Nate Silver: evaluation

Transcript context

…Shouldn’t they just stop the betting on, say, how many rebounds a player pulls down? It encourages corruption. It’s not actually a suspenseful act, whether it’s seven or eight rebounds, whereas who wins the Super Bowl presumably is a suspenseful, meaningful act for many people. That’s right. If you have a Jalen Brunson — I’m a Knicks fan — or someone who’s a major star, then it might make sense. But no, these books have way too wide a menu of events, and the sharper books don’t. The sharper books will pull a line down. If Steph Curry is questionable for the game, you can get a gigantic edge if you have any inside information about whether he’s going to play or not. They will just not take that bet, or they won’t do the more esoteric player prop stuff. Or things like the NFL draft — if you are an NFL reporter for ESPN, then you could probably absolutely crush NFL draft bets. You might get fired if someone finds out, but the retail books are like, “Yes, we can put bets up that a knowledgeable person could make money on because we won’t let the knowledgeable people bet in the first place. ” Relatively, I guess it’s a sustainable equilibrium in the long run. I’m not quite so sure. One thing that sites like DraftKings are relying upon is, they’re basically piggybacking off the sharp sites, because you can just set your line based on Pinnacle, for example, or Circa. These are books that are sharp, and they actually do take bets from winning customers. DraftKings piggybacks off them. If we could enforce just an outright ban, what’s the cost-benefit analysis on banning all sports gambling?…

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