Is there a game of skill that involves gambling? Like for example, what would you do to prevent cheating?

Could we play chess in person? Maybe some variation of Bridge?
Or play some sports in person and gamble on ourselves.

Really I don't see that many options. Most games that involve gambling are luck based for a reason. You have to guarantee the chances and the randomness without possibility of cheating. At least to a reasonable extent.
Zero luck games where participants have a prize to win are tournaments, not gambling. It's a different thing.

Family is the primary support network of anyone and those don't having adequate support from their family will more likely than others end up addicted.

Imagine the discipline you'd have to have to keep your cool while being sad and completely alone. No one to talk to, no one to return to, no one to stay with, have cooked food from etc. Just think about it, if someone is already addicted, having good support from his family can really help him put off that habit. Having a good support network means that kicking a habit and maintaining a healthy life can be done more reliable.

If a family has an addict in their blood, they should really get together and treat him with love and affection to try and save him. It's the best way possible.

For most crypto casinos, if you get someone to sign up with your link, then their account is under you and you get paid in the long term based on how much volume they have on the casino. For example, you may be paid 20% of the house edge of their bets. This is a good incentive to invite big gamblers but really you get very little if someone signs up and stops playing after a while.

Non-crypto casinos tend to reward per-sign up. Some even pay cash for every time someone enters your free spins code for slots. This allows for affiliate marketers to earn more stable income from these casinos if they can somehow bring in new people constantly. It's a very different style of affiliate, both have their advantages. I guess licensed casinos have more money to pay upfront and be done with it. But there's also some whales in crypto and if you manage to attract even a handful you'd be set with some good passive income.

I will never put serious amounts of money in a bookie that doesn't have clear cut rules that are simple to understand. A bookie should use simple language and internationally standard terminology to explain how they will handle things when unpredictable events happen. The trick for me on this is to see when a bookie will void a match. If their policies are extremely easy to understand, then in my eyes their service seems honest.

However if the terms seem complex, if there are too many different links leading to different terms etc. Then I will never want to play with big amounts there. If I can't understand your terms, then why would you expect my money? At least the language in the terms should be simple to understand and not mambo jumbo legalese. We're here to play and understand what we're doing easily, not play pretend lawyer just to understand the terms.

Peer pressure is something that can normalize gambling in one's life a lot more than if one was to start gambling on his own.

For instance, I know a friend of mine who was watching a lot of gaming streamers growing up, he was a bit of a lonely guy, but as these streamers realized that there's a lot of money to be made from gambling streaming of course they started dedicating more and more of their content to this type of games.

So the issue here is that so long as my friend was watching a stranger gamble, he was of course interested in the content but not so much on putting a lot of money towards gambling himself. When he however went to parties of his friends group and saw them putting hundreds of dollars towards slots, he started believing in gambling a lot more. So naturally being a lonely guy and having fully normalized gambling in his money now, he started losing substantial amounts without even telling anyone.

Thankfully after a while he admitted to it and asked his friends to stop playing in front of him. The good ending here is that they switched to playing board games other than gambling in their get togethers. All for their friend. Quite admirable. 

Yup, it's certain at this point that Kennedy himself and the PACs supporting him alike are 100% counting on taking votes away from Democrats.
It's a very odd subject though because Kenndy's agenda sounds a lot like a republican's play book being read outloud. The anti-vaccine narrative, calling people in Washington corrupt, rampant Zionism... So it's not like this sounds much of a valid alternative to the current options. However Republicans seem much more organized in their Vote so surely those paying for the huge ads for Kennedy must have done their research.

This is also showcased by the fact that Biden keeps getting heckled so much at his events, they've now started to outright deny entry to Muslim women wearing Head coverings in fear they might speak aloud in front of his speech in support of Palestine.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/31/biden-campaign-event-islamophobia-palestine-protest

Crazy for a party that is supposedly against racism. 

Thanks for your attention.
I've changed the post's title to sound more normal based on your response.
I appreciate you coming forward with and addressing this issue. Hopefully these measures will be effective. Sadly there must be at least some success in these drainer scams because every time I've been writing in a public Telegram channel I get messages like these constantly. So it's an issue that has to be addressed from its roots too. No platform should host such pages, no need to make it easy for scammers.

Thanks for taking an interest and saying you'll contact them too.

I was too lazy to go further than contacting via email especially since they responded personally. But sure, if they want to redeem themselves we should give them a change.
It's hard managing a company so if they people high up that are responsible are well intentioned and responsive there's a chance to show it now.

Bitcointalk Profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=121796;sa=summary
Amount of merits for the last 120 days: 71
BTC Address: bc1q54u6us9hj79wf3hldxqk9hekzjmksuc26fwcev

For real, it was such a disaster! We had possession for most of the match but lost in penalties. I think our players were a bit selfish trying to score a memorable goal with a header instead of getting ball control in front of the goalpost to increase chances of scoring but with a more boring goal.

Anyway, here's a bet suggestion for this match day:


I don't really like the play-off part of the season because it's harder to spot matches that are more secure with good odds to bet on as all teams lower in the league are only matched against each other and vice versa for higher teams. But as lamia made it to playoffs we can see if they have good odds since they are a smaller team matched against all of the toppers in the league. So I'll be taking this bet for an Aris win for the upcoming matchday.

I think USDT would suffice? Low TX fees, can be processed in many different networks, fast transactions and stable value. Pretty much most things needed by a gambler.
Of course it would be good to also feature og on-chain bitcoin payments as it's the currency most people in crypto will know and use. If you're crypto-enabled it can't just be USDT for sure. I think though ultimately the best thing would be to have an in-house wallet that gives the option to show your stake in dollars or your currency of choice no matter what you have deposited to make things easier.

Stake does this for slots and they do it quite well actually, so if you want to draw inspiration from somewhere you can have a look.

The trend I really don't like recently is how for many casinos there's a hyperfocus in promoting non-provably fair slots. And also I highly dislike how governments all around the world are eating this up by allowing these types of games in "licensed" online casinos.

If you think about it, crypto gambling at least used to have a good feature, nearly everything was provably fair from its games. However, when it comes to gambling now, crypto or not, very few of the popular casino games are provably fair. Stake at least makes a very good effort to make its original games provably fair which is good to see from the biggest casino in the industry. But still slots from third party providers are very opaque in how they operate and how their supposed randomness.

Dunno maybe I'm romanticizing things but I remember that in past competitions there used to be more than one favorites, plenty of songs that were objectively good and fit several styles. And quite often an outlier would win too. The quality of the competition has degraded a bit lately. Not only is it less entertaining to watch but also songs are soooo forgettable. Most Eurovision songs that are remembered as "good" are from many years ago. And it's a challenge to remember the lyrics or the beat of many entries, as it was the norm though.

This year's favorite being croatia surely is a different style than the rest, and this electro-rock style is favored lately but certainly it wasn't very noteworthy. So yes I think this year is going to be one of these years where the favorite for betting doesn't come first.

As a Greek I was watching the Georgia - Greece match and so many times Greek players wasted good chances. Greece had over 60% ball possession for most of the match and perhaps that got a little too much into the players' head. Surely Georgian players were playing in many international leagues and had experience, but Greek players only taking chances with headers instead of more conventional passes and shots for a goal made me kinda angry at times.

Georgia played very impressive and strategic defense though. All players and coaches from both sides did well to maintain a conservative play style and counter their opponent. To be honest I'm not even that disappointed Greece didn't manage to advance further. Now they're placed in a group with Turkey and Czechia. If they keep playing that well they're gonna do well for sure in my opinion.

As of our neighboring country Albania, I don't know if we have any Albanian here... But their country got for sure the hardest group. I'd wish them luck but that alone won't do, they need a miracle to win against Italy, Croatia and Spain.

