The Issue I Will Have with the Superbowl

It's not Taylor Swift.  I don't care about Taylor Swift.  I mean, not at all.  I follow her in the same way that I follow Jai-alai.  When the cameras inevitably switch to her for a reaction shot, it may as well be to a shot of any other random entertainment billionaire in the fancy one-percenter boxes.  Eh.  So what?  Big deal.  

But there is something about the upcoming Superb Owl that is going to bother me, and bother me a whole bunch.  Because something has changed, and changed for ill, both in football and across the country.

I was recently walking through my home "town" in the Northern Virginia suburbs, where I passed a little laundromat.  In that laundromat, something caught my eye.

It was filled with day laborers, more than a dozen able bodied men, because that stretch of Little River Turnpike is where such men gather for whatever work they can get. They were all staring intently at the one wall not lined with washers or dryers. Against that wall were three huge vertically oriented screens, each of which were splashing the room with a shifting array of bright colors and the simulated spinning of three sets of numbers and symbols. They were Slot Machines Two Point Oh, and all were transfixed. Three men gambled, and a room spectated, entranced by the game of chance. 

Is that legal in the state of Virginia? Not really, although as our society continues to move more and more away from the Bedford Falls of George Bailey and slouches towards the crass brassy clatter of Pottersville, I’m not sure anyone cares.

In my neck of the woods, there’s also a push to drop in a casino in the Tysons Corner area, because development business growth revenue something something. Mostly, it’s because gambling is a wildly profitable business, and gambling is happy to feed the political beast with donations and the promise of lazy, predatory revenue. This is a fat season for American gambling, as anyone who pays any attention to sports at all will know. Since the Supreme Court sided with New Jersey in a case five years ago, sportsbetting has exploded. FanDuel, the most successful of these businesses and a subsidiary of the Dublin-based multinational conglomerate Flutter, saw a 600% increase in use and a similar increase in profit between 2019 and 2022.

With FanDuel, you can gamble from your phone, gamble all the time, bet on every play in a game, never ever stop gambling, dopamine hit after dopamine hit until you’ve maxed out all your cards and drained every account. It’s wildly successful, virally successful, a perfect storm that “leverages the synergies” between gambling’s addictive qualities and the operant conditioning techniques that corporate clinical psychologists have woven into contemporary app design.

When the Superbowl is broadcast from Vegas...and there's a reason it's in Vegas, honeychild...there’ll be a great onslaught of ads telling us just how much fun it is to gamble. 

My Scots blood helps inoculate me against this siren song.  I’m cheap as dirt and have more than a wee bit of lingering Calvinist cynicism about bright lights and shiny objects.  

I can’t, however, miss the impact it has on those who get hooked on false hope and dopamine, who can’t afford to lose the money they bet, the people who’ve hit bottom, who are driving a 100% increase in calls to addiction hotlines over the last two years.  The flacks for the gambling "industry" swear up and down that this is because they inde that little warning in their ads, but c'mon.

We're not idiots.

I'll enjoy the game, although not as much as I would had either Detroit or Baltimore made it.  

But every time I see an gambling ad...for DraftKings, for FanDuel, or MGM...I'll recoil.

Faith, Morality, Gambling, and the Poor

An article on the front page of the Post today highlighted a peculiarity here in the great state of Virginia.    We Vah-ginn-yuns are among the ever-shrinking cadre of states that do not permit casino gambling.  It's a motley little group, comprised of some peculiar bedfellows.  There's a cluster of Deeply Red states, mostly southern, in which the refusal to allow gambling stems mostly from religious conservatism.

There's a small cluster of Deeply Blue states, meaning Vermont, New Hampshire, and Hawaii, in which gambling is prohibited largely because it's not really an industry, but rather a great way to separate a sucker from his or her money.  It disproportionately impacts the poor, and is a fundamentally anti-progressive "industry." 

What struck me in the article were two things.  First, the story includes numerous quotes from the Democratic leader of the majority party in the Virginia State Senate, who views "gaming" as the sort of economic activity that would be good for the state.  That State Senator Dick Saslaw would be in support of gambling is at least consistent, as he's also been the primary proponent of the recent spread of car-title-lending businesses in Virginia.  Loan sharking and gambling?   Guess he never met a predatory business model he didn't like, although how this attitude flies with the Democratic primary voters in his putatively progressive congressional district is beyond me.

Second, I was struck by a flawed assumption in the Post's coverage.  The assumption was this:  There are people who oppose casino gambling for religious reasons, and then there are people who oppose casino gambling because of the impact it has on the poor.  These categories were presented as if they were different…but I don't think that they are.  Not at all.

Here, the flaw in the assumption seems rooted in the idea that faith and religious morality are solely individual things.  It's just about me and My Personal Relationship with My Lord and Savior ™, or so the idea goes.  From that perspective, you only don't gamble because it's morally weak and imprudent.  And, yeah, it is unwise, but that's not the whole of it.

