Wager Mage
Wager Mage
Photo: Andres Ayrton
Gambling also leads, indirectly, to increases in violent crime, suicide, divorce, and bankruptcy. Problem gambling is a significant social cost; the pain of the lives that are ruined spreads to whole families. The rough social cost of a single problem gambler is about $10,000 a year.
You may have come across the term “over 1.5 goals” or “under 1.5 goals,” but what exactly do these mean? Basically, it is a market where you can...
Read More »
As the name of the game suggests, the best hand is blackjack. That's an ace and a ten, jack, queen, or king. With a starting total of 21, your hand...
Read More »Gambling has become one of the defining pleasures of our time, the perfect accompaniment to an era of high-risk, rigged economies and a looming sense of collapse. Once there was Las Vegas; now there’s a Las Vegas in every phone. You can bet on almost anything today. Elections. Literary prizes. If you have a feeling that, say, Lapuan Virkiä is going to beat Porin Pesakarhut in the women’s Superpesis, the top professional pesäpallo league in Finland, you can put your money where your mouth is. During the pandemic, as casinos and racetracks closed, you could wager on the evening’s forecast in real time, or on the upcoming winter snowfall. There was serious action on the highest daily temperatures of major American cities. Then there are the ads. If you watch sports regularly, you probably feel, as I do, that the games have become interruptions in a more or less constant barrage of wagering promotion. Gambling is swallowing sports. The most straightforward reason for the surge in gambling is a change to the law: In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, opening the door to online sports betting across 21 states. As a direct result, sports-betting revenues grew 69 percent from 2019 to 2020 and another 270 percent during the first quarter of 2021. Total gambling revenues in the U.S. are set to break the $44 billion mark this year, approaching the size of the market for movies, books, and music combined. For a certain kind of American bettor, yesterday’s Thanksgiving celebration meant wagering on favorites as much as eating turkey or passing out in front of the game. (In the NFL, by the way, playing the favorites is usually a poor bet because they tend to be overvalued, but on Thanksgiving the opposite is true: Since 2003, favored teams have beaten the spread an absurd 73.2 percent of the time, not counting this year’s games. Please do not take this as betting advice. As they say, I’ve always been lucky with gambling: I’ve never won.) For society as a whole, if such a thing exists anymore, there are benefits as well as costs to legal gambling. The chief benefit is that there’s a lot of money to be made, for governments and businesses both. The primary cost is that many unlucky and vulnerable people are destroyed. American society has accepted that trade-off—big money now for social crisis later—on any number of fronts: in its banking sector, in its housing markets, in its health-care industry. The rise of gambling is simply one example of our boundless desire for risk. Once upon a time, there was the concept of “public morals.” In New York City, of all places, there were squads that enforced bans on pornography, sex work, alcohol, drugs, and gambling. Law enforcement had an explicit mandate to impose collective standards of behavior. This was, consciously, a repressive mechanism with religious roots. Then, slowly, that all went away. The repressive mechanisms rusted and crumbled. Now they’re collapsing. The end of Prohibition in the 1930s and the liberation of the ’60s and subsequent decades amount to the abandonment of these various repressions; we are still in the middle of this trend. Permission to gamble has been more of a continuous process than a singular event, extending from 1961, when betting on horse racing was legalized, to the present. Prohibitions against alcohol, pornography, and marijuana have fallen. The legalization of sex work and the decriminalization of hard drugs are still to come. Liberalization has been slow but consistent because both sides of the political spectrum, even in this moment of extreme, violent hyperpartisanship, agree on the basic principle: Get government out. The left wants the government out of people’s private lives. The right wants the government out of their financial lives. There was, for a time, a kind of balance, weighing the public good against the desires of the market. Then the market won. For one thing, attempts at repression, like the war on alcohol or drugs, often did more harm than good, and regulated markets allowed those substances to be controlled in a much more sensible way than through law enforcement. For another, greed has a tendency to win against any other consideration. The end result is the same: You do you. If it kills you, that’s on you. But the ban on gambling was more than a prohibition on a form of pleasure that has social costs; it was also a regulation of a predatory economic practice. The ban on sports gambling, in particular, was about retaining the purity of the game, which is just an idealistic way of describing market integrity. Ordinary people would not watch fixed games, just as ordinary people would not invest their money in fixed stock markets; in both cases, fairness is a prerequisite for future investment. The endemic corruption of boxing is one of the reasons its popularity has been in decline for 50 years. Baseball survived the Black Sox scandal of 1919 only by taking extreme measures, creating a commissioner role and making the faintest taint of gambling unacceptable. (Pity Pete Rose.)
The casino will keep the portion that you owe to the IRS and sent it to them with a form that you receive a copy of. Aug 26, 2020
Read More »
Points spread betting: outcomes That means a bet for $110 would win $100, or $11 would win $10, and so on. (More on this later.) Alternatively, a...
Read More »
When you see a +1.5 in front of a team's name, that means that they are 1.5-point underdogs in that matchup. Nov 7, 2020
Read More »
If they win, you win, no matter the score. While a point spread requires the team you bet on to win by a specified margin, moneyline does not....
Read More »Gambling is an entertainment of uncertainty, a way of turning instability into play, of pretending that the structures of life don’t apply to you, that you are exempt from statistics. It’s also a way of avoiding reality, avoiding the future. When the wheel is still spinning, the fall hasn’t come.
When playing with wild cards, five of a kind becomes the highest type of hand, beating a royal flush. Between fives of a kind, the higher beats the...
Read More »
That bet wins if eight or more runs are scored. The under is a small underdog at +105, meaning you win $105 for every $100 you win. In a lot of...
Read More »
5 Best Tips for Winning at Blackjack Learn Basic Strategy and stick to it. ... Always double your bet when your first two cards total 11 and always...
Read More »
Cognitive ability is consistently the best predictor of job performance across all job types, levels and industries. Cognitive ability covers a...
Read More »
Promotion
Promotion
Promotion
Promotion