Gambling from home is growing more popular
“LAS VEGAS,” said Frank Sinatra, “is the only place I know where money really talks—it says, ‘Goodbye.'” But thanks to changing regulations and improvements in computing and mobile technology, you can now contrive to bid your money farewell from the comfort of your own home. Interactive gambling—a category that encompasses sports betting, poker, casino games, slots and other such wagers placed from a home computer, interactive TV or mobile phone—makes up an increasingly important part of the global gambling market, according to data from H2 Gambling Capital, but not an evenly distributed one. The world's biggest gambling market, the United States, remains its most divided. Betting is legal—encouraged, even, as Ol' Blue Eyes can attest—in Las Vegas and Atlantic City; most states have government-run lotteries; and horse tracks around the country are rolling in slots revenue. But online poker remains illegal (which is not the same thing as not done). China seems to have similar qualms. And the global uptake rate is steady, but not especially fast, which suggests that gambling remains a social endeavour. Penury loves company.
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When I first looked at the title, I misperceived it as saying "bedwetting"
I was like, hmm interesting issue for a Daily chart to address.....
Why online poker is illegal?
Definitely not because the online casino can cheat. The casino has its own way of making money. The games are constructed in the way that statistically at high volume the casino wins its share anyway, so there is no need to cheat.
What makes online poker different is that casino cannot prevent cheating by players. Collusion is pervasive. And you don't need two or more persons to do it. With such tools like securitykiss and their dedicated IP, one person can register several accounts from different IP addresses and it is undetectable to the casino.
Anyway I don't see a problem with the fact that as someone said "the mathematically challenged" pay their tax. Just one more way the markets get efficient and clean out the gene pool.
Betting is legal, probably because that´s what you to in financial markets. I guess if it was banned it would still exist, namely under the supervision of organized crime. But - then, Wallstreet is defined by an organized, but legal activity, which has much more serious repercursions for people´s financial health than what we call organized crime. The western world is reaping the fruits of organized betting on Wallstreet and in the LSE. I guess some people just can´t be saved from themselves.
As part of this growing global phenomenon you forgot to mention online financial spread betting and CFDs which are almost as popular as sports betting and casino games nowadays. They are equally addictive and certainly an equally effective a way of losing money, I can assure you!
Gambling activities date back to biblical times! Many women gamble world wide. By implication, many men are prostitutes.
This is totally messed up presentation, Macau lost is 34b, twice that of China and 34% of US, which I suppose should be added to the 15b China losses. In any case, Chinese is the worst addict. Sweden is as noticeable as its suicide rate.
What do you consider so special with the Swedish suicide rate? Sweden is 30th (below China, Russia, Finland, France, Austria, Hong Kong, New Zealand, etc) in the list of countries with the highest suicide rate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate#List
Anyway, the first chart shows "Interactive gambling as % of total". Therefore, if I were the only one gambling in the whole country and I gambled USD 1 once a year online, then the graph would show 100% for my country, although that wouldn't be very alarming.
I think it would make more sense to show gambling losses as a % of GDP. This would really show the relative addiction of gambling in the world.
I was talking about an old joke, that Northern Europeans are high on suicides (and low on daylight), which was probably true some time ago.
As a % of GDP Sweden actually did not do bad either.
Graph and perception can be wrong. :)
This is "interactive" gambling and I am surprised that Greece ranked top as the least loser. That may say a lot and the American loses everytime they hit the e-keyboards. What an entertaining piece of rubbish!
I'm surprised why china and HK are seperated in this table.They have a common name 'CHN',aren't they?
In the economics context, when people talk about "countries", they really mean economies, or markets. That's why the eurozone sometimes also takes a separate spot.
stupid ipad 3 retina can't show the graph for macau for per capita loss when U.S. is norm
It is worth remembering that ALL forward-looking business (and human) activity is gambling. It's just that some forms of gambling have a quicker return or loss than others. For example, when I play roulette, I will know within 30 seconds whether my US$100 bet on red has won or lost. When I enter a new market for widgets, it will take several months before I know whether my US$10,000,000 bet on the widget market has won or lost. Perhaps The Economist should be renamed The Gambler...
I´m not surprised to see Greece, Italy and Spain in that Chart...honorary members of the PIIGS club
Looking at the graph, should we conclude that the UK is four times more of a PIIG than them?
If you include the gambling losses of Wall Street...the London Whale alone...will make internet gambling losses like a walk in the park.
Casino or internet gambling are zero-sum games; while stock and commodities markets are devices for the efficient allocation of resources. Investments are directed toward companies or products that have the best chance of making a return -- and directed away from declining industries. By creating the liquidity necessary for timely trading, when circumstances change, they actually greatly reduce the risk for investors.
In theory you are right. However, the way these Wall Street gamblers ( I meant traders) are betting on one directional move of the market in of itself is a gambling bet that does not take in account of all the fundamental of corrective trading and or investing. You defined the term "investment" quite accurately and that is what most long term investor would do. The trading activities of wall street such as high-frequncy trading, robo trading, naked shorting, pump-and-dump scheme are all one form of gambling. These transaction does not add economic values to society.
" The trading activities of wall street such as high-frequncy trading, robo trading, naked shorting, pump-and-dump scheme are all one form of gambling."
You've mixed together legal and useful activities (high-frequency trading) and some legal but perhaps questionable activities (robo trading and naked shorting), in with a completely illegal activity (pump-and-dump).
