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“Parlay bets are the combination of at least two wagers. A parlay wager might include a bet that a baseball team will win, the pitcher will record at least three strikeouts, and the catcher will hit a home run. The possibilities are endless, and the added bets don’t all have to come from the same game or even the same sport. The upside is that, with each additional component, the payout rate goes up. The downside is that parlays are all or nothing: If a single leg of the parlay misses, the whole bet loses, so adding more lines to the parlay drastically reduces the odds of winning. The result is pure excitement. “A parlay is sort of like poppers mixed with molly mixed with cocaine mixed with a heart condition,” journalist Anthony Schneck writes. 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 bet on non-parlay sports bets and thirty-one cents for every dollar bet on parlays; still, parlays are hugely popular among amateur bettors, especially in the United States. In the age of cryptocurrency and GameStop, these gamblers want to multiply their money many times over, and they want to do it quickly. So they turn to parlays, which represent the jackpotification of sports betting, the transformation of sports betting slips into lottery tickets.”

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“His gambling routine was blessedly interrupted in March 2020, when professional sports shut down amid the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. But before too long, Korean baseball came back, followed by tennis. Because he was working from home, he could have sports on all the time. It was like an “NCAA Tournament every day, every week.” Not knowing any other bookies, Andrew turned to the two largest offshore, online sportsbooks: Bovada.lv and BetOnline.ag. Both offer a wide array of sports betting options, as well as casino games and poker. BetOnline consistently accepts credit cards, which only sometimes worked on Bovada. For the latter, Andrew would deposit money into cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, purchase Bitcoin, and immediately deposit the Bitcoin into Bovada, where it was converted into cash he could use to gamble. On the offshore sportsbooks, Andrew resumed his normal betting routine. But once he started gambling with credit cards, he began racking up significant debt.”

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“Once he went into debt, Andrew’s imperative shifted. He kept betting less to try to recover his losses or his ego and more to win money that would allow him to prevent anyone from discovering his gambling problem. Andrew’s doubling down speaks to an important feature of gambling disorder: It represents the only addiction where the affected individual can reasonably hope their addiction will solve the problems that stem from that addiction. Someone dependent on alcohol, for instance, has no reason to hope that their next drink will relieve them of their substance use disorder. A problem gambler, on the other hand, can hold on to the belief that all it takes is one big win to wipe out all of their debt, and therefore all the negative consequences of their gambling. As a result, many keep betting, and keep losing, which only makes them more desperate to bet, and so on. Andrew fell into this exact trap. He would gamble, and the feeling of his life hanging in the balance only made his bets even more thrilling. Eventually, he would win enough to come close to getting out of credit card debt. Rather than stop betting, he would push to try and get enough for all of it. Then he would start to lose again. And the cycle would continue.”

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“Problem gambling has a higher suicide rate than any other type of addiction. According to a 2023 Rutgers study of New Jersey bettors, almost 30 percent of individuals with a gambling disorder reported thoughts of suicide, 25 percent had engaged in self-harm, and 20 percent had attempted suicide. An important factor is gender. Men are already much more likely to die by suicide than women, and heavy gamblers, especially sports bettors, are predominantly male. Gambling studies scholarship offers two additional reasons for the high prevalence of suicide among problem gamblers. First is indebtedness, the understanding that the gambler’s debts would disappear with them. The second is shame. Gambling addiction has not been destigmatized nearly as much as other substance addictions.”

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“Andrew received an email notification every time he accessed his FanDuel account, and there were some days when he would log in twenty times, the only gap a few hours of sleep between 3:00 and 7:00 a.m. (it is not possible to determine how long he kept the site open each time he logged in). More troublesome was the pace of his deposits. He would rapid-fire money into his account, on one day making twelve deposits totaling nearly $1,000, behavior that suggests he was chasing losses. ... FanDuel never flagged Andrew’s account. 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.”

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“Isaac Rose-Berman explains, many professional bettors purposefully engage in betting behaviors that make them look irresponsible, such as logging in at odd hours or withdrawing money and then canceling the withdrawal to keep money in their account (to give the appearance that they can’t resist betting). These sharp players know that sportsbooks don’t want to cut off bettors like Andrew. They reason that the longer they can make the sportsbooks think they have an addiction, the longer they will be allowed to bet without limits on their account.”

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“Fundamentally, sportsbooks want to limit their own liability, not people’s gambling. They also reason that any restrictions will not actually stop the problem but will simply send bettors into the waiting, willing arms of a rival. If someone is going to gamble more than they can afford, it might as well be on their app.”

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“Claiming bogus medical reimbursements, he transferred the entirety of his HSA into his bank account to fund his gambling. His mother gave him $8,000 in May to purchase an engagement ring, and over the course of the next three days he transferred almost half of her check into FanDuel.”

