West Town

What is West Town?

As the U.S. warms to the idea of online sports betting, the NCAA has taken steps to protect its athletes. Deputy General Counsel of the NCAA, Naima Stevenson Starks sat down with Calvinayre.com’s Becky Liggero Fontana to explain her organisation’s stance towards betting involving student athletes and maintaining the integrity of those competitions. 

Stevenson Starks shared those concerns that the NCAA has towards online sports betting in the U.S.:

“The two [concerns] are the integrity of athletic competition, and how that could potentially be impacted by a proliferation of legalized sports wagering. And then the second is really the health and well-being of student athletes.“

What is West Town?

“I think the industry will adopt these technologies much more quickly than people might expect,” he says.

There will inevitably be imitators if swipe gaming establishes itself. Yashin welcomes that prospect, but believes any rivals would struggle to match the speed, creative output and trend-spotting capabilities that sit behind it.

“I think it would be good for us to have strong competitors,” he says. “Of course, you can copy the mechanic, you can copy the name and you can copy the theme of the video, but you cannot copy the creative itself.”

How to play West Town

In his 2022 letter to shareholders, he criticized mobile trading apps that make day trading and speculative positioning effortless, accusing them of turning the stock market into a “gambling parlor.”

Two years later, Buffett again targeted the “gamblification” of financial markets in his annual shareholder letter.

“Markets now exhibit far more casino-like behavior than they did when I was young. The casino now resides in many homes and daily tempts the occupants,” Buffett wrote, noting that extreme volatility makes identifying sound, long-term investments vastly more difficult.