Pump-and-dump isn't gambling -- it's fraud. It's a criminal act. It has nothing at all to do with the question at hand.
High frequency traders add liquidity to the market. They allow the market to clear, much, much faster than it would, if there were only long-term buy-and-hold investors present. That provides very useful information to all involved, and (as any reader of The Economist should know) markets function best when there is good information. If there were no traders, the risk for investors would be greater. They would not have accurate information as to the current value of a stock, before they made their investment (or divestment) decisions. If you look at the tapes for stocks with little trading activity; you will see that the spread (between bid and ask prices) is much larger than it is for frequently traded stocks. The traders increase liquidity, and therefore actually reduce market risk for everyone.
Gambling and risk taking share the same personality genetic traits as entrepreneurship and innovation.
Men are gamblers; Women are content.
Silicon Valley is more similar to Las Vegas than Manhattan.
To dare to be great, one must risk and gamble.
Men represent the bulk of gamblers, true, but women are not "content," they have more concern for security. A guy who blows his paycheck in Vegas has his fantasy of winning big. His wife and kids have other priorities, like food and the mortgage payment. If men could only be made to understand that they have a much greater chance of losing than winning, interest in gambling might dwindle. But there's the old devils, the XY gene pair and testosterone working to overwhelm common sense: give any guy a couple of free beers and he thinks he's the late Amarillo Slim.
Based on my casino experience in Canada, your average gambler is a lot more likely to be a retiree or a senior person than average, and I didn't see any lack of old ladies playing slots or roulette.
Yes, casinos in my state have special days and nights for retirees, who should be old enough to know better, but apparently don't. At least the financial damage they do to themselves doesn't have the same repercussions as my hypothetical example of a breadwinner blowing a paycheck and the negative impact on his family.
The problem with on-line gambling is fair play. It is almost impossible to enforce fair play since the house could very well use a rigged algorithm. During inspection, if such inspections were practicable, they could very well present clean code.
The only situation I can think of is some kind of government cloud from where these applications would be forced to run. Thus the code would always be open to inspection. It is really not practical. But this is where the problem lies, enforcement is just too impractical.
...
And in what sense can conventional gambling claim to uphold "fair play"?
The gaming industry is about screwing the statistically illiterate in society - throwing them scraps of false hope, and mixing the rape with a few exciting thrills.
Mankind's failure to intuit risk is a scourge on general financial (and hence material) well-being. It takes a good mathematical education with a little probability theory - or tales of horrific personal suffering - to overcome the industry's innate attractions.
"The problem with on-line gambling is fair play. It is almost impossible to enforce fair play since the house could very well use a rigged algorithm."
1. The software in online casino is manufactured by renowned companies that do not allow casinos to play with their algorithms.
2. It is relatively easy to prove cheating in games like roulette or blackjack when the distribution of outcomes is predictable in great number of plays.
As an online gambler (mostly betting not casinos) i do consider online gambling safe.
Also the industry created its own watchdogs (like http://www.sportsbookreview.com/) that carry out disputes on the behalf of players who think they were cheated. I don't think we need some kind of industry central regulator. The real problem is missing tax revenue because most of the online gambling companies operate in tax havens but that's a different story.
I am not quite sure I follow your argument here. The fact that some nice guys in the industry are willing and eager to do the right thing does not prevent rogues from doing otherwise. Unless of course we have regulation forcing the online casino's to use regulated software.
I would also caution against placing too much trust in these "renowned" companies. I personally know of a multi-million dollar software firm that allowed a egregious flaw in their stock trading software to remain unreported for fear of damaging their brand.
A bit ungenerous me thinks. Not all gamblers are statistically illiterate.
I've never understood why someone would like to gamble against someone they don't know in the first place (against someone they do know I can understand; you're having fun with friends, and at worst your friends will take your money). But I have an even harder time understand why on Earth people would play against strangers for money online: I mean, how in the world do you know that the other people at your virtual poker table aren't all controlled by the same person? How do you know the game is fair?
Gambling...a tax on the mathematically challenged.
Not quite.
Firstly, gambling is a valid form of entertainment.
Secondly, even in statistics, things are not really straightforward for such highly nonlinear distribution as far as a simple concept of mathematical expectations go. It becomes, effectively, a regime changing structure that, in case of lottery tickets, makes some financial states possible.
"It becomes, effectively, a regime changing structure that, in case of lottery tickets, makes some financial states possible."
Like I said, a tax on the mathematically challenged.
Also, I'd be extremely curious to hear your explanation as to how non-linear distributions aren't subject to the concept of expectations.
You might say that about many forms of gambling such as: roulette, blackjack, craps, and lottery tickets; where, regardless of skill, the player is predestined to lose in the long run. However, it is possible to be a long-run winner betting on sports, such as horse racing or football. Punters, who study the track records (literally) of the players, and who are mathematically gifted, can win more often than losing. The same can be said about poker, where the players' relative skills -- including real-time analysis of complex probability distributions -- separate the winners from the losers. There are several wealthy professional poker players.
Agreed - not all people have normally distributed odds for all games.
But those who are good at gambling are, as a general rule, not mathematically challenged. In fact, I'd assume they're quite good at it. This would exempt them from the original statement.
And even if some people do have a better chance of winning than others, you can still find the mathematical expectation for that particular person.