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“Andrew missed two mortgage payments and the bank called his father, whose name remained on the title. His parents confronted him and, seven years after he placed his first bet, he confessed that he had a gambling problem. It came as a complete surprise. His mother said it felt “like we were hit by a truck.” For his father, the confession immediately explained so much of Andrew’s behavior the previous few years: his shabby clothes and beat-up car that seemed out of place for a young attorney, his isolation, his use of the family credit card for innocuous purchases, his moodiness, his encyclopedic knowl- edge of seemingly every sport, his addiction to his phone, and so on.”

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“In the years immediately following the Murphy decision, sportsbooks got almost everything they realistically could have wanted in the American marketplace. Sports gambling became legal in thirty-eight states; online gambling in thirty. Industry lobbying generally kept tax rates low. Partnerships with leagues and celebrity spokespeople embedded gambling into the sports ecosystem. Advertising made it inescapable. And the bets came pouring in.”

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“Little needs to be done to persuade people that stealing to support a gambling habit is wrong. 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 one 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?”

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“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.”

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“By the time someone recognizes the need for a deposit limit, their dopamine pathways may already be rewired in a way that makes it difficult to slow their gambling -- and therefore makes them unwilling to opt into a program to do so.”

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“The industry's version of 'responsible gaming' is designed to pull people from the river once they are drowning rather than requiring guardrails to make sports gambling products less dangerous,” Daynard, Gottlieb, and Levant wrote in 2022.”

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“The RG [Responsible Gaming] approach is rooted in personal responsibility. By suggesting that players should play responsibly, RG implies that doing so is entirely up to them. If someone develops a gambling problem, then they did not properly utilize the resources made available in the sportsbook app. People have agency and should face the consequences of their decisions, good or bad. 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.”

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“Tobacco companies have long insisted that smoking is a choice. They do so even as they have adjusted their cigarettes to ensure just the right balance between ammonia and nicotine to keep smokers chemically hooked.”

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“No matter how small they make the font, RG [Responsible Gaming] messages are exactly what the sportsbooks want. RG reinforces to bettors that playing safely is up to them and them only. As historian Sarah Milov explains, warning labels were nominally placed on cigarettes to warn customers about the risks to their health. However, they also served to protect the tobacco industry from tort litigation, as “Americans could no longer claim they had not been warned about the risks” of smoking. Though hardly as prominent or as morbid as cigarette warning labels, responsible gaming messages serve much the same purpose, inoculating the industry in the event bettors get carried away.”

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“Internet sports gambling has particular consequences for young bettors, nearly a third of whom said someone has expressed concern to them about their gambling and almost a quarter have at one point lied about the extent of their betting. While most states only allow bets from those who are at least twenty-one, high schoolers have found ways to get in on the action too. Young people are already used to gamified algorithms shaping much of their lives, from who they date to the TV shows they watch. Online sports betting adds a new level of gamification to sports gambling, which is itself a gamification of actual sports.”

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“Young Americans are open to a range of speculative forms of investing, from the stock market to cryptocurrency to video game skins. Many in this generation have disposable income, but not so much that they see a realistic possibility of saving up to buy a home, start a business, or pay off their student loans. So they gamble instead, whether on March Madness or meme stocks, hoping to multiply their money many times over.”

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“Young men across the globe have a documented appetite for risky behavior that might predispose them to gambling, especially for large stakes. In the United States, this appetite for risk is augmented by a relative decline in income for all but the top-earning men and by lower rates of enrollment in higher education compared to women. For many, gambling presents a seemingly rational alternative way to try and get rich. The sportsbooks know all this.”

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“The two companies that dominate the American sports gambling market—FanDuel and DraftKings—came onto the scene in the mid-2010s as the purveyors of daily fantasy sports. Today, 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. In many ways, they are more tech companies than sportsbooks, given their reliance on specialized software to generate constantly changing lines on every possible game and every possible outcome within those games. Like other tech companies, they know how to find their target demographic and how to keep them engaged. They keep players hooked with everything from carefully constructed app interfaces to VIP hosts, all with the goal of extracting as much money as possible from as many gamblers as possible.”

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“Much of sportsbooks’ behavior is obviously less about competing with the black market and instead about cultivating a new generation of gamblers. “Anybody under twenty-five they have their eye on,” one former FanDuel employee said of their old company. The vast majority of these bettors would likely never have bet illegally. But the companies know that young people are crucial for their bottom line, that bettors between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five are “the guys that bring you all the money,” the former FanDueler told me.”

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“Fearful of competition, of demanding stockholders, and of public and private entities seeking greater cuts of their profits, sportsbooks allow people on their platforms to develop gambling problems. Then they let them keep betting until the money runs out.”

