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April 7 - April 7, 2025
Polls indicate that between 20 and 40 percent of American adults have bet on sports,
Between May 2018 and August 2024, Americans gambled $398 billion through legal sportsbooks, including $121 billion in 2023, more than they spent that year on video games, movie tickets, music streaming services, books, and concert tickets combined.
The primary cause of the crisis is a gambling system focused on generating profit for sportsbooks instead of protecting the well-being of sports bettors.
People between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five are also the most likely to have at least one sports betting account and to bet multiple times per week. Gender is the other dominant predictor. In surveys, men are twice as likely as women to have an online sportsbook account and almost three times as likely to bet at least three times a week.
A study from Australia finds that each problem gambler financially or psychologically affects five others—for example through requests for money—so even a modest increase in the percentage of people with a gambling disorder will impact millions of people.
a state’s legalization of sports betting, and in particular online sports betting, correlated with a 25 to 30 percent increase in bankruptcies, lower credit scores, more debt collection, and higher use of debt consolidation loans,
they control 75 percent of the American sports betting market, generating a combined $8.07 billion in revenue in 2023. Their political spending has made it almost as easy to find one of their lobbyists at a state house as it is to find one of their ads on TV.
“Persons with severe addictions are among those contemporary prophets that we ignore to our own demise, for they show us who we truly are.”
because he was betting digitally, the “money never felt real.” Scholars have documented that casino chips help dissociate gamblers from the size of their bets, encouraging them to act more liberally than they ever would with cash. Smartphones take this dissociation to a whole new level.
Sports betting capitalizes on this unearned confidence, daring fans to prove that they know sports better than their friends, their coworkers, and the hosts of their local sports talk radio station. When their intuition is wrong, these same fans have a remarkable ability to maintain their confidence, convinced that their wins are the result of their knowledge of the game and their losses are due to unlucky bounces.
one of the most recognizable symptoms of gambling disorder: “feeling the need to continue to get even” according to the APA, also known as chasing losses.
The excitement factor is offset by the fact that parlays are, simply, a dumb way to bet for the vast majority of gamblers. Between 1989 and 2023, casinos kept roughly five cents for every dollar in non-parlay sports bets and thirty-one cents for every dollar bet on parlays.
Sportsbooks make choices all the time about limiting players. They have a habit, in fact, of cutting off or severely limiting anyone who wins consistently, in some cases doing so under the guise of protecting problem gamblers. But people like Andrew, who was exhibiting clear signs of problematic play but consistently losing, are welcome to keep betting.
But what about a sportsbook identifying a bettor who is trying to quit and targeting them with promotional credits? What about an app interface with limitless betting options designed to satiate bettors’ constant need for action, where someone can lose multiple mortgage payments in a matter of seconds? What about an industry whose entire business model relies on a small percentage of players losing large amounts of money?
“Every other addictive product that you can think of, government seeks to regulate its distribution and consumption,” Levant observes. Given gambling’s official classification as addictive, and especially the evidence about the habit-forming potential of online gambling, a public health framework suggests the need for measures to protect consumers before they have the chance to harm themselves or someone else.
The operators have so much data on every customer, PHAI alleges, they could identify problematic play as it develops. But they choose not to.
But the RG model places the burden on gamblers to make good choices while obfuscating that sportsbooks’ products make it difficult to make better choices. The model also ignores that once someone is hooked on gambling they are no longer actively choosing to play. Instead, their addiction makes it impossible for them to stop.
Another approach is to prevent people from seeing sports betting ads in the first place. Australia limits gambling advertising during live broadcasts of sporting events and restricts the hours during which ads can run.
Australia banned the use of credit cards for online betting—a practice permitted in most American states with sports betting. Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and other countries have enacted limits on weekly or monthly deposits or losses (currently in place in Tennessee, Maryland, and Massachusetts), while other nations ban or extremely limit free bets and other incentives.
United States, meanwhile, is still in the early stages of its experiment but is ignoring the lessons learned overseas. “Many of the things that are the most controversial and have led directly to the most backlash in the UK, are the very things that we are moving the farthest and fastest on here in the United States
Sports betting is here to stay. As it should be. Americans should be able to gamble legally on sports.
a curious fact about American problem gambling is that rates have generally remained consistent for decades, even as states have expanded the menu of legal betting options. But many people, like Kyle, only started betting because it was legal and, more importantly, because it was available on their cell phone.
Withdrawals should be as frictionless as possible, with severe penalties for unnecessarily prolonged withdrawals. Deposits, meanwhile, should entail much more friction. Some advocates have called for a ban on credit card deposits (already in place in seven states), though evidence from the United Kingdom suggests that this measure does not help problem or at-risk gamblers. More promising would be a limit on the number of deposits a bettor can make within each twenty-four-hour period.
