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Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

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Jonathan D. Cohen

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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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