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“After the 2018 Supreme Court decision, sports betting launched in thirty-eight states in less than six years. In much of the country, this rapid pace was facilitated by the gambling industry, which not only lobbied for legalization but helped write the bills and the regulations governing its own behavior.”

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“In most states, sports betting was the first form of legal internet gambling. But lawmakers did little to prepare the populace. Gambling can be harmless, provided the right safeguards and treatment options are in place. They are not. Most lawmakers are either oblivious to the harms from sports betting or have chosen to turn a blind eye.”

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“The sports leagues and their gambling partners ... conspired with state governments to place what he calls a “landmine” in front of young people. Many of these young people will be able to avoid gambling or avoid incurring any harm from gambling. Many will not. Most do not realize how addictive it can be, how much attention, time, and money it can suck away. So they download the app onto their phone, eager to add some excitement to the games they love, not realizing this can be the start of a dangerous journey.”

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“[New Jersey Democratic senator Bill Bradley] feared the spread of problem gambling, that legalized gambling would supplement rather than supplant illegal gambling, and most of all, the threat of the corruption of sports and of America’s youth. “When young people see the State involved in gambling on sports, can there be any doubt that they will think that that’s what sport is all about?”

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“Garnett and the sportsbooks justified the design of their bill by emphasizing the need to compete with the illegal sports betting market. By their telling, Colorado was a state overrun with bookies and offshore gambling websites, and the only defense against these nefarious forces was legal, regulated gambling. DraftKings’ Stanton Dodge estimated that sports betting was already taking place “on a massive scale,” and that 1.2 million Coloradans (one out of every five people) bet a total of $2.5 billion per year illegally, an enormous, un-fact-checkable figure of unknown origin. Proponents implied that so much gambling was happening anyway that HB1327 would not so much expand sports betting as siphon existing illegal players into a taxed marketplace. The black-market bogeyman both got legislators on board and rationalized the industry-friendly aspects of the bill.”

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“Garnett chose water as the beneficiary for sports betting as a matter of both good policy and good politics. Water turned gambling skeptics—and maybe even opponents—into believers. Western Colorado state senator Dylan Roberts (at the time a member of the state house) said the water tie-in made it a “no-brainer” for him to support the bill, “not because I love sports betting or anything.”

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“The ad campaign focused on the Water Plan, not sports betting. As Perry put it, “No one really understands the nuance of why water is important, but they know it’s important.” In one commercial, Terry Fankhauser, longtime executive vice president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, proclaimed, “DD is a win for Colorado’s water.” While the campaign did not hide that DD benefited sports betting, neither did it place gambling front and center. The campaign turned the ballot measure into a simple equation: A vote for DD was a vote for water. A vote against was a vote against water, and by extension, against the future of Colorado. Of course while the ads never quite claimed sports betting would be a panacea for water, neither did they make clear just what percentage of the Water Plan would be funded by gambling.”

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“The election still proved extremely close. At one point on election night, “Yes” led by just eighty votes. Sports bettors across the country stayed up to watch the results. Garnett was awake with them, tweeting at 10:30 p.m. “Just hang tight and enjoy the #sweat,” the term used by gamblers to describe anxiously watching the outcome of a bet. Ultimately, DD would prevail with 51.4 percent. “Yes” votes outnumbered “no” in just seventeen of Colorado’s sixty-four counties, but the campaign was able to run up the score in Denver and its surrounding suburbs. Despite the bipartisan nature of the original bill, the vote fell largely along the state’s established rural/urban, Republican/Democratic divide. In all but nine cases, a county’s vote for DD predicted which way it would swing in the following year’s presidential election, with pro-DD counties going for Joe Biden and anti-DD counties for Donald Trump. According to Brian Jackson, polling conducted after the vote by the Environmental Defense Fund revealed that, without the water tie-in, the proposition very likely would have failed.”

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“Richard Schuetz, longtime industry insider and former regulator, … likens states handing control over sports betting to inexperienced regulators with a patient placing their life in the hands of an inexperienced surgeon and hoping for the best.”

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“Colorado had the misfortune of launching legal sports betting at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when all major professional sports leagues were shut down. Some people, like Garnett, were willing to place bets that would not be decided for months (the Broncos finished 5–11). Others wanted action right away, wherever on the globe they could find it. Among the most popular sports in those early months were South Korean baseball, Costa Rican soccer, and Russian ping-pong. In May and June, Coloradans bet $15.7 million—roughly a quarter of the total bet on all sports—on table tennis, which was exciting, fast paced, and played at all hours of the day. Even if many bettors were simply picking players at random, they were not going to miss the chance for convenient, legal betting.”

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“As one of [Colorado]’s problem gambling therapists predicted in early 2019, “We just are not ready for this.” They weren’t, and still aren’t. As of 2024, the state still has no inpatient or intensive outpatient treatment centers dedicated to problem gambling, and the PGCC website lists thirteen certified treatment providers for the entire state.”

