> should be illegal globally

Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.

Banning "unregulated gambling" is just pressure to make sure that the Spanish gambling racket stays intact for the bookies already at the top.

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pimterry 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.

Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting, or issues with gambling? All the stats I can see suggest the opposite, and there's already plenty of tight restrictions on local gambling businesses (sports sponsorship ban, welcome bonus ban, almost no public advertising, etc). At a quick google, it looks like the 'Spanish gambling racket' for sports is tiny, gambling problem stats far lower than UK/France/Italy, and most gambling that does happen is the lotteries etc instead, which has its sins, but is a very different beast.

Is there something specific you're getting at?

	▲	jmorenoamor 17 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Ludopaths often try to put on the same level national lotteries with sports betting and other means of information based betting. Not a fan of lottery myself, but at least it's just some random numbers drawn from a drum. There is hardly any dark pattern or illegal incentive there. It is just you against Thomas Bayes.
	▲	anthk 5 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting La Quiniela, a lottery based on soccer matches' results. Every middle aged man filled some weekly forms (win for locals/draw/win for foreigners) as if it was a religion. If you matched 14 from 15 results (much better with 15), you could get a big prize. Also, Jai Alai matches on the North of Spain had huge bets on results too. Younger millenials and Gen-Zers will just play on RETA which is kinda the same as La Quiniela but online.

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bee_rider an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t see the need to have gambling, but if they are going to have it, I can see some merit to the idea of making sure the proceeds of these silly games at least stay local. It’s not like engineering or something, where protectionism allows local businesses to survive while falling behind the global market, resulting in worse products.

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Copenjin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sadly correct and I expect that many other countries will follow suit very soon, they don't really care about gambling addiction or related problems.