Sports Betting as a Hobby?

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ellobear2026

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I'm half-considering putting sports betting down as a hobby. I only bet up to 1 dollar a day, which is what the app gives you for free, so I've never actually put any money in on it. I am more interested in the math side of things. For example, my friends and I made an algorithm to use odds for March Madness to predict the bracket (came out to be 95th percentile!). Please talk me out of this.

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Do you have to list it as "sports betting"? Wouldn't something like "fantasy sports" maybe be a better title?

Also, maybe focus more on the social / team-building aspect of it, and less on the betting part?

Just my humble opinion
 
I probably wouldn't. It invites questions and feeds insights you aren't looking for and don't want.

You can call it sports betting, fantasy sports, or whatever euphemism you might think is appropriate... but please understand any adult will read it as gambling, because that's what it is.

You may not view this as an addiction (and there's nothing in your post that would invite that kind of reasoning); however, you feel weird about it because you know that it is a vice and it's pretty well-established that most addictions become apparent to everyone else before they become apparent to the addict. That's why we have this societal messaging that encourages us not to believe someone that says "it's only a dollar" or "I can stop whenever I want."

In your case, it could be true that you really do only bet a dollar; and that you could stop if you wanted... but is that something you want to put on a job application? I just don't see an upside to listing this, but I can imagine permutations of downsides.

But who knows, professionalism as we have known it has been radically redefined as of late, so... Maybe the moral depravity is actually positive in the upside-down simulation we're living in.
 
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I agree with the commenter above who suggested that you reframe the issue from sports betting, which could be seen as a negative, to predictive analysis in sports. That will allow you to focus on sabermetrics or any other mathematical anaylyis you're undertaking to value players and predict outcomes, but avoid the stigma that could be associated with gambling.
 
I'm half-considering putting sports betting down as a hobby. I only bet up to 1 dollar a day, which is what the app gives you for free, so I've never actually put any money in on it. I am more interested in the math side of things. For example, my friends and I made an algorithm to use odds for March Madness to predict the bracket (came out to be 95th percentile!). Please talk me out of this.
It's like saying I play scratcher lottery tickets or the Powerball every week. Maybe discussing the algorithm to predict odds for sports games to "inform" people who like to place parlays on sports outcomes would be cool to chat about.

 
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