1) The SuperDome has had a corporate sponsor (Mercedes Benz) since 2011. It's not like Caesars caused them to sell out.
2) No legal Pennsylvania sportsbook is advertising (or even offering options to bet on) B league Argentinian soccer. It's very likely the gambler in the article was on a grey-area offshore sports book (e.g Bovada), and legalizing sports betting helps combat those.
3) Sportsbooks paying $18 in total on two $10 bets is known as the "hold" and it's basically a transaction cost. You could make the same argument about poker (with the rake) or stock trading commissions. If there's a cost per transaction in an otherwise zero-sum game then money is being continuously removed from the total sum.
4) When you are betting in a non-exchange context (the case for all U.S based books), the sports book is taking the other side of the bet. They may try to balance the book, or lay off bets, but they often do end up taking risk on one side. This is advantageous for the book when done correctly.
5) Sports Betting is the only gambling option where you are betting against the house in a situation where the true odds are not known pre-facto. This is very different than blackjack or roulette where the odds are known beforehand, and the house can ensure the odds are always in their favor.
6) This means that sportsbetting is hypothetically (and often in practice) uniquely winnable in the long term. If you are better at determining the true odds for an outcome than the sportsbook, then you can have positive expected value.
7) If the above wasn't true, then sportsbooks would not have to limit winning players (which frequently happens). Sports betting is basically the only gambling option where the house does not always encourage/want more betting volume from players.
Slight correction: blackjack is also possible to play with positive value for the player[1], and casinos routinely ban blackjack players for being too skilled. It’s also much easier to play blackjack with positive EV than to bet on sports, but it’s also trivial to detect if surveillance is paying attention, so the real game is avoiding surveillance in various ways, e.g. by never staying at the same casino for long.
1: technically this depends on the exact rules, most notably (1) how much is paid out for a blackjack (3:2 is ok, 6:5 is unplayable) and (2) “penetration”, i.e. how many cards are dealt from a shoe before a reshuffle. But it’s still very easy to find blackjack games with beatable rules.
> blackjack is also possible to play with positive value for the player[1]
Unless you're talking about card-counting (it's fair if you are) it's not possible to "play" with a positive value for the player; doing what you have to do to get that 2% or whatever means you have to strictly run an algorithm and not fuck it up. Screw up once and that 2% is gone.
Given that they mention 'penetration' I can practically guarantee they're talking about card counting, I can't think of any other reason it would ever matter.
Semi-offtopic: It seems like it would be very easy for casinos to completely prevent card counting at blackjack.
I wonder if the fact a lot of games are beatable is intentional bait for novice counters that will screw up and lose. Maybe casinos have done the math on this and figure they win more from the novices than they lose from the experts (before they kick them out).
> I wonder if the fact a lot of games are beatable is intentional bait for novice counters that will screw up and lose.
This is surely part of it. The other factors are that many non-advantageous players dislike continuous shuffle machines for superstitious reasons, and using a traditional shoe (not continuously shuffled) but massively decreasing penetration leads to less hands per hour (and therefore less profit) due to time wasted shuffling. So neither of the most obvious countermeasures is free for the casino.
But honestly, even though it’s still beatable, the modern shoe game is way less profitable than old-school single-deck games (and casinos that still offer single-deck, like El Cortez in Vegas, are famous for watching them like a hawk and kicking out players they have the slightest suspicion are counting). So it’s not like casinos have done nothing to protect themselves from advantage players.
Card counting is indeed impossible on games with a continuous shuffling machine that shuffles after every hand (or every few hands). But many games don’t use those, because they’re expensive, and even non-advantage-players dislike them for superstitious reasons.
Indeed, plenty of games do use CSMs which is one of the many reasons card counting is harder and less profitable than it was in the past. But it’s not impossible.
Yes, I’m talking mostly about card counting (although there are other advantage strategies, like trying to find an unskilled dealer who accidentally exposed their hole card).
Competent card counters simply don’t play insurance unless the count justifies it, so it’s not really an effective countermeasure against them. It does increase the casino’s profit against unskilled players, though. (And indeed, plenty of people think they’re in the former category but are actually in the latter…)
Not quite as bad, but I've worked with plenty of APIs that have an endpoint that returns all new data since the last time you ran the call. If something goes wrong with the call, it's basically impossible to see just the new data.
That still doesn't mean that not yelling should receive any sort of admiration. You don't get bonus points for doing what should be the bare minimum, regardless of what the current norms are.
I don't see why not.
Should the anti-slavery campaigners of the 1800s receive no admiration, despite social norms at the time, because vocal opposition to slavery "should be the bare minimum"?
What about companies now that go out of their way to make sure none of the workers in their supply chain are exploited? That should be the bare minimum - should we ignore the effort that they've gone to?
What about a family member who's been clean from drugs for 10 years? Should we celebrate with them, or just ignore their achievement because not being addicted to drugs is pretty much considered the bare minimum by broader society?
Man, who would have thought "not yelling at your employees isn't an accomplishment" would be controversial...
> Should the anti-slavery campaigners of the 1800s receive no admiration, despite social norms at the time, because vocal opposition to slavery "should be the bare minimum"?
Not even close to the same. This case would be like admiring all the people that happened to not own slaves. Congrats?
Anti-slavery campaigners were doing way more than the bare minimum. No one lost their lives over just not having slaves.
> What about companies now that go out of their way to make sure none of the workers in their supply chain are exploited? That should be the bare minimum - should we ignore the effort that they've gone to?
Not even close to the same. This case would be like admiring the factory manager for not exploiting their employees. Congrats?
> What about a family member who's been clean from drugs for 10 years? Should we celebrate with them, or just ignore their achievement because not being addicted to drugs is pretty much considered the bare minimum by broader society?
Maybe if yelling at employees was incredibly physically addictive.
Literally my whole point is that you all are saying, "Wow, it's so admirable that you're not a piece of shit!".
I am 100% for real.
Everyone is a piece of shit in one way or another - and rarely do people stop being a piece of shit until some sort of external judgement/pressure is applied.
The fact that this guy refused to shout at his staff, even though he was in an environment where shouting at staff is completely tolerated, is an admirable and frankly rare trait.
It shows he actually cares about other people, rather than doing what is socially acceptable/beneficial to himself.
Very cool, and nice to see more options here (especially open source ones). I remember looking five years ago, and being very surprised that there was no Stripe-equivalent for adding scheduling to an application.
Your project looks awesome, thanks for sharing! And yeah, hopefully new booking apps will have a lot of better options now than implementing the scheduling stuff themselves.
I would love to be able to use off the shelf software, sadly I have to integrate with an internal prosumer software. It's ugly to say the least to get the data, there's no proper sync flow, it's heavily rate limited... And I have no control over it. I would love to move the scheduling outside this software, but sadly it handle other part of the logistic flow needed (book some items, get ready the work order...)
So yeah. Booking is dead simple. If you don't have a complete logistic flow added on top of it.
I spent a month in Jaco in Jan/Feb this year. I found it to be a nice middle ground where it's on the beach, but is also a (small) city with reliable internet. It's easy to get to Santa Teresa/San Jose/Manuel Antononio, etc as well.
It has a (not-entirely-undeserved) rep as being seedy/a party town, but I found the overall pros to outweigh cons related to that.
I find that whole garabito zone to be WAY TOO HOT. Like it's really dry there. The guanacaste region too gets really hot and dry. Somehow I think my health prefers hot and humid. My nose is all dusted up and clogged in those regions. That said this country has a TON of microclimate stuff going on, so there's something for everyone, because plenty of people don't seem to mind that at all!