Because Christian faith is not just personal wisdom.  It's fundamentally relational.  Meaning, it has to do not just with ourselves and our personal prosperity and spirituality, but is radically oriented towards the other. It is rooted in compassion, a deep awareness of the impacts of our actions on other beings.  From that compassion, you look at actions that are causing harm to others, and are compelled to speak and act against them.

For Christians of all ilks and political persuasions, care for those who are struggling is a fundamental moral and spiritual imperative. Actions and behaviors that generate profit at the expense of another are radically in opposition to the core value of Christian faith, and that becomes particularly and doubly true when it comes to the poor.  

As Pope Francis has recently and wonderfully declared, you can't parse out faith from the care for the poor, not if our faith is to have any integrity.  

Gambling, Compassion, and the Probability of Suffering

One of the most fascinating chapters in Nate Silver's The Signal and The Noise comes after he's talked baseball and politics and weather.   For two years, Silver was a professional gambler.  Meaning he quit his job at a prominent accounting firm, and lived entirely off of his winnings from poker.

From his own account, he was pretty good at it.  For a while, at least.   This was in the early days of internet gambling, when it was wild and unregulated and free.   Texas Hold 'Em was his game of choice, and as poker is not entirely random like roulette, someone with Silver's self-discipline and focus was able to make a great heaping mound of cash.

His knowledge of human behavior, his skills at analyzing probability spreads, and his relentless focus on self-correction and learning meant that in those two years, he walked away from internet gambling with a total net of around $400,000.   He wasn't the best at the game.  He calculates his skill as being ninetieth percentile on a good day.

But he did well.  And he knew when to walk away, because when US regulations clamped down on online gambling, it got untenably harder for Silver to make a living at it.   Why?    Silver chalks it up to the nanny state, driven by moralizing Republicans.

Using longitudinal data provided by several major internet gambling sites, Silver was able to quantify this.  For gambling to be profitable for those in the top 20% of gamers, Silver writes, there need to be "fish."  Fish are people who are for crap at poker, but are too blind to their own incompetence to realize it.   Internet gambling...wide open, easy access, 24/7...was like open sea drift net fishing, or tossing explosives into a well-stocked trout pond.  "Fish" came in vast schools, and the pickings were...well, like shooting fish in a barrel.

With that as the dynamic, gambling could be remarkably lucrative for the two top niches.    Silver objectively analyzed how each of the deciles (meaning, each 10% category relative to losses/winnings) fared during his period of success.  What he found was that 80% of folks who played lost, and only folks in the top 20% broke even, with only the top 10% really doing well.  He also observed the losses growing exponentially as you moved further down the food chain.  This was important, because as Silver analyzed the data, the catastrophic losses of the bottom 10% of players are what make gambling profitable for people at his skill level.

These are the addicts and the incompetents and the delusional souls...and as they bleed out everything they own, their lifeblood is the fertilizer for the rest of the system.   Remove the suckers from the system, and the window of predictable profitability narrows, to only about the top five percent of gamblers.

When the "fish" were driven away by legislation, Silver found the going a lot harder, and after one disastrous night when he lost over $75,000, he abandoned the pursuit entirely.   Silver saw that legislation as destroying the probability of profit.  As a rational actor able to protect his own self-interest, that reduction in probability made gambling too high-risk to be a viable primary source of income, and he knew when to fold 'em.

But reason and compassion are not the same thing.

Reading that same data, I also saw it probabilistically, but in a different way.  Instead of self-interest and profit as a primary ethic, I ask: What is the probability of a particular action inflicting harm and suffering?

I have friends who gamble, and who enjoy it, and whose lives are viable.  But I've also known "fish."  They've been hardworking people, generally.  They've tended to be idealists and dreamers, and their grasp of their own place in reality has been filtered deeply through their own dreams.   From that place, they've done huge and lasting damage to their relationships and their lives, as that delusional conviction that luck is just one big wager away has destroyed them.

I've seen it turn brother against brother, watched as gambler-boyfriends have lied and betrayed, or connived to get widows to second-mortgage their homes because that one score was just a card away.

As a pastime, it's fine.  But as an industry?   It is an industry where the product is an 80% chance of loss, and whose profitability is reliant on the catastrophic financial losses of its bottom decile.

Understanding ethical behavior towards other sentient beings probabilistically, I see in "gaming" an industry that vastly increases the probability of loss and suffering.   As I am painfully aware of my own limitations, I stay away from it.  Giving you a dollar for the thrill of getting twenty cents back just doesn't strike me as entertainment.

But I also stay away from it because, as Silver objectively observes, it systemically violates the core ethic of my faith.

As a rational Christian in a probabilistic universe, my aim is to reduce the probability of suffering.  When Jesus asked us to be "fishers of men," finding easy marks was not what he meant.