The Thrill Of The Long Shot

It may not surprise you to learn that gambling is believed to predate human civilization, going back into the Paleolithic (aka "Stone") Age. Indeed, Fred Flintstone himself had a gambling problem.

Dice have existed for thousands of years, as have playing cards and dominoes, and even apart from such devices, people have long bet on events of all sorts. Clearly, something in human nature is fed by gambling.

And as naturally, there are those who have decried the behavior and sought to control or prohibit it. Some are moralists of either religious or secular origin. Others. more cynically, want to use the power of law to bend the revenue stream in their direction. Often, the latter leverage the former, and often, some are both. I recall church bazaars from my youth, where a sub-eighteen year old me actually got to bet real money on games where the house had a mathematical advantage, guaranteeing that patrons, in the aggregate, would lose money, because "good cause."

I also recall, again from my sub-eighteen years in high school, some classmates betting on football games. Completely illegally, of course - at the time you could only bet on sports in Nevada's casinos. In fact, gambling has long been a major revenue stream for organized crime.

Of course, there was legal gambling even in the days of my youth. Betting on horse racing went through a period of "temperance" in the late 19th century, but became formally legal again in 1908. The New York State Lottery drew its first numbers in 1966, and New York's Off Track Betting (OTB) business began in 1971. OTB went belly-up in 2009, by the way. Leave it to the government to figure out how to lose money from a gambling monopoly.

Across that time span, those who wished to gamble had to either travel to casinos (Las Vegas, Atlantic City, some riverboats, some Native American reservations), partake of the incredibly poor odds that government lotteries pay, play poker with friends, or go black-market.

I roast the hypocrisy of government-run lotteries here.

Much has changed in the ensuing decades. In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a 1992 law that restricted sports betting, and the floodgates opened. Today, gambling is a huge and widespread business that's accessible to anyone with a smart phone. The moralists and Puritans have lost this particular culture war.

What piqued my interest is this Wall Street Journal article about how long-shot bets have become increasingly popular. Parlays, where one bets on a sequence of outcomes rahter than one, are a booming segment of sports betting, even though their payouts (that is, the average return on a bet) are poorer than single-event bets.

In this they resemble lotteries, as my linked article discusses. Where, mathematically, a blackjack player playing "basic strategy" can expect, over the long term, to win up to 99.5 cents on the dollar, a lottery like the MegaMillions pays out well under 50 cents on the dollar.

Sports betting can include an element of skill, in that someone with an intimate knowledge and a lot of research can give himself enough of an advantage to overcome the "vig," i.e. the percentage that the entity organizing the gambling keeps for itself (often around 10%). But, it's likely that most gamblers overestimate their skill, just as most blackjack card counters just aren't good enough to actually succeed. So, for most, sports gambling is a net-lose proposition like casino table games and state lotteries are.

The utility of gambling is obviously not in the expected profit, so it's got to be something else.

That something else is entertainment. I've sat at a blackjack table and enjoyed the thrill of winning even as I knew that I was simply buying those thrills and that, barring luck, I was going to leave poorer than when I sat down. In that, it's no different from going to the movies or paying for some other time-consuming entertainment. We trade the fruit of our labor for recreation. It is the gamble itself that stimulates our pleasure centers.

Not all stimuli are equal, of course. Rip-roaring comedies appeal more than "ooh, clever" subtlety, jumpscare horror flicks that wouldn't qualify as "art" under even the most generous critic's eye rake in millions. Likewise, only a few psychopaths prefer a mediocre, half-ripe cantaloupe to one at peak of sweetness.

So it goes with gambling, the evidence tells us. The thrill of the big win, the endorphin rush of a long shot, that is why people throw money at lotteries and at parlays and at 500:1 prop bets instead of high-probability payoffs that might you twenty cents on the dollar.

It's also why Ralph Kramden and his animated doppelgänger Fred Flintstone were always get-rich-quick scheming, why boiler rooms are able to lure patsies into buying their garbage offerings, why meme stocks are a thing, and why the dream of cryptocurrency as a snoop-resistant means of exchange fell prey to the "let's get rich on Bitcoin" avarice.

