Category Archives: sports betting

Gambling Odyssey

Gambling problem? That’s a conspicuously ironic question tacked onto those relentless ads that invite sports talk radio listeners to sample “risk-free” wagering.

According to the National Council on Gambling Problems, the rate of addiction among sports bettors is at least twice that of gamblers in general. So those ads essentially are Sirens’ songs to a potentially vulnerable audience not lashed to the mast to avoid sailing into the trap of compulsion.

Since May 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban prohibiting sports gambling in most states, 22 states and the District of Columbia have rushed to legalize the activity. Radio Matters, the Radio Advertising Bureau’s blog, reported a subsequent stampede, “especially on sports format stations,” to accept advertising from sportsbook operators.

Gambling problem? Experts on the issue see the ads as nothing less than greasing the skids for trouble, the kind of temptation that beer ads present to alcoholics or the enticing effect fast food marketing has on those with unhealthy eating habits. More than that: The ads are meant to bring a new generation into the game—because the more people hooked on betting, the more money to be made.

Professional sports leagues, long vociferously opposed to taking the Las Vegas model nationwide, suddenly see the financial wisdom in boarding the bandwagon. As Daniel Wallach, director of the University of New Hampshire School of Law’s Sports Wagering and Integrity Program, recently told The New York Times, “All sports gambling derives from the product the leagues put on, and there’s an upside [the leagues] don’t want to leave on the table. That would be bad for business.”

Legalized sports betting, a Nielsen Sports study found last year, “will increase fan engagement and expand interest in pro and college events….adults who bet on the NFL watch 19 more regular season games than those who don’t.” It follows, Nielsen reported, that advertisers “foresee greater market share by getting into the action.”

Everybody gets richer—including counselors in the gambling addiction business.

As a sports journalist—and, by definition, a sports enthusiast—my curmudgeonly reaction to these developments aligns with the Casino.org website prediction that “legalized gambling on sports will gradually change American sports. As with everything that involves money, the sports industry will become even more commercialized than it is now. In a slow but consistent process, the focus on American sports will become betting rather than the game itself. Anyone who has ever gambled on a sporting event knows that once you place a bet, the focus of the game suddenly becomes money, not the game. And that’s not what sports is about.”

It appears inevitable, furthermore, that there will be an increase in what National Council of Gambling Problems executive director Keith Whyte calls “in play”—urging gamblers to bet on developments during a game, whether a certain player will score a basket in the next five seconds, or who will convert the first three-pointer in a quarter. That keeps the wagerers’ adrenaline flowing and diminishes the importance of final scores, even point spreads.

Bet on this: The preponderance of betting adds “is going to be a big issue,” Whyte told the Associated Press recently. “There’s heightened concern for people struggling with gambling addiction and relapse.”

Lots of luck with that.

Sports betting: Feel-bad entertainment

Nostradamus I am not. For this, and many other reasons, I am not rubbing my hands together in anticipation of nationwide legal sports betting.

That puts me somewhere in fuddy-duddy territory. A recent poll found that the majority of Americans—55 percent—now support such activity, a reversal of attitudes from just 25 years ago. And that shift in mood coincides with the Supreme Court ruling in May that struck down a 1992 federal law prohibiting most states from authorizing gambling on sports.

Teams and leagues, so opposed for so long to betting as a risk to “the integrity of competition,” suddenly are rushing to arrange partnerships with casinos. Calvin Ayre, a Canadian-Antiguan entrepreneur and founder of an online gambling company, has cited an analysis that sports betting can be “the cure to declining TV sports viewership.”

Having money on the line, the reasoning goes, will draw gamblers to tune in and monitor the progress of their investments. Those self-proclaimed oracles and clairvoyants out there, convinced they can see around the corner, will want to track their potential windfalls.

But I tend to subscribe to the argument that gambling is a sure way to get nothing for something. I confess to an aversion to barrel apparel. At this writing, my one annual attempt at sports prognostication—joining 35 others in a $1 college football bowl pool—reminds again of the financial ruin I would face as a serious gambler.

Of the 21 games played so far, I have correctly foreseen the winner of nine. (A losing percentage of .428.) Over the pool’s 20-year existence, I never have finished in first place, while my friend’s daughter won the whole thing when she was 3 years old! She did so by prophesying results based on which opposing teams’ mascots would be natural predators of the opponent’s mascot. As reliable as any betting system available, I suspect.

Furthermore, I cling to the outdated belief that the unscripted theater of sports—the sheer unpredictability—provides quite enough action. And to apply such an outlook precludes involvement with the soul of the betting industry—point spreads. Since the purpose of sporting contests is to determine a winner and loser, the exercise of divining—guessing?—by how much a team will win or lose strikes me as (sorry) pointless.

