Stacked Decks
I know most of you probably think I’m a red-blooded American male, gorging myself on synthetic testosterone and subscribing to ESPN so I can watch soccer matches in Brazil and tennis tournaments in Australia and Nascar anywhere they got an oval track. It’s understandable, your misconception. I probably haven’t exposed my poetic sensitive metrosexual side near enough, but it’s late in the game now and I guess you’ll have to take my word even if it brings my manly manhood down a notch or two in your estimation.
Sports. I have to confess I was never much for team sports in my youth. Oh sure, I played some Little League baseball, but I got that out of my system pretty early. And by the time I realized that proficiency in sports was inextricably connected to desirability by women, it was too late, I was doomed to lonely intellectualism. Without being very intellectual, which as you might guess, is lonely indeed.
So when Fantasy Sports reared its head this year, I didn’t have Clue One what the hell this was. I kept asking my more sports-minded buddies what this new sports craze was all about, and they kept telling me it was an on-line something or other where you could pick a team from anybody on any team and compete against folks in the world of the internet. And you could bet on your team! Gambling, that I could understand.
So now the government is looking into whether this Fantasy Sports is really gambling or is it a skill? The skill, I guess, is figuring out the odds and variables of whatever intricacies of betting on different players in different combinations you can come up with. Sort of like blackjack, you ask me. Which, if you’re a card counter, is a skill. But if you’re just a schmuck like me at the casino table, it looks remarkably like gambling. If you had to play against a good card counter, I bet (but not much) it would seem like a skill, one I don’t possess.
I saw a piece on the news last night how 91% of the money made in Fantasy Sports was made by 1.3% of the people who bet. Those, except for the Lottery addicted, are long odds. I have to say, the government might want to regulate what seems like gambling to me. The danger, of course, is they might have to take a hard look at the stock market too. I think those same 1.3% who make up the algorithms and the formulas might be the bright boys in Goldman Sachs. And I quit betting against them a long time ago.
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