If you've ever wondered what those sports journalists talk about in the glassed-in best seats in the house, my experience likens it to a betting ring without the bookies. Predicting the immediate future is the bread and butter of bored reporters. You amuse yourself by trying to impress your colleagues with your clairvoyance. It's also a sort of credentialling process, where if you can establish a name for knowing what's going to happen next, who's going to fold, who's going to dominate, what the score will be at the next break, then others will look at you with new respect.

In this way, a press box is a little like a lot of living rooms. Fortunately, until recently the mock-forecasting was notional, not real. It was just for fun. But it was a compulsion nonetheless.

Then someone figured out how to feed the coins into the slot and monetise the daydreaming. As a non-betting person, I kind of enjoy it when Ray Warren tells me that the Dragons have eased from $1.75 to $1.90 since Jamie Soward's last three kicks went dead. And if Richie Benaud tells me Australia have firmed to even money to chase a T20 total, I like the idea of matching wits. But only the idea. Yet for those who like to put their money where their mouth is, the intrusion of betting into sportscasting raises some big bad questions.

Firstly, are the networks exceeding their quotas of advertising minutes per hour? Currently they are limited to an average of 11 minutes, but it's allowed to vary throughout a time period, so they can level out heavy advertising periods in a highly-watched show with lighter periods in another. But I wonder if the Australian Communications Media Authority, the watchdog for these matters, quantifies each time betting is advertised, via sportscasting, during a game. These are ads, after all, every bit as much as the message from our sponsors during half-time. If ACMA did measure these ads as what they are, there might well be breaches.

Secondly, having named Ray Warren, it can't go unmentioned that the venerable league commentator has struggled with a gambling addiction in the past. It's his choice whether or not to do what he's told and advertise the latest odds. It's his choice to say ‘Remember, bet responsibly' in a loud voice or a quiet one. But it's his director's choice to ask Ray to perform this service, and it seems, purely out of compassion, a mean thing to do, as unfair as giving a reformed alcoholic a job behind a bar.

The third question you've got to ask is, isn't it a little hypocritical to come down like a ton of bricks on one addiction - nicotine - while giving a constant green light to advertising for another? Does gambling have as bad an effect on health and family life as smoking? You bet. Can gambling destroy a life quicker than smoking? You can put your last dollar on it.

Another question is how companies which are banned from headquartering themselves in one state - such as Betfair, based in Tasmania - are able to use national sports telecasts to spread their reach across borders.

Another is how teams and sporting associations can accept sponsorship and advertising money from gambling organizations and casinos when it seems that the most harmful addiction suffered by sports stars, from Phil Mickelson to Brendan Fevola, is the habit of blowing their disposable income on games of chance. Ah, but I've forgotten the flexibility involved with an Australian Rugby League or a Cricket Australia, for instance, that has players condemning drunkenness while wearing VB caps.

New figures out this week show that Australians are putting more money into internet gambling as they are into poker machines. The mountain has finally come to Mohammed, moved in with him and started sponging off him. To fuse two irrational passions - sport and predicting the future for money - is the kind of clever business that redistributes more money than any mining profits tax ever would. Only problem is, it's flowing the wrong way.