Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Jonathan D. Cohen

Quote by Jonathan D. Cohen

Work

Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Jonathan D. Cohen

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Jonathan D. Cohen. more

You May Also Like

“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.”

SportsAddictionGamblingGamblerGambling AddictGambling AddictionSports BettingLegalized Sports BettingOnline Sports BettingSports Gambling
Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
Create image

“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.”

SportsAddictionGamblingGamblerGambling AddictGambling AddictionSports BettingLegalized Sports BettingOnline Sports BettingSports Gambling
Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
Create image

“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.”

SportsAddictionGamblingGamblerGambling AddictGambling AddictionSports BettingLegalized Sports BettingOnline Sports BettingSports Gambling
Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
Create image

“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.”

SportsAddictionGamblingGamblerGambling AddictGambling AddictionSports BettingLegalized Sports BettingOnline Sports BettingSports Gambling
Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
Create image

“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.”

SportsAddictionGamblingGamblerGambling AddictGambling AddictionSports BettingLegalized Sports BettingOnline Sports BettingSports Gambling
Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
Create image

“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.”

SportsAddictionGamblingGamblerGambling AddictGambling AddictionSports BettingLegalized Sports BettingOnline Sports BettingSports Gambling
Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
Create image

“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.”

SportsAddictionGamblingGamblerGambling AddictGambling AddictionSports BettingLegalized Sports BettingOnline Sports BettingSports Gambling
Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
Create image

“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.”

SportsAddictionGamblingGamblerGambling AddictGambling AddictionSports BettingLegalized Sports BettingOnline Sports BettingSports Gambling
Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
Create image