Losing Big Quotes

“The nation has not faced the long term of its embrace of legal sports betting, which was facilitated by profit-hungry companies and revenue-hungry lawmakers.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Records from his BetMGM accounts show that, over the sixty-two days from May 16 to July 16, he placed at least one bet all but eight days. Thanks to an early hot streak, he ended his betting binge down just $1,500, a somewhat meaningful sum given his lack of steady income, but like the year prior, the toll was not just financial. On some days he spent nearly all his waking hours gambling, multiple times equating his mindset to being high on psychedelic mushrooms where gambling becomes “your reality,” a reality totally detached from all other parts of life. The stress of that reality led him to take up smoking and to drink a lot more alcohol than he otherwise would have. For the first round of the tournament, he stayed awake for nearly forty consecutive hours researching potential picks, discussing upcoming matches, and then watching them unfold. His preferred way to bet was to identify a match he liked and watch the first game or two to see how the players were performing. BetMGM would have let him bet on every single serve if he had wanted to.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“The nation is in the middle of a rapid embrace of gambling with no overall direction, just more more more. But how much gambling is too much?”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Seven states have legalized iGaming — online casino games like slot machines and blackjack. From personal experience, these games are terrifying in how addictive they are. They offer much better margins than sports betting, so major gambling companies will leverage their sportsbooks to dominate this market, just as they leveraged DFS to dominate sports betting. While sports betting can be tweaked to be made safer, iGaming needs to be stopped in its tracks until it can be proven that the games are designed with player safety in mind. And even these games are just the beginning, as young people are caught up in a range of online gambling-adjacent activities, from stock trading and cryptocurrency to video-game skin gambling and loot boxes.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“People who have lost their savings or have developed an addiction need to know that they are not solely at fault and that support is available. Given the high suicide rate among problem gamblers, American families and educational institutions need to do everything they can so that if someone runs into trouble with gambling, they know to come forward before their life is in danger.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Most of the information Americans receive about sports betting comes from sportsbooks themselves. Thanks to commercials featuring celebrity spokespeople and the arrival of sportsbooks inside arenas, what was once an illicit vice on the margins of society is now at the heart of sports culture. The through line in all of this normalizing messaging is that betting on sports is exciting, and that it is harmless. The nation needs counterprogramming to sportsbooks’ narrative so that young people, in particular, are able to appropriately scrutinize these messages. They do not need to be chastised into thinking that gambling is not exciting or is evil, but they need to be made aware that it is addictive and that it can be easy for someone to get carried away. One approach is that taken by Virginia, where, in 2022, gambling addiction was added to school curricula on drug and alcohol abuse. Arthur Paikowsky of the International Center for Responsible Gaming suggested adding gambling content to first-year orientation at colleges and universities. Parents and anyone who teaches financial literacy should also make a point of talking about gambling. Of course, high school and college students are not exactly known for paying rapt attention during these types of lessons. But someone needs to present an alternative view about sports betting than what young people are likely to see on social media or in sportsbook advertising.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Regulators need to take their regulatory responsibilities more seriously, to focus more on protecting consumers and less on protecting their state’s new source of revenue.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“In too many states, sports betting regulatory bodies have ceded control to gambling companies. These regulators are charged with managing sports betting and ensuring companies abide by the rules that the regulators put in place. In practice, they seem to see their mandate as getting out of companies’ way while ensuring sportsbooks meet the bare minimum requirements.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Keith Whyte at the National Council on Problem Gambling claims problem gambling is 338 times less well-funded per capita than treatment for substance abuse.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Companies will insist that their data should be treated as a trade secret. But scholars and lawmakers cannot make informed decisions about gambling policy without better data, and modern sportsbooks have more data on their players than any gambling operation in human history.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“No one is watching Malaysian women’s doubles badminton at four in the morning hoping to make every moment more by placing a little money on the match, though it is perfectly legal to do so in some states. If someone is gambling on such an obscure sport, they are seeking action wherever they can find it. They would bet on a coin flip if they could and Kyle describes his late-night betting on minor league British darts as effectively doing this. States make rules as to which sports to include in their betting catalogs and what types of outcomes are acceptable to bet on. These lists should be shortened. Obscure sports account for fractions of sportsbooks’ revenue but cause massive amounts of harm for the small subset of people using them to feed their addictions. If anything, certain bets could effectively become trapdoors to snag problem bettors: Place a bet on an obscure sport in the middle of the night on a Tuesday after a day of heavy losses? Congratulations, you’ve won an automatic limit on app access, bet size, and deposits.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Some sportsbooks are notorious for delaying customer withdrawals. An uncharitable interpretation is that companies intentionally keep as much money in players’ accounts as long as they can in the hopes that players will get the urge to gamble. 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. Rather than rely on players to set a time or deposit limit, sportsbooks should use their data on players to identify when they are chasing their losses and should block them from accessing or funding their account for a certain amount of time.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“By far the top factor that led Fanatics to label a customer as high-risk was deposit frequency. (The second largest was the percentage of bets placed on days of the week other than Saturday.)”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“At the 2024 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Kristie Savage, head of data science at Fanatics Betting and Gaming, gave a presentation entitled “Predicting Problem Gambling Among Sports Bettors.” Savage explained how Fanatics creates player risk profiles using two measures, one of risky behavior and another based on the trend of that behavior if it is becoming more or less risky. Within a week of someone gambling on their app, Savage boasted, Fanatics can identify about half of all high-risk players. The presentation confirms what the Public Health Advocacy Institute and others have long suspected: Sportsbooks have massive amounts of data on players. If they wanted to, companies could use that data to stop unsafe practices before they develop. They are actively choosing not to deploy these predictive models, which would catch people like Kyle before they get into trouble.