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“In interviews, many current and former lawmakers and industry representatives acknowledged the flaws in Colorado’s initial sports betting system, which they attributed to the fact that Colorado was an early adopter and had few models to learn from. (It was the sixteenth state to launch sports betting after Murphy, and the ninth to launch full online gambling.) But there was nothing forcing the state to adopt so early other than a gambler-esque hope for a quick windfall. Colorado could have sat back and assessed the results from New Jersey and Delaware and designed regulations that addressed the issues faced in other states. With money—or water—in their eyes, it chose not to.”

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“States were unprepared for the onslaught of lobbying that followed the Murphy decision and were caught flat-footed by an aggressive campaign to set up industry-friendly sports betting systems. Facing the promise of a new source of tax revenue, lawmakers largely went along with sportsbooks’ desires without considering the potential harm that could ensue from gambling arriving onto every cell phone in the state.”

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“The NFL was terrified of gambling because it would be devastating if fans came to believe that the outcome of that one-yard run was fixed, scripted, rigged. Notwithstanding the popularity of professional wrestling—which actually is scripted—a sports league cannot attract viewers if people believe the outcome to be in any way predetermined. The league’s concern with integrity, then, was as much about ensuring the fairness of its games as ensuring the perception of fairness. “The most precious possessions that we as a football league have are our reputations for integrity and the integrity of our games,” Commissioner Paul Tagliabue told Congress during hearings over PASPA. The league went to extremes to preserve that reputation and distance itself from all things gambling.”

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“For decades, the [NFL] had a strict ban on all televised gambling references. Some announcers, like Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder or Al Michaels, would cheekily skirt this rule. If the outcome of a game was in hand but the losing team scored a touchdown that affected the over/under or the game spread, Michaels might note that the touchdown was “significant to some.” Such insider comments notwithstanding, the NFL’s stance on gambling ensured its broadcasts were gambling-free zones. These days, Al Michaels does DraftKings ad reads for Amazon Prime’s broadcast of Thursday Night Football.”

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“The NFL justified its embrace of gambling with a new favor­ite Goodell phrase: “fan engagement.” “We’re going to find ways we can engage fans through legalized sports betting,” he declared in 2021. What Goodell meant was that betting offered a chance for people to raise the stakes for the games they already loved and to make being a football fan a more interactive experience. Gamblers had always taken a special interest in NFL games and now there were a lot more potential gamblers, casual and occasional viewers who could be converted into superfans if they thought they could win some money.”

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“67% of sports bettors said they watched more than usual when they had bet on an NFL game. While a quarter of all sports bettors said they watched more than usual when they had bet on an NFL game, watching a game that was a blowout, just 10 percent said they would do so if they had money on the line. This was music to the league’s ears. As a former DraftKings employee observes, gambling is “scratching the itch of people who are competitive . . . or somebody that just wants a reason to watch a Thursday night Titans/Texas game.”

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“With indications that Gen Z is less interested in watching football—and professional sports generally—as well as an overall decline in America’s broadcast TV habit, dark clouds appear on the horizon, revenue-wise. Gambling was both an infusion of money through partnerships, sponsorships, and data agreements and a way to bump ratings back up. Sure enough, average viewership for 2021–2023 was 17.2 million. As more Americans try their hand at sports betting—especially as more states legalize it—the NFL will rely on gamblers to keep its revenue arrow pointing upward. The league does not seem to mind if it becomes as normal to bet on football as it is to watch football.”

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“The normalization of sports betting represents the most consequential outcome of the NFL’s flip-flop on gambling. Had it only been states and the gambling industry that embraced gambling after Murphy, sports betting might have remained a somewhat niche interest. Betting would have a strong appeal but would have largely remained a subculture within American sports. It could have become something like fantasy sports: an activity that is hugely popular but also a pastime that can be avoided by anyone who does not want to participate. Today, sports gambling is definitively not a subculture or niche interest. This is in large part because the NFL and its fellow leagues helped transform the nation’s sports ecosystem into a sports gambling ecosystem. Is all of this gambling a threat to the integrity of football? Apparently not.”

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“From TV broadcasts to data deals, gambling is now an unavoidable part of the football experience, one that the league insists does not threaten the integrity of its product. As it has for decades, the NFL is trying to have it both ways: cracking down on some types of gambling while simultaneously making as much money from gambling as it possibly can.”

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“Every problem gambler’s story is unique. But in many ways, their stories are also all the same. Most sports bettors are drawn to gambling because they love sports and because gambling offers the chance to make the games more exciting. For some people, though, the pursuit of that excitement takes over their lives, leading to addiction—followed, for those fortunate enough, by recovery.”

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