Christianity is a weird religion.

In recognized holy religious texts there's no mention of gambling. However most priests will say it's a mortal sin to gamble, play cards or derive enjoyment from such games.

And still in almost all predominantly Christian societies there's little to no stigma against gambling. People will do it, sometimes daily. In villages, in the cities. There's TV commercials, legal online casinos, team sponsorships... It's a very weird dynamic actually.

So while during Christian holidays priests will urge people to stay away from such "sinful" activities even more, nobody listens. Festive gambling activities are even higher than on average actually. My country is a great example of this. While the vast majority will gladly state that they are devout orthodox Christians here in Greece, only if you account for the licensed online casinos, they had a turnover of like 30 billion EUR in a year. It's crazy.

Honestly I don't judge people for wanting to partake in religious activities. And hiding their gambling habits through online casinos is also their right in my book.
But I can't understate how pretentious I find it of so many Christians to play a role of a devout man, while behind closed doors they're wasting their money on gambling online.
Of course governments here in Europe also have a role in this by giving a green light to all forms of gambling promotion while doing absolutely nothing to provide meaningful means for people to get off-addictions. All this while our local governments also heavily favor Christian Churches. So the biggest hypocrites in all of these are governments again.

Thanks for posting this week's match day schedule!

So yeah, indeed it was a very unfortunate match between Panathinaikos and Lamia but oddly enough Panathinaikos went on to win against PAOK and is now on the Greek Cup's final...
It'll be an interesting matchday now as a lot is to be decided for the rankings.

I too think betting on OFI this time is a reasonable pick.

I think however my picks for this week will be to bet on a victory for AEK against Lamia

and a victory for PAOK against Panaitolikos


Odds around 1.4 for matches that are more on the safe side seem like good picks to me at these odds. I think the rest have too much risk for the reward they provide.

This is highly subjective.

To me, a forum where tens of thousands of people are active posting very regularly like in here, should also be having an influx of new users that are able to contribute that is akin to its active userbase. That would be at least a few hundreds of new users becoming legendary every year. If we check https://bpip.org/Report?r=mostmerit there's only one legendary user in the top 1000 with a registration date of 2021 and 14 users from 2020. So in a little more than 3 years only 15 users reached the maximum rank. Also note that the bottom of the top 1000 have only a tiny bit merit above the required 1k to become legendary so I wouldn't guess that there's many more besides that.

I know this is an unorthodox way to check this but I can't find any better way to do so.

Generally casinos have a set house edge on their games, which in the grand scheme of thins should correlate with the return to player.

So if in a day a casino has 100$ wagered, we can overall expect ~4% revenue towards the casino's bank accounts. 4% being around the upper limit for house edge. Usually though, this number can trend a lot higher because players will very often keep gambling with their entire balance until they go bust, with a very small percentage of all players coming out of the casino in profit.

So the real number is unclear to visitors unless the casino publishes some sort of stats. Because the bankroll of casinos is usually privately funded though, we rarely get a glimpse to such data. Another interesting spec though can be that in casinos with a public bankroll where large bets can be placed have an all time profit of lower than their house edge in relation to their total waggers. For example bustabit has ₿ 2,318,294 waggered but only ₿ 7,066 all time profit (which is 0.3% of total wagered). To my understanding casinos are in an advantageous position to this due to attracting customers that are willing to play at a higher house edge with lower max-bet limits, which leads to more losses.

So in the end, it's obvious that the casino always wins. But the casinos that win the most are the ones with the best marketing, able to attract players willing to lose on high house edge games like slots.

I'm quite certain many people have the same approach now, but things work differently on a macro and on a micro level.
The macro level is that if everyone has less sMerits and there were far fewer merit sources, the result of having less merit to go around would be that the responsibility on spotting and rewarding good posts increases.

Precisely because there's a lack of new users with good posts I believe that we don't need new merit sources. At this point in my opinion new merit sources should only happen if less active ones are removed and their sMerits rescinded. When forum activity from new users goes down merit sources should ideally decrease, not increase.

