Sports Gambling

I just read a transcription of a radio broadcast, On Point (wbur in Boston), Inside the Life of a ‘degenerate’ Sports Gambler.
You already know what the problem is, so if you never gamble, you may want to pass this along to any young people you may know.
If you gamble on sports or culture, you’re going to lose.
The future cannot be seen, and the system is set up to ensure that you lose by trying.
The house stacks the cards against you, and they charge you a fee for the right to play.
Also, the House can afford to let you win a little when you make your first bets. They are raking the money in from all the suckers who think they have figured out the game. Those suckers always think they’re going to keep winning, but they have only started a long slide to the bottom.
On the insignificant other hand, if you want to be a pro gambler (someone who occasionally wins or breaks even from time to time), you will lose something even more valuable than your money, all your free time. To be a successful gambler, you will have to do a mountain of time-consuming research. You will need all the information you can get to ever have a chance to fine-tune your guessing skills.
Even then, it’s very hard. The article interviewed a well-known gambler and prognosticator, Nate Silver. The first thing he said was that to be good at it, you have to take all the emotion out of it, which is the main reason gamblers mostly lose a lot. We humans are emotional, waking and sleeping. Those emotions are nearly impossible to turn off. The best you can do is rein them in, like wild horses.
The worst is sports betting! The House siphons in a ton of our money on sporting events which are impossible to predict. Even the most informed and successful gamblers, like Nate Silver, are happy when they can successfully break even on NFL or NBA games. There are way too many variables on every play. The House doesn’t need to know who is going to win. They just need to know how most people will bet.
Oh, by the way, if you put in all the work to become like Nate Silver, and you start to show an above-average ability to get ahead of time and circumstances, the sky will no longer be the limit. Surprise! The House will issue new rules just for you and the few others like you. They’ll limit the amount you can bet to a couple of bucks. What do you know?!?! Your bubble will have just been burst. If you do show any ability to win, they will rein you in. They definitely do that. They don’t care if you are not cheating. They will just move to stop your winning.
In the unlikely event that a significant number of gamblers ever got good at it, the House would just charge higher fees or put a bigger cap on all above-average winning wagers.
Gambling is a way to challenge fate, and that can be a thrilling challenge, but, overall, you are just going to lose. Any inveterate gambler will tell you that you have to learn to not mind losing, and that it’s going to take all of your free time and money to do that.
There may be some manipulation going on. The gambling apps have to show a disclaimer, but they aren’t showing commercials featuring sad people with empty pockets. Instead, it usually looks like a party. But we are all free agents in the Universe, so if you’ve got a ton of money and don’t mind losing it, then you can look at it like a harmless game. And it’s a social event, so you and your friends can celebrate and cry together. Most often you’ll all be crying.
Proposed: Let’s be smart and avoid the obsessive and disappointing hobby known as gambling. In the long run, any thrill we might get on the occasions when we make the right guess will not compensate.