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Sportsbooks should do more because they can do more. Instead of simply promoting responsible gambling by individuals, they should practice the responsible provision of gambling.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Sportsbooks’ current business model relies on a small percentage of bettors losing a lot of money, and their bottom line would be in grave danger if these RG [Responsible Gaming] tools were in wider use. Not surprisingly, most of these tools are entirely optional, and available data indicates extremely low uptake rates. In its home state of Massachusetts, DraftKings reported 0.1 percent of players set a time limit for app use, 0.13 percent set a spending limit, 1.4 percent had used a “cool-off” period, and a whopping 2.3 percent had set a deposit limit. As former problem gambler and longtime marketing professional Jamie Salsburg explained, the messaging around RG is “broken” and is not designed in such a way to effectively reach the people who most need to use RG tools. The messaging is not the only thing that is broken. Optional tools rely on a moment of clarity from someone who might already be chasing their losses. These tools are, fundamentally, the wrong way to protect players.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“The overarching goal for the nation should be a sports betting setup focused most of all on the well-being of gamblers, even at the expense of profit for sportsbooks or tax revenue for states.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Sportsbooks are doing much more than siphoning money that would have already been spent on betting. They are inculcating sports betting among people who never would have bet otherwise, creating new generations of gamblers.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Executives and spokespeople constantly argue that offshore, illegal sportsbooks do not have to comply with any regulations or pay any taxes. But legal sportsbooks should be held to a higher standard than illegal operators.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“The current sports betting regime is defined by insufficient regulations to protect gamblers, with too many states relying on the impossible dream of sportsbooks regulating themselves.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“The classification of gambling as an addictive activity means that at some point, problem gamblers are not choosing to gamble. The road to addiction is smoothed for them by sportsbooks. The design of the app interfaces, the nonstop stream of betting options, the relentless advertising, and the auspiciously timed bonus offers all serve to keep people like Kyle engaged, maximizing their “customer lifetime value,” the industry’s holy grail metric dating back to the days of DFS. If sportsbooks have smoothed bettors’ paths to heavy losses and gambling disorder, then states have smoothed sportsbooks’ paths to products that let them do so.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“The question is not how to totally denormalize sports betting such that putting $5 on the Cubs becomes socially or legally unacceptable. The question is how to normalize safe betting practices and, more importantly, to put a system in place that prevents unsafe practices from developing in the first place.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Too many young people and some not-so-young people are getting caught up in gambling without understanding how easy it is to get carried away or to become addicted. Some of these people likely would have run into trouble gambling anyway—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.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“By recognizing that unsafe gambling is not simply a matter of personal irresponsibility, sportsbooks could transform themselves into sustainable businesses that protect public health. Every day they choose not to do so brings them a day closer to reckoning.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“The first lawsuits against tobacco companies by smokers were filed in the 1950s, but the industry maintained an undefeated record in these cases for four decades. The opioid crisis began in the 1990s but took until the mid-2010s to gain national media and political attention, and a similar (albeit shorter) lag plagued lawmakers’ response to fentanyl. The Senate’s passage of the Kids Online Safety Act sponsored by Richard Blumenthal in 2024 came only after a leak of incriminating Facebook files and years of warnings about the deleterious effect of social media on young people’s mental health. Federal action on sports gambling regulation will likely face a similarly protracted timeline.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“States, sports leagues, data companies, media outlets, and others are all trying to get their hand in the sports betting cookie jar, and the cookies only come from one place: gamblers’ wallets.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“Gambling companies had promised sports betting as a tax revenue bonanza and by converting players from the illegal market, a product that would do little to reshape the total amount spent on gambling. “We’re starting to see policymakers start to really push back on all of the false promises that they were once sold,” Brianne Doura-Schawohl explained.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“In 2022, a New York Times investigation uncovered at least eight campuses that had reached partnerships with gambling companies, including the University of Colorado Boulder, where every download of the PointsBet app using the university’s promotional code netted the school $30 after the customer placed their first bet.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“The SAFE Bet Act would reenact a ban on sports betting but create a process whereby states can apply to the Department of Justice to set up sports betting operations, offering federal oversight to ensure states have sufficient consumer protection regulations in place. The “minimum federal standards” called for in the bill fall across three categories. First, advertising, banning certain ad content such as bonus offers and placing limits on when gambling ads can run, including during live sporting events. Second, affordability, banning credit card deposits, requiring affordability checks for anyone making a large wager, and banning sportsbooks from accepting more than five deposits from a customer over a twenty-four-hour period. Third, artificial intelligence, banning the use of AI to track players’ gambling or create individualized promotions.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

“In April 2021, forty-year-old Luke Ashton died by suicide after sinking £18,000 into debt, primarily through gambling with Betfair, a part of Flutter. Ashton had utilized numerous RG [Responsible Gaming] tools, including self-exclusion and deposit limits. But in the ten weeks prior to his death, he ramped up his gambling. In March 2021, he made 1,229 bets and deposited £2,500 into his account. Ashton received eight generic RG emails from Betfair, whose algorithm labeled him “low risk” for problem gambling. In a landmark move, the coroner listed gambling disorder as a cause of death, noted that RG tools are “inadequate” for protecting gamblers, and castigated the company for not adopting practices that would meaningfully prevent harm.”
― Jonathan D. Cohen, Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling