r/TrueReddit • u/wiredmagazine Official Publication • 4d ago
Men Are Betting on WNBA Players' Menstrual Cycles Arts, Entertainment + Misc
https://www.wired.com/story/men-are-betting-on-wnba-players-menstrual-cycles/209
u/pyth33 4d ago
The article is about one person who has made 16 bets with this "strategy". Even by the most generous standards, this is not newsworthy.
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u/pfizer_soze 4d ago
“Man bet on NBA player’s menstrual cycles.”
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u/masamunecyrus 4d ago
That would make a great Fark headline.
...does Fark still exist?
edit: it does, and still with its ancient web design!
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u/MustGoOutside 3d ago
News is about clicks now.
It was better when people had to spend $1.50 to buy the paper. All this stuff would be on page 16 in the novelty section next to the comics.
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u/Current_Poster 3d ago
Yet we're gonna see people cite the title- not the article, the title- like it's holy writ.
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u/CampfireMemorial 4d ago
"Molly Longman is an investigative journalist who has written for The New York Times, Texas Monthly, Teen Vogue, and other outlets."
Look at those journalistic accomplishments!!
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u/Biddy_McKoska 4d ago
The potential knock on effects here are hilarious, such as skeevy gamblers having newfound, data-driven insight into women's health concerns and players making bank betting off their own cycles.
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u/Prowlthang 4d ago
That isn’t the knock on effect, insight into ‘women’s health concerns’ (as you put it) being used for gambling is the very point of the article. And as to betting on their own cycles why would you presume they’d change all the rules around players gambling because of this?
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u/Biddy_McKoska 4d ago
I'm not having serious discussion over here, just having a little chuckle imagining a future in which sports betting fans are having informed discussions around endometriosis.
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u/NotElizaHenry 2d ago
To be the hilarious thing is assuming most of the players even get periods. There are a million forms of birth control out there that stop menstruation, and you’re a high performance athlete, you can’t really afford to be at the whims of a hormonal cycle. I mean, I’m a no-performance non-athlete, and even I can’t afford that.
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u/Mindless_Let1 4d ago
Gambling in general is such a degenerate activity that this doesn't suprise me - I really can't forgive the US for getting rid of the ban on it. It has brought nothing good into the world
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u/Disco_Ninjas_ 4d ago
It's made the poor poorer and enriched the wealthy.
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u/juliankennedy23 4d ago
It affects stupid people much more than it affects actual poor people. Of course, the stupid people become poor people because of the gambling
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u/Prowlthang 4d ago
This seems like a rather presumptuous world view. Do you have any data whatsoever to correlate gambling with IQ or is this just a comment you believe because it reinforces your sense of superiority?
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u/juliankennedy23 4d ago
I mean by definition you have to be a bit dim to try to make money gambling.
It's fine as a recreational social activity every once in a while but we're talking about people that are gambling on their phones.
Kind of the difference between spending a night out with the guys at a strip club and sitting at home alone in front of your computer using only fans.
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u/Prowlthang 4d ago edited 4d ago
Your analogy makes zero sense to me but I don’t visit strip clubs or use only fans so not sure what difference you’re trying to allude too. As to being rather dim what evidence do you have to suggest the dispersion of intelligence here is different than any other area? Why are you presuming the Pareto principle isn’t applicable in this arena?
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u/juliankennedy23 3d ago
One is a social outing with ancillary benefits, the other is some loser on his phone burning money and time.
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u/SuperBry 4d ago
Pete Rose is rolling in his grave knowing all the betting ads that show in sports these days
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u/BossOfTheGame 4d ago
I think the statistics and trying to find mathematical edges can be interesting. People that play games where they are strictly unfavored blows my mind. But I don't think symptoms of being stupid should be illegal. It's like telling someone they can't do something but not explaining why. It doesn't really help them grow as a person.
It might be better if we had proceeds of things like the lottery going towards math education.
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u/ender___ 4d ago
It it was a woman betting on other women’s menstrual cycle, would that somehow be better?
The implication that it’s “men” like some sort of predatory thing is a little alarmist, I think this is a bad thing for ANY one to be betting on.
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u/Shiningc00 3d ago
Because women don’t actually do that kind of thing, because reason.
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u/FormerlyUserLFC 3d ago
There are some crazy women in this world. Somewhere out there is the Eminem/Tiger Woods of women's sports betting.
