People have bet on the outcomes of sports for a long time, first getting standardized pay in 1867 with the Pari-Mutuel System. People would put money on a certain player getting a goal or a horse winning a race, and then depending on their track record, the payout would be higher if they had a worse track record, as it would be rarer for a worse player to show better results. The pari-mutuel system combined all of the money bet on a game and divided the money among the winners. That made betting a competition against bettors.
Horse racing has always been a popular sport associated with betting, as horses were simpler to predict compared to humans, they had easier-to-understand raw statistics, and horse racing is a simpler sport compared to soccer and basketball with all of the rules.
There are also very large betting scenes for soccer, American football, and basketball.
Sports betting wasn’t legalized in the U.S. until May 14th, 2018, when the federal government gave states the option to legalize it or not, but states like Nevada did that beforehand anyway.
With the nationwide legalization of sports betting came many sports betting sites and apps like FanDuel and DraftKings as people jumped on a newly legal way to make money.
It has the same vibe as a casino, where it preys upon gamblers’ fallacy to get people to put in money so the system can profit, but it has the advantage of real player statistics that people can base their bets off of. It could work out, and you could get a 1.5x payout from a phenomenal player if a game plays out as usual with them on top, or you could get a 10x payout from a mediocre player; the higher the risk, the higher the reward. If fewer people think like you and you win, the more you get.
All of these apps feel sketchy to me since they haven’t been around for long; they’ve capitalized on the artificial competition of placing money on a racer against someone else and their racer. I’m surprised how long it took to legalize sports betting nationwide, and I think it’s a less harmful way of gambling since slot machines are designed to keep you playing through visual stimuli rather than watching a sports game.
