Azartiniai lošimai, priklausomybės ir pažeidžiamumas

Nuo pat vaikystės šalia teatro visuomet buvo ir sportas: iš pradžių krepšinis, o paskui futbolas, kuris ir šiandien lydi M. Pažemecką. Tad pradėjo žaisti Panevėžio „Statybos“ futbolo komandoje, vėliau „Ekrane“.

„Juk reikėjo iš kažko gyventi. Kas ketvirtą parą dirbdavau ugniagesiu gelbėtoju, žaidžiau Lietuvos ugniagesių sporto rinktinėje, o kitomis dienomis žaisdavau futbolą. Net būdamas keturiasdešimties dar stovėjau „Ekrano“ komandos vartuose“, – pasakojo Marius.

Tuo metu buvo savotiška tradicija visas pergales ar pralaimėjimus „aplaistyti“. Nors sportas ir alkoholis – nesuderinami dalykai, jaunystė gebėjo atlaikyti viską. Dėl tokių pasirinkimų gerokai vėliau M. Pažemeckui išlindo bėdos su širdimi. Jam operuoti meniskai, išvaržos – visos sportinės traumos atsiliepia dabar.

Kaip sako Marius, sportas pavojingas dar ir tuo, kad tik retas profesionalus sportininkas sukaupia rezervą tam metui, kai nebegalės žaisti. Daugelis vėliau žaidžia mėgėjų lygose, bet iš to neišgyvensi. Todėl dauguma sportininkų stresą ir nerimą dėl ateities pradeda laistyti alkoholiu.

„Ne kiekvienas sportininkas uždirba kaip Arvydas Sabonis. Iš pradžių po truputį ir net nepajunti, kaip esi įtraukiamas į priklausomybių liūną. Visų istorijos panašios – nuo alkoholio prasideda narkotikai, lošimai, antidepresantai ir kita puokštė priklausomybių“, – atvirauja buvęs futbolininkas.

Two Lithuanian men “trafficked” to Ireland to work as gardeners in a cannabis growhouse in Arvagh have been sentenced before Cavan Circuit Court.

Edas Jankauskas (21) charged with cultivating cannabis and possession of €2,750 in cash, the proceeds of crime, was given a 12 month sentence; while Valius Sakavicius (24), due to his previous criminal record, received a 16-month term for cultivation. Both sentences were back-dated to take into account time already served.

As part of the sentencing handed down by Judge John Aylmer, Jankausas has been given four weeks to leave the country post release and told he cannot return for a period of 12 months.

They pleaded guilty last February to cultivation of cannabis worth over €195,000 at 3 Bruce Manor, Arvagh, on November 16, 2023. The offence carries with it a maximum term of 14 years' imprisonment before mitigation.

<...>Jankauskas, the court was told, immediately asked to speak with a solicitor. He made “full admissions” to gardaí about his involvement, and also asked to “speak with his mother”. “He was extremely upset,” said Gda Maguire.

The judge was told that Jankauskas had amassed debts in excess of €7,000 through visiting a local casino back home in Lithuania.

He told gardaí he'd been “hit and beaten”, that he felt “trapped” working in the growhouse, and was ultimately too “afraid to run away”. Jankauskas stated that his mother had been “threatened” for his failure to pay back the money he owed, that he had been taken to the house in Arvagh where he met Sakavicius, who himself only arrived there the month before.

Jankauskas told gardaí he “didn't want to be there”. “I'm not a criminal,” said Jankauskas, who Judge Aylmer was told once had a promising career as a talented footballer before contracting Covid, an illness from which he never fully recovered. Unable to play the game he loved, Jankauskas instead whittled his time away gambling.

Jankauskas told gardaí he'll “never come back” to Ireland if released. He was told by the gang the owed money to that he was to work at the growhouse “to pay off the debt”.

The money Jankauskas was found in possession of was due to be handed over at a “football ground” near Cavan.

The Lithuanian Gaming Control Authority has reported that gambling [organizatorių] revenue in the country reached €116m in the first half of 2024. That’s a rise of6.9 per cent year-on-year. Player spending increased by 6 per cent to €1.27bn.

Growth was driven by the online gambling market, where revenue rose 12.6% to €81.3m. <>As for [online] sports betting, revenue rose 1.6 per cent to €19.3m. Wagers were up 2.4 per cent at €289m.

Alarming patterns have started to emerge. Two recent working papers look at the economic impacts of legalization. One, by Northwestern University’s Scott Baker and colleagues, finds that legal sports gambling depletes households’ savings. Specifically, for every $1 spent on betting, households put $2 less into investment accounts. States see big increases in the risk of overdrafting a bank account or maxing out a credit card. These effects are strongest among already precarious households.

A second paper, from the economists Brett Hollenbeck of UCLA and Poet Larsen and Davide Proserpio of the University of Southern California, tells a similar story. Looking specifically at online sports gambling, they find that legalization increases the risk that a household goes bankrupt by 25 to 30 percent, and increases debt delinquency. These problems seem to concentrate among young men living in low-income counties—further evidence that those most hurt by sports gambling are the least well-off.