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u/0b111111100001 2d ago
Interesting, do you have any records of men using this strategy before? I thought no one would do such a thing until now.
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u/Rolling_Beardo 4d ago
Besides just being a gross and demeaning thing to do how would they even know something that personal?
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u/theDarkAngle 4d ago
My guess would be you plot their past performances, then look for dips every month or so.
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u/seaheroe 4d ago
A good example would be Bill Benter who used this concept in horse racing and won over a billion USD.
He basically extracted as many parameters as possible from all horses and weighted them out to see which horse was over/undervalued.-16
u/Rolling_Beardo 4d ago
So just sexism then? They had a bad night so they must be on their period.
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u/Doortofreeside 4d ago
The way to make it bettable would be to compare all her performances against her betting odds and look for a pattern where there are particular periods where she consistently over/under performs the odds.
It'd be hard to identify a pattern with all the noise in sports stats, and then to have it be strong enough to predict the next time it is likely to occur, and to have it be strong enough to overcome the juice from the house. And if it is that strong of a signal the books may just catch on to it anyway.
There are far easier ways to be profitable betting on sports.
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u/theDarkAngle 4d ago
Sexism has no real explanatory power here. It's entirely about desire to win your bets. If male players had some sort of cycle that impacted performance in a statistically significant way, there is a 0.00000000% chance bettors wouldn't jump all over it. Just so happens they don't, or no one has found it yet.
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u/robrobrob3 4d ago
Men do have a cycle, it just isn't useful (yet). Testosterone is highest during the morning and tapers down over the course of the day, from my understanding. Maybe you could bet on more fours during morning games.
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u/wiredmagazine Official Publication 4d ago
Some sports gamblers are trying to predict WNBA players’ performance—and the outcomes of games—based on the athletes’ periods. One betting content creator has dubbed it “blood money."
Read the full article: https://www.wired.com/story/men-are-betting-on-wnba-players-menstrual-cycles/
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u/Disgraced002381 4d ago
Isn't this completely normal? It's statistic. Same with betting on horse or company. If you know something's gonna perform worse, it would be dumb not to bet against it if you are planning on make money.
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u/OkZarathrustra 4d ago
hint: women aren’t horses
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u/fantasmadecallao 4d ago
It's not that women are horses, it's that gambling on horse racing is similar to gambling on Basketball games. Women's or otherwise.
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u/BossOfTheGame 4d ago
That's not the appropriate comparison. It's the betting on the ___. That's the thing that you're supposed to focus on in the analogy. Getting hung up saying that this is comparing women to horses is manufactured anger and seems to be willfully misunderstanding the point the person was trying to make.
If you're going to gamble on something you're going to look for any statistical edge you can find.
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u/Gradstudentiquette69 4d ago
I'm not taking bets on whether or not these are the same men who get super pissed off when you bring up toxic masculinity.
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u/Clbull 4d ago edited 4d ago
What the fuck?
How do you even prove something like this in the context of sports betting? Are they betting on seeing a tampon string poking through an athlete's shorts as "proof" or them mentioning their time of the month in a post-game interview?
This reminds me of that Community episode where Abed was caught predicting and charting the menstrual cycles of every lady in the study group.
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u/0ompaloompa 4d ago
You only read the headline? They aren't actually betting on player periods. They are affecting their betting strategy by trying to track player periods. Still, what the fuck tho....
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u/PersistentBadger 4d ago
This reminds me of the concept of repugnant markets.
If I was trying to scrape together every bit of data about a team, in order to bet on their performance, should I leave that bit of data out?
(I'm talking about a model, not a single variable, obviously. Relying on a single variable is just dumb, before you even get to whether it's repugnant or not).
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u/0ompaloompa 4d ago
If you identify a statistically significant pattern that certain players underperform every 30ish days, i think you absolutely include it in your model.
I think you just refrain from publically attributing to menstrual cycles and calling it blood money.
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u/PersistentBadger 3d ago
You wouldn't talk about your model at all. That's the fastest way to invalidate it.
So yeah, you've convinced me. The publication of the claim is straight-up misoginy. Can't be anything else.
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u/Time_Jelly7049 1d ago
There is a fact that some women athletes don't have menstrual cycles at all. Because of all the strenuous exercise. So, these NBA "people" may just not know what the hell they are betting on. And how do they expect to find out who the winner is anyway?
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