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“He was addicted to the dopamine high that came with the feeling of a bet hanging on the outcome of a game, having a stake in something he could not control. “Since I started gambling, I could turn every day—no matter how much work/school/ stress I had into the most exciting day of the year,” he later wrote in his journal. He would bet in the shower. He would bet while driving. Betting became his reason to wake up in the morning. He would place a wager before he fell asleep and wake up eagerly to check the result. Regardless of the outcome, he would place another bet, his action the only thing that could motivate him to get out of bed and start the day.”

Quote by Jonathan D. Cohen

Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
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Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

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Jonathan D. Cohen

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“Winning money felt different, providing a hit of dopamine no biweekly direct deposit ever could. Unlike a salary, winning said something about the gambler as a person. It marked them as a winner. The lottery lets bettors feel they are lucky or blessed. Sports betting lets gamblers feel smart. Of course, luck plays an important role in sports, and by extension in sports betting. However, because gamblers make their own picks, they can imagine sports betting as an exercise in intelligence.”

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Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
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“Many sports fans—especially young men—feel they have a unique understanding of the games they watch. 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.”

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Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
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“Rather than feel humbled by a big loss, gamblers instead have an urge to bet more to win it all back. Anna Lembke theorizes that problem gamblers are addicted to chasing their money: “The more they lose, the stronger the urge to continue gambling, and the stronger the rush when they win.” Andrew chased, and he lost. But he did not panic. After all, he was the sports genius who had been up $43,000. So he kept betting, buoyed by the belief that, “If I got up all this… I can get it back so quick, because I got it so quick, right?”

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Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
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“Here was the downside of gambling as a signifier of intelligence: If winning says a bettor is smart, what does losing say? Gamblers chase as much to recover money as to recover their self-esteem. And if they keep betting, they can avoid admitting they have lost. So, if he was down $40,000, what was another $5,000 or $10,000 compared to the possibility of wiping the slate clean?”

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Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
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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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Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
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“Sometime I am disappointed with love. I thought that when you were in love, it would always be right there, starting you in the face, reminding you every moment that you love this person. It seems that it isn't always like that. Sometimes I know that I love Jamie, but I don't feel it, and I wonder what it would be like to be with someone else. I love him the most when we fight and I am scared that he will leave me. After we fight, I want so much to be close ot him, and the next day I want his hand in mine every minute. Sometimes he loves me more than I love him, and he wants me to pay attention to him, but I wish he would leave me alone so that I could go back to reading or talking to Angie about Mrs. Adams. Sometimes we both love each other a lot and its hard to hang up at night, and I wish it could always be like that.”

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Book:If He Had Been With Me
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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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Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
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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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Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
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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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Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
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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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Book:Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
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