I respectfully disagree. If merit sources had too many posts to pick from and less merit they'd be more pressure on them to focus on actually good posts by good members so they can reward their efforts by making them rank up. Now there's so much merit going around from merit sources that most of it ends up being not utilized at all. And at best, there's huge merit circlejerks in the absence of new posters. Merit is so abundant that nearly no one cares about it anymore. Even in cases of abuse. In an ideal world there would be more admins to be looking through this every few weeks or so to remove or add merit sources accordingly based on how many new users are coming in. But on the contrary, for the last few years we've had an oversupply of merit. But now that we have too much of it, nearly no one cares. New users just find hacked accounts to rank their own accounts through local boards and it gets lost in the merit circlejerks of users that have already reached legendary rank.

I think the right approach is to this issue is that every gambler should know that they money they bring into a gambling establishment, while real money, is something that could be lost. If you come in a casino with 100$ and intend to wager those, you could lose 100% of the capital with just a single wager. So the "just play for fun" attitude is actually quite realistic. But of course it's also up to interpretation.

For instance, if you have 1 hour to kill, you might as well spend it gambling. However, if you come in with all your money you made in a month, you could also very well lose it within that one hour. There's other principles that have to be followed here also. If you have any amount of money you can comfortably put aside and some of that to spend on yourself, only of that should be ever entering into a gambling establishment. So if you adjust your bet value, you could sit for an entire hour without losing everything immediately.

All in all, I think the "just play for fun" mindset is something good to share as a catchall because people need to understand that the odds are against them in winning. But for sure other principles should be applied to. Surely being interested in the amounts you play with increases enjoyment especially if you win, but you shouldn't play with what you can't afford to lose. So fun remains the primary "non problematic" indicator of gambling for me still.

I normally wouldn't mind having a signature campaign manager be a merit source. After all people that have a job related to this forum spend a lot of time here and could spot valuable posts easily due to their experience. 

But right now I know that there's an oversupply of merit. Merit sources have thousands of sMerits and there's a distinct lack of influx of new users. You're a very weird exception to this rule becoming a legendary user pretty fast compared to others. But most new people that come into this forum are either interested in bounties or local boards. So it doesn't make much sense at this moment to have even more merit sources in my opinion, especially when there's years worth of backlog for local board merit sources.

For one, our local Greek board hasn't had even a moderator in months, let alone merit source applications from Greek speakers pending for years! Theymos' attention should be directed to older requests imo with a focus on other things like local boards.

Some people like to gamble when high or drunk and honestly I can't really blame them. Substance abuse is a whole separate issue though and if you need to overuse any substance to be able to do something then we have to address these issues separately. Just like someone can be a problem gambler, they can also be an alcoholic or addicted to drugs.

So often times these issues need to be approached through a multifaceted counseling method attended by an expert. But really when it comes to gambling, it doesn't matter. If your deposit is something you can afford to lose, you could be half asleep while also drunk and high and still play care-free, because in the end you'll know you can sleep peacefully even if you lose all that money.

Well yes indeed binary options is the type of gambling that often gets passed around as a method to make easy profits because it's "trading".

But on the other hand especially when compared to how manipulated crypto markets are and how high the leverage is on many of the actual futures trading sites are, binary options are almost a comparable risk.
So for those interested in trading that don't really want to bother with adjusting their margin or interest, I think Binary options with crypto could be a viable alternative. I'd be eager to see what other alternatives exist out there but seems also like the interest has died down a little since that time years ago.

As this thread is about to reach page 10, I think it's time to lock it and make way for new threads for discussion. I think the question was answered from quite early on and the sentiment was that whatever friends one might have need to take personal responsibility for their faults. At least that was the judgment of most people.

For me, I think showing some compassion and at least not planning gambling events with said friend would be a good idea at least for a prolonged amount of time until it's deemed that he can be close to gambling without triggering his compulsion again. And if most of the friends group agreed that hanging out with said person was more valuable than their poker sessions, it might still be a good idea to reduce the poker sessions and increase hanging out as this would also offer some support to quit gambling.

With that thought, I'm now locking this thread as I believe the discussion has been more than enough for what such a question calls for. 