The least we can expect is that if someone is an administrator to an open ended service they'd take some measures to at least respond to reports.
In this instance they were alerted and obviously acknowledged the issue as it's obvious that they have responded.

Expectations of them were set extremely low. In fact for how many people use such services, I have to admit that it's the first time I hear of this particular one. So it might not be that surprising if it's in affiliation with the scamers themselves.

Ok there's something very interesting happening here:


When put in competition head to head vs Trump, Biden is shown to have a lead in polls.
However, when put in polls as Biden vs. Trump. vs. R. F. Kennedy Jr., Trump has a notable lead against Biden!

Some republican mega donors are kinda unhinged in their support for R. F. Kennedy, but this is also making the race more interesting.
First of all, will Biden manage to counter the notions many people are developing right now to consider supporting Kennedy? He has months to prepare a strategy, but I take it things are gonna be tough for the Biden team.

Look for instance at how much the funding has been for an independent candidate. Even Kennedy himself thought the super-bowl ad for his campaign ran by a super PAC might have been a bit too much...


However now, thanks to the funding, there's an "army" of canvassers running around America and the Kennedy campaign's projection is that they will have ballot spots in 50 states! So the polls do actually make sense! Biden is very much threatened and this is not a drill.

Images via this vid

This is a bit of a non-standard scam report as I personally haven't lost money to the service, but I know many other people have lost money due to them.  

Since December heylink.me was alerted that on their website scamers were hosting wallet drainers scams.

Here's an archive:
https://archive.ph/YzvHt



This was their response when alerted of the issue:


Basically they said you need a paid subscription to their service for contacting their abuse email?  

The wallet drainer is still hosted on their site to this day:
https://archive.ph/De3ZC

So I don't know what else to say. I just wanted to name and shame the horribly irresponsible service's, heylink.me owners that are perfectly glad to host wallet drainers on their site, without even making a remote attempt to take the malicious content down even when alerted about it. Just stay away from heylink.me at all costs. If a service is willing to cooperate with scammers they're definitely not worthy of your money.

---

March 30th Edit:
Issue was addressed. The Heylink service admins have responded in this thread and advised the public to email them at the following address for related abuse in the future:

Let's be honest, even if a licensed casino goes bankrupt, it's unlikely that all people with money deposited will be fully compensated. So licensed or not, it's not a form of insurance from bankruptcy or the casino closing unexpectedly. It's just a very light indication that the casino takes it self and its image a bit more seriously in terms of having something to present to the world.

But to say that it offers insurance is an overstatement. The only thing that is guaranteed by a fund is bank accounts. But even there there are some asterisks that would allow you to get cheated on. So there are no true guarantees.

Even in areas where there is no representation of any particular sport on the local level to get people interested, people find stuff to bet on.

For instance in Asia people often bet on matches they make up themselves like fights of animals. As weird as it sounds... People find something to gamble on regardless of conditions. The thing isn't about banning something but rather enforcing it.

For instance, if I gamble on a sports book that is not licensed in my country, it is theoretically banned. But there is no penalty for me neither the sports book. So it happens quite a lot. Would a government have the funds to be so authoritarian to ban football? Some authoritarian regimes maybe, but it would be very hard to ban a sport that has so many fans entirely.

Let's be realistic,

in this day and age casino licenses aren't very meaningful. Unless you are you domiciled in a jurisdiction where a casino license was issued.
Many casinos will have a SUB-license issued to them only for there to be something in their website's footer. Not much more.

Now about this specific casino, we can't be sure. The thing is, if they wanted to prove that their games are fair, they could simply offer provable fairness verifications for each one of their rolls.
If they don't care to do that, it's a trust based matter. In fact, even for every spin in slots through any major online casino, you'd have to be trusting Evolution Inc. for their fairness. Because they might say randomness is guaranteed, but there's no way for them to prove it, as their games are not provably fair.


So all in all, I'd say just stay away from this casino. But if you want to pick apart everything like you do here, care more about proper provable fairness over just licenses and guarantees.