Like, you pay him a little (<= $20 ?) and he'll announce your game of NBA-2K26 on twitch. He does have a good radio voice. A good way to make a little in the off hours.

So, he got a gig to announce the opening of loot boxes at some show. I think it was Fortnite loot boxes. I guess it gives you the total value of the loot box spree you opened. So, 2 people buy a bunch of loot boxes, then open them up, then whoever has the higher value wins and takes both of the people's total haul.

Sounds like a strange thing to have to announce, but sure the guy says you pay and I'll say.

No, it was gambling for the watchers on polymarket [0]. People were betting on who would have the higher value. 'Like a lot of people' he said.

That's High Card. "A lot of" people were betting on games of High Card, essentially.

You know, shuffle a deck, draw 2 cards, whoever has the higher value one wins. Repeat.

It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers.

My lord, what a plague we have unleashed. We'll be dealing with this for decades.

[0] no idea if polymarket and the like do things this quickly, but he said they were gambling somehow with another site off of Twitch and then waved his phone, implying you can access it that easily.

The more anonymous the winner is relative to the action taken, the more that bad behavior is incentivized. Back when this was dreamed up, the idea was crypto. But now we have prediction markets that encourage insiders to bet. And an administration that chooses to not prosecute corruption: https://www.wsgr.com/print/v2/content/49042620/Executive-Ord...

The result is a market that incentivizes manipulating wars for private gambling profit. With no need for anonymity, because the investigators have been fired. :-(

>But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight

The era doesn't matter. The incentives are so bad, eventually you'd get a horrible result even with oversight. These markets are prone to this and shouldn't exist.

A small market is not at all efficient - it's unlikely to incorporate available information to attain accuracy.

A large market invites manipulation of the event itself - it's auto-corrupting. If ball players make $1M/year and there are easy opportunities to throw a game and make $30M anonymously, then you can expect that the game you're seeing isn't legit.

Arguably (go watch the show 'Billions') this is a big part of how the stock market works as well - insider information is rampant and overwhelming in profitability, and if you believe POSIWID ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... ) ... you're probably not doing a whole lot of trading as a personal investor based on publicly available information.

You went from a situation where the intent was for coaches to develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.

And now it's leaving at the slightest difficulty, constant money dangling to encourage transfers because even if the guy doesn't play for you at least he's not playing for your opponent, followed by a million voices online just telling kids to follow the money. There's no telling how much gambling is playing a part.

It's taken one of the best institutions in our country for developing youth and corrupted it while people go out of their way to not report on the stories of people being hurt by the process.

We're already seeing athletes try to fulfill specific bets since it's way easier to rig a play than to rig a whole game. The problem with prediction markets is that people who bet on something small and influenceable have an actual chance to change the outcome of that thing in their favor.

I am curious - how do you even begin to police such a thing like polymarket? Wouldn't it take enormous resources to do it? Is it even worth it at that scale? They let you bet on anything and everything, right?

I had fun betting $5 here and there

Maybe this is the solution - don't let people bet more than $5. That is small enough for everyone to have some fun and not worth it for insider trading, threatening journalists etc?

What about calling it "gambling" rather then "prediction market"? And then applying the gambling regulation on what is gambling.

People betting on stuff is not exactly a novel idea, the novel thing is how they are avoiding the regulations.

If you just want fun, you don't need to be gambling real money.

I cannot fathom what could be fun about that.