And don’t get me started on fantasy sports, in which wagering on the statistics of individual players takes precedence over team performance—a clear devaluation of the very idea of sports competition.

One final thought, after struggling to compose these thoughts on the vacuous—and fiscally perilous—racket that is sports betting: The English author and critic M. John Harrison has judged that “writing is like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted. Not less.”

Hmmm. But I haven’t lost my shirt.

 

Ice hockey in Vegas: Sin bins in Sin City?

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Should the NHL, in considering an expansion team for Las Vegas, be haunted by the jock establishment’s traditional fear and loathing of the potential fix? Or might the really unwise aspect of setting up shop in the nation’s gaming capital be its correlation to Timbuktu—a far-away desert outpost noticeably lacking in ice hockey culture?

There is growing evidence that major sports leagues at last are accepting the reality that betting on their events not only is here to stay, but is a growing industry. And that, rather than believing they can protect the “integrity” of their games by distancing themselves from that fact, they will be better off advocating legalized gambling, to assure transparency and control.

That is: Adopting the Las Vegas model. Last November, new NBA commissioner Adam Silver took that leap with an editorial in the New York Times, voicing his belief that “sports betting should be brought out of the underground and into the sunlight where it can be appropriately monitored and regulated.”

Silver’s remarks came seven years after NBA referee Tim Donaghy was found to have bet on games he officiated, causing preliminary talk of an NBA franchise for Vegas to be muted. At the time, veteran sports journalist Frank Deford was arguing on National Public Radio that an NBA team would be ideal for Las Vegas—“a 24-hour town meets the 24-second clock”—because Vegas’ above-board operation is “the very vaccination against sports fixing.” Vegas, he noted, “goes on the alert and advises the authorities” whenever some evil genius attempts to fudge the system.

About the time Silver made his (shocking!) proposal came the early rumblings of Las Vegas’ interest in an NHL team. Naturally, Sin City-related wisecracks immediately surfaced, including Jimmy Fallon’s “pro-con” shtick on the Tonight Show.

“Pro: Buying a souvenir jersey. Con: Because you lost your shirt at the casino.”

“Pro: Watching a bunch of men with missing teeth trying to score. Con: Then leaving the strip club to catch a hockey game.”

Tee-ha, giggle-snort.

This week, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, during his league’s board of governments meeting (in Las Vegas, by the way) confirmed that Vegas was among the cities whose bids for an expansion team will be entertained. Espn.com wasted no time in posting some sly suggestions for possible what-happens-in-Vegas-themed nicknames and logos: The Bones (with a skull between hockey sticks and dice); The Flamingos; The Outlaws; The Rat Pack; The Dealers; Sin….

…And “The Las Vegas Nordiques.” Because, it was pointed out, “Once we all realize what a stupid idea hockey in Vegas is, the NHL can move the team to Quebec City in five years—after attendance has dropped to 3,000 a game—without having to change its name.”

A recent analysis by the FiveThirtyEight web site likewise questioned the wisdom of the NHL’s venturing into south Nevada, given that the league’s seven Canadian-based franchises are home to roughly as many hockey fans as the 23 U.S. teams. FiveThirtyEight’s research found that the “six current NHL markets with the fewest number of hockey fans” are warm-weather Nashville, Miami, Raleigh, Phoenix and Tampa, as well as Columbus; that Vegas’ estimated number of NHL fans is roughly a third the number in Tampa (and less than a fifth the total in Quebec City); and quoted Forbes in reporting that those franchises lost a collective $51 million in the 2013-14 season.

Vegas’ minor-league hockey team, which drew fewer spectators than its mid-level ECHL average of 4,500 per game, was disbanded this year, a symbolic sending of the city to hockey’s sin bin, even as an NHL-regulation arena is being built near the gaudy, touristy Strip. The chances of tuning a fan base into game-attending routines appear further hindered by the city’s irregular working hours and Vegas enterprises that operate without windows or clocks.

In sizing up its odds, then, NHL pooh-bahs might want to think about the location-location-location mantra of the real estate business. And recall how Canadian Jack Kent Cooke was talked into placing an NHL expansion team in Los Angeles in 1967 because, he was told, there were some 300,000 Canadian expats living in the region—only to be faced with lousy attendance.

“Now I know why they left Canada,” Cooke said. “They hate hockey.”

Climate change toward frozen ponds in Vegas doesn’t sound like a good bet, either.

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