The thing about long shots is that they rarely succeed. Often, when they do, they simply inspire more of the same behavior, dissipating the benefit, wasting the luck, and bringing people back to the mean. I recall an acquaintance from decades back who, despite (or perhaps because) being well-to-do, spent a couple hundred dollars a week on lotteries. When he finally hit a jackpot, to the tune of a million or so as I recall, word was he just kept on gambling. Obviously, the thrill mattered more than rationality.

Old-school gamblers who prefer traditional wagers, such as single bets on who will win a game, think of parlays as a rip-off—some call them “sucker bets”—because their long odds make it nearly impossible to regularly win money. But fans of parlays say that while the wagers are true long shots, the appeal of winning five figures from $5 is too strong to pass up.

The question we see - not as eternal as gambling, but probably as eternal as civilization - is whether and to what extent "society" should intervene in the irrational act that is most gambling.

You knew this was going to end up with a liberty lesson, didn't you?

Scolds such as Congressman Paul Tonko (D-NY) and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) take the standard alarmist tone by branding gambling with the "public health" canard, and in doing so trying to bootstrap both the authority and the moral imperative to coercively restrict behaviors by and between consenting adults.

[E]very single moment of every sporting event across the globe has become a betting opportunity. That’s resulted in a frightening rise in gambling disorder, which has in turn enacted a horrific toll on individuals, many of whom have lost their home, job, marriage, and their lives. We have a duty to protect people and their families from suffering the tremendous harm related to gambling addiction.

This bill is a matter of public health. It is a matter of stopping addiction, saving lives, and making sure that young people particularly are protected against exploitation.

We all do countless irrational things every day. But, you know what? That's our choice, and any society with the audacity to call itself "free" has no business interfering with our freely-engaged behaviors. Gambling prohibition didn't work, and liberation of gambling from government's greedy hogs and the underworld's leg breakers was something long-overdue. And, even today, there are too many restrictions. Why, for example, does the government get to have a monopoly on lotteries? Because it is supposedly "doing good" with the rapacious profits? If the private sector could run lotteries, you know the payouts would be better than they currently are.

Just like every other vice and "sin," gambling runs afoul of the puritanical in our society.

Are there people who have gambling problems, whose addiction to this pastime have taken then down the path of ruin? Of course and obviously. People ruin their lives in countless ways.

Society, however, doesn't try to litigate away the freedom of those who eat themselves into obesity-related health problems, or to six-figure credit card debt due to shopping addiction. Society hasn't banned tobacco, no matter how many deaths it has caused.

On the flip side, we see many destructive behaviors encouraged by government intervention. Two-parent households in the black community ran about 80% before LBJ's "Great Society" decided to help that community by throwing money at it. Now, two-parent households are down to 25%, and since a two-parent household is by far the biggest indicator of life success, that "help" has done immeasurable harm to the community government purported to help. Likewise, government largess has so skewed college education that countless young people are entering adulthood with six figure debts and useless degrees.

Some will argue that Corporate America is predatory in its marketing, that people are too susceptible to the carefully orchestrated advertising barrages. Private-sector corporations cannot, however, hold a candle to the government in the "predatory" department. Beyond the government's ability to grant itself monopoly status in such things as lotteries, government coercion of any sort is definitionally market-distorting. No private-sector company can distort the marketplace, by contrast. An occasional crusader might genuinely believe he is doing good by limiting others' freedoms, but history proves time and again that human behavior cannot be legislated away, that unintended consequences prevail, and that the goals get overwhelmed by negative distortions. Coercive morality gets mugged by reality.

I've occasionally been lured by the siren song of the long-shot. I've kicked a ten or a twenty toward a billion dollar PowerBall jackpot from time to time, if only to engage in idle fantasies of what life would be like with that big a chunk of money landing in my bank account. Rational? No, but neither is that third slice of chocolate cake. So what? It's my choice, and no one has any business impeding it.

I’ve never understood how people can justify doing harm to those who’ve done nothing wrong as a means of trying to alter other people’s behavior. The only rational conclusion is that the doers do not believe in freedom.