I think that maybe in lack of a better sponsor, they chose this creative way to fund their team for this year.

It's likely that local sponsor market isn't that ambitious especially when it comes for a team that's 8th in the standings. Surely with better funding they could do better things because transfers and better coaches really can uplift a team a lot.

The issue is that when it comes to doing something like this, unless they attract a more reliable sponsor like a big crypto-based casino (which is likely what they're hoping for in the long run for sponsorships), probably they won't get that much money from crypto users.  That's because oddly enough people don't like spending their crypto that much. If I told you to pay for a jersey in company stock from one of your investments, would you go in that trouble? Probably not. I think of it like in this analogy.

Yes of course there's going to be enjoyment. This I think is a healthy part of gambling. You can still make 1$ bets on a blackjack table and enjoy yourself a lot.
But indeed, those new to the scene will probably have a harder time knowing hot to exercise self control and limit their gambling in order to stay within limits. So to them it's advisable to have developed a strategy to avoid mishaps from early on.

Budget based on income, put limits accordingly, and also limit their total time gambling to some extent. Because the time sink effect of gambling can also worsen addiction and lead to more risky less thought out decisions, that might be costly and hard to calculate to a new gambler. So yea, all in all, enjoyment shouldn't trump responsibility. People gambling should have all these things in mind generally.

I think it's very common for a new gambler to feel increased joy while gambling.
It first takes a little getting used to, but afterwards it's like your body might be asking for a fix.

If you feel like it's hard to control impulses, it might be a good idea to go off the site for a while. There's certainly no need to gamble every day. And if you do gamble without control or a budget preset then you might also run in financial trouble. Gambling really is enjoyable but should be limited.

It's funny to see gambling influencers be angry about their losses when it's only themselves that got th themselves in this situation.
They signed up for an account, put their money in and eventually even started streaming to everyone...

But also at this age where everyone has too much information to digest, it's hard to trust such things. Was this a stunt? Most likely. What streamer gambles with his own money these days? Maybe a wannabe? But we know most streamers are funded by the casino they play in anyway so I don't know what's the matter with all that.

Yeah and moreover for an old forum Bitcointalk has more than enough members.
If the admins wanted to monetize the forum they could earn substantial amounts, currently they host the forum without earning from users or companies and yet only users earn from advertising. So even for that, there's more than enough users. I wouldn't so easily invite someone here unless they have something good to offer. Otherwise I am almost certain they would find it hard to adapt to the community.

There is no objective benefit neither to soft or hard drugs. It's just one of the worst alternative when it comes to recreation, it literally makes you hallucinate and get out of reality. However when the high ends you end up addicted and worse off financially and mentally.

Our society has some deeply rooted issues to have people addicted in drugs. If we had more outreach programs to help people get off the streets we could be saving so many people. But it seems like we have lost our humanity.
 
 

Damn this for sure was an exciting week in the Greek super league.

So Olympiakos wins 4 - 1 against PAOK who were so far first in the league. This makes AEK who also won their match in this match day to pass first from the third spot that they were in previously! So now we have AEK first, Panathinaikos and PAOK tied in second place by a single pont, and Olympiakos fourth by 4 points.

Seems like the competition is fierce. Our prediction for the Aris march came out correct this time, so let me know if you also made this pick 😜

Looking forward to the upcoming match days. which are going to be very exciting.

Why should there be a reward in terms of money for bringing new users to this forum?
There is no revenue stream for the admins for new users. It's just increased liability. Theymos, the admin, even paused his ads...

So really, think about it, not everything needs to be a monetary transaction. If you bring someone here and he appreciates the information here and the forrum's community, maybe he's gonna like you as a human in general. Some things are not always tied to money.

I think what has happened also is that to a large extent governments broke their own monopolies and deregulated gsmbling a lot. For instance, on most countries of the world gsmbling was allowed but it was mostly through state owned monopolies. But in the last 10 or so years the market had opened up to the private sector.

Ironically this is happening at a time that so called unlicensed gambling is also growing. So licensed casinos being able to advertise freely has lead even more people to being addicted and even more people in turn going to so called unlicensed casinos.