them until it's too late.

yep, I once lost like 80 bucks in 5 minutes on a video poker machine waiting for my wife to finish saying goodbye to some friends

when we got out to the car I burst into tears, in retrospect that was an important moment in eventual recovery

Watching the explosion of sports betting in the U.S. over the past few decades has been kind of amazing because it has all just felt so nihilistic. We know what this does to people — and what it does to sports, too — but … there’s just so much money to be made from it (largely not by gamblers, of course). We just caved.

As a person that possesses very little working knowledge of sports or a firm understanding of "Why sport?," finding out about the depth of sports gambling is stunning. WTF dudes

I still do football accumulators and the Irish lottery, sometimes some horseracing or greyhound bets. fuck knows why I bother though. I became a habitual small stakes gambler while working in the bookies and it's been a lifetime habit. It's decades since I got into any big trouble from gambling, so to some extent I'm in control. But sometimes when I'm skint I will play with money I can't afford to lose in the hope of some magic happening. And once in a blue moon this has actually worked. Mostly though I just find myself even more skint and also angry with myself for being so compulsively dumb.

I agree with Neando about how it should require more effort … I get ads for some solitaire game you can win money playing and… at one point I had a computer solitaire compulsion… but I don’t understand how one can actually win money playing solitaire as it seems antithetical to how the game works.

I don't gamble hardly at all (every few years I'll throw down $20 on Powerball tickets), but I did make some money once helping some fantasy football douche write a book about his life and "methods." Staring into his hollow eyes (metaphorically; we never met face to face) really was frightening.

My dad organized fantasy sports games with his coworkers back in the 80s. I don’t think any real money was involved. They were like math and science teachers who followed professional sports. I think the fun for my dad was designing the game and rules, and he and his friends got to bro down and argue about who is a better player outside of their team.

I play in two regular poker games that haven’t changed their buy-ins ($10 and $20 respectively) since the Obama administration, so I feel pretty comfortable with my risk exposure.

I guess it's good for some people!

The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, made more than $1.4m while gambling in Las Vegas last year, according to federal tax filings released by his campaign team.

Pritzker, already a billionaire with a family net worth of $41.6bn, who is widely seen as a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, won the money after playing blackjack at a Las Vegas casino while on vacation with his wife and friends, according to his campaign spokesperson.

The governor plans to donate his winnings to charity, his campaign told NBC.

Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, Pritzker said: “I went on vacation with my wife, with some friends. I was incredibly lucky, you have to be to end up ahead, frankly, going to a casino anywhere."

I am shocked, shocked to find sports going on in this gambling establishment

https://abcnews.go.com/US/miami-heat-terry-rozier-charged-nba-betting/story?id=126789368

Can’t imagine how you get a thrill from gambling when you’re already a billionaire if you’re not putting down $100 mil a hand.

"i'm good, it's a safe necessary side-hustle for me, an active nba coach."

the coverage of this is funny to me bc Kash Patel totally seems like the kind of guy who would get suckered out of a million dollars at a rigged poker game that a celeb invited him to

The details of the rigged poker games are kind of amazing.

This was no ordinary shuffling machine, according to the indictment. It contained hidden technology that read the cards in the deck and instantly predicted which player would be dealt the best hand, prosecutors said.

That information was transmitted outside the building to someone known as the operator. The operator, in turn, alerted a player at the table who was in on the scheme — “the quarterback” or “the driver.” Finally, that player told his comrades what was about to happen, prosecutors said, through a system of secret signals. The signals included touching certain poker chips to communicate different outcomes while appearing to be harmlessly fidgeting.

The players at the table could essentially see the future and know who would win a poker game before a hand had even been dealt.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/nyregion/nba-mafia-rigged-poker-games.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wE8.LV_K.thqygXWGPaOD&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

this is all vaguely laughable -- chauncey billups made $100m during his career as a player! -- but if we allow that criminal organizations are involved it seems far less likely that he was trying to make money than that he was trying to protect his family from being harmed because he did or did not make certain substitutions

Do people still smoke cigars when they play poker?

when the indoor smoking ban was enacted every bar was really really serious about it, the threat of losing your liquor license was so huge nobody wanted to chance it, except this one bar that hosted a poker game where people just smoked openly at the table and nobody said a word about it or even mentioned the smoking ban at all. poker players have always had this attitude that the law just doesn't apply to them, no surprise so many of them are insane Trumpers

Coffeezilla is fed up with this shit too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ii1ROzeSwU

Lol @ this on that polymarket bollocks.

https://bsky.app/profile/60minutes.bsky.social/post/3m6v763a6op27

I lately find myself in the bizarre position of being on the side of Fanduel and DraftKings et al versus the completely unregulated “prediction markets.” This is how the world moves the Overton Window apparently.

It’s all so fucking gross but at least the sports books have to abbreviate their advertising so as to include information about gambling addiction helplines etc