An award-winning ESPN producer resigned after 24 years over the network’s embrace of sports betting: “I’m not going to have blood on my hands.”
An award-winning ESPN producer resigned after 24 years over the network’s embrace of sports betting: “I’m not going to have blood on my hands.”
I’m not opposed to sports betting on its own, but I am absolutely appalled at how much it’s bastardized everything.
It’s one thing if it’s in small doses and you can sort of just ignore it. It’s another thing when EVERY FUCKING SITE AND PLATFORM has gambling odds, gambling ads, gambling sponsors. Etc. You can’t blink without these predators trying to siphon money from people.
If I were a recovering gambling addict and sports fan id be heartbroken right now.
Even more to it too. Once it gets big enough you start getting match fixing, so it ruins the sport and also endangers all players since fixing all but necessitates organized crime.
The final outcome is a world where someone bets on a runner up, and goes out to shoot the champion, to steal money from the addicted masses.
The same issues apply for betting on other real world things.
We can thank Trump’s Supreme Court for this. They overturned a previous ruling with a case in 2018 and now here we are.
I wondered if I was wrong or if it used to be illegal to advertise gambling with sports. Heck you still can’t take a sip of alcohol in commercials … But you can ruin a family financially. That’s nice.
What’s extremely scary about online sportsbetting is how they game the user into falling further into the spiral with dark patterns. I can’t see that anyone with a slightly addictive personality could possibly not get completely railroaded into massive debt.
This shit has to be addressed, and soon.
It ain’t even just sport anymore. Election coverage on CNN includes Kalshi odds like it’s a fucking scientific study. Gambling is everywhere online too? Games, livestreams. Crypto casinos where they can get kids hooked.
Some of the initial friction between live streamers with the online left was when “gamba” became prevalent and they started calling it out.
It used to be illegal to have online poker like 25 years ago and now there are DraftKings banners in metro train stations and LeBron got $15mil annually to stump for Polymarket. What are we even doing?
The fucking prediction market odds during the news is insane, as if it has any bearing on reality.
It’s fucking back to the future 2…
Yeah I’m not some pearl-clutching puritan by any means, but all of this deeply embedded gambling (and “prediction market” bullshit) is not going to end well. The scandals, fixes, and chicanery will be off the charts and it’ll ruin sports.
I had a friend once who got a call from a sports bettor trying to sell their picks and asked him how much he bet on football a season. He said about $500. The guy laughed and hung up
I knew a guy when I was in big tech that’d lost $40K plus in draft kings per year.
Fucking insane what people pour into these.
40k jeez! That’s what I make yearly at work after taxes and benefits.