A third recent paper, from the University of Oregon economists Kyutaro Matsuzawa and Emily Arnesen, shows another, perhaps more surprising—and certainly more harrowing—harm of gambling legalization: domestic violence. Earlier research found that an NFL home team’s upset loss causes a 10 percent increase in reported incidents of men being violent toward their partner. Matsuzawa and Arnesen extend this, finding that in states where sports betting is legal, the effect is even bigger. They estimate that legal sports betting leads to a roughly 9 percent increase in intimate-partner violence.

Pagal žodį lažybininkai:

MLB INSIDERS react to 2024 baseball betting scandal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miGZA6MDLig

Įdomesnis dalykas, už tuos pralaimėtus pačių žaidėjų pralošomus. Čia apie dar atskirą problemą, kuri dėl lošimų paveikia varžybų žiūrovus:

The recent surge in legalized gambling in every pro league, and throughout college athletics, has impacted American sports in ways thought unimaginable just a few years ago. But along with the potential good that hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenues bring to the NBA and other leagues, something new and ominous has arrived: verbal abuse directed at players and coaches based solely on fans’ wagers.

Teams now have partnerships with casinos and build their arenas next to them. Announcers, long allergic to any references to betting, now commonly cite wagering information during broadcasts. The NBA recently announced that it would allow fans watching games on its streaming app to track betting odds and click through to make bets with the league’s betting partners, FanDuel and DraftKings.

But an unintended consequence of this new relationship comes out of the mouths of increasingly irked fans.

https://www.90min.lt/forumas/P-t3457?&p=155657#p155262
https://www.90min.lt/forumas/P-t1319?start=360#p155965

A 2024 study out of Connecticut found that 1.8% of problem gamblers in the state accounted for 51% of sports betting revenue. And the companies have created sophisticated technology products designed to squeeze maximum engagement out of them, just as social media companies like Meta did years earlier with users of Facebook and Instagram, added Darragh McGee, a researcher at the University of Bath. In fact, as The New York Times reported, DraftKings employs machine learning and data scientists to identify losing customers and entice them with promotions to keep them going — even if those are exactly the kinds of customers at risk of becoming addicts.

In Massachusetts, on average, just 0.64% of gamblers were limited as of December 2024 and within that group winning bettors were more likely to have their bet maximums lowered than losers. Sportsbooks could do the same to customers at risk of becoming addicts. In fact, the Times reported, data scientists at DraftKings had developed a tool to identify customers headed in this direction of digging deeper and deeper holes, but the company didn’t adopt it.

“Took a loss? Now take a beat,” it read, <>I clicked “Maybe Later,” and the interruption was over. But DraftKings’ apparent concern for my well-being was belied by a promotion the company sent me just hours later: A 20% profit BOOST on bets of up to $250 for an unlimited number of live microbets on baseball plate appearances. This was exactly the kind of bet that had led me to lose so quickly at the ballpark. Now the company was encouraging me to run it back at even bigger dollar amounts for as many times as I wanted until the promotion expired later that day. I could practically hear the crank of a slot machine lever.

Midway through June, the unimaginable happened: The Knicks won the NBA championship for the first time in more than half a century. The unlikely win resulted in sportsbook operators reporting a $48.5 million loss for the week ending after the Knicks secured the championship, the first time that’s happened since state lawmakers legalized online sports betting. I’d erased all of my previous losses and netted a couple grand in profit.

This confusing series of events presented a wrinkle in my experiment: What does the problem gambler who has been a consistent loser do when, by the grace of God, he comes out ahead? “Congrats on becoming a huge world cup fan,” Minnick texted me. <>So I threw myself into World Cup betting with enthusiasm. And guess what? I was winning. A lot. I was up $16,000 on top of my initial investment — astronomical heights. I frankly started to wonder: What if I was really good at this? What if I kept on winning? My experts knew better. “I always say on my channel, like all wins are just future losses because when you don’t stop, it eventually gets given back.”

DraftKings was eager to get me into the action. With my account newly fat with house money, the company turned back on the push notifications notifying me of BOOSTS and betting opportunities. I had to keep going. I was putting more money than ever into play, placing between $3,000 and $7,000 a day on games (Think about that. That’s well above monthly rent for most people.), going for lucrative, unlikely parlays (DraftKings heavily promotes parlays, offering “profit boosts” that juice their potential payouts. Mathematically, however, you’re actually four times more likely to get three out of four legs of a parlay, for example, than all four.) DraftKings lifted the qualifying bet amount for a profit BOOST from $250 to $500 and even $1,000. But I was hit in the app with responsible gaming prompts on only one of the 10 days. In all, I’d lost $10,702 and decided enough was enough.

But before closing out my experiment, I wanted to see just how far DraftKings would let me go. So I asked my VIP rep if I could get a match on a (hypothetical!) $25,000 deposit. If I deposited more, my rep said, he could “look into the account and see what is available to add in.”

Overall, “the system worked the way it was supposed to” in my case, Kalani said. While I often played late into the night, I wasn’t playing in the wee-est hours, between 1:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., she said. I found this response revealing, though perhaps not in the way she’d intended it to be. I’d deposited $21,600 into my account in less than eight weeks, exhibiting just about every sign of compulsive gambling there is, according to my expert consultants.

By DraftKings’ metrics, I didn’t even register for a manual review.