If You're Not Spending $2,000 A Month On Online Sports Betting, Are You Even Alive?

You going broke means someone else is getting rich, so.

Skrrrt skrrrt the presses, The Economist has found itself a hot take: The recent boon in patchwork-regulated online sports gambling is a good thing. The actual title of this week’s cover story: “America’s gambling boom should be celebrated, not feared: The gambling frenzy is mostly about people being free to enjoy themselves.”

Is that what it’s about? Yay, gambling away the price of a house on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, rah rah rah fun!

Still, when is The Economist gonna think of the little guy, your hardworking Richie Apriles and Paulie Walnutses, pushed out of the life-coaching business because Davey Scatino is doing his betting on DraftKings with a credit card now?

[Warning, graphic]

Is this really good for states overall? As the Economist oh by the way notes in another article they published on the very same day, credit-card debt goes up in betting households, and the savings rate and household credit scores go down. Betting households are 25 percent more likely to go bankrupt. And BTW, there’s also a higher rate of domestic violence in states with sports betting, and yes, they concede, “for some, gambling is a ruinous addiction.”

But look at how much fun some people are having, they insist. Sourpusses who don’t like sports betting are stuck in a “puritanical past,” practically living embodiments of the Hays Code, or the party poopers of Communist China. Companies are making money, and the gamblers are having as much fun as a bunch of young David Lee Roths! Even Jay-Z is opening a casino, which makes sitting alone in your dorm room pecking away one’s tuition glamorous by association. It is “an expansion of people’s freedom to lead their lives as they choose.” Some people form throuples, some talk to their dogs like they are people, and others prefer weeping on the can because they have to tell their mother they spent their college tuition check betting that Mike Tyson would KO that dick Jake Paul with an uppercut to the beard. It’s called freedom of life choices, MOM.

We certainly don’t want to be accused of being the lovechild of Mao and Prudence Thistletwat (again). But the ruining people’s lives part, er, should we all really be skimming right over that? Is it really a good thing for a state government to take a cut off of their most mentally vulnerable residents being driven into bankruptcy?

Back in the day, the ancient times before 2018, you’d have to travel to Vegas in person to lose all of your money betting on sports. You’d have to physically hand over the money in green paper bills to a lady with a beehive and a Virginia Slim dangling from her lips, no credit cards allowed, unless you were pathetic enough to call American Express and beg them for a cash advance. For your cash you would at least get a cushy chair, free drinks, and the experience of watching games on a big screen in the company of horny convention-goers, beleaguered cocktail servers and a pack of hooting Sig Eps from USC. And then you would see all of their misery and pain when they lost. You got an experience!

But in 2018 the Supreme Court threw out The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act that limited sports betting to Nevada, because New Jersey complained that this was unfair to Atlantic City. And since then, the country’s been on a nationwide gambling frenzy: 38 states plus DC have legalized sports betting, and 27 have legalized online sports betting. So not only can you use a credit card to gamble now, if you’re doing the online betting thing, it’s necessary.

Handy for the researchers who study human misery, states legalized sports betting at different times. So, they can compare states before and after, and the after is not much funtimes for the people losing money, which is DUH NO SHIT most of them.

In 2023, the sports-betting industry brought in a record $10.92 billion, 2024 is projected to be $14.3 billion, and that is not from the winners. The growth has come mostly from men, who are doing about 75 percent of the sports betting activity, and mostly from the ones who can least afford to lose, or as researchers call them, “financially constrained households already operating with less flexibility.” Also ones that are undersmart and overconfident, or as economist Steven Leavitt more delicately put it: “bookmakers exploit bettors’ cognitive biases and lack of skill.”

That’s the name of the game, baby! The ideal mark is a Schmoe who fancies themselves Lefty Rosenthal, instead of being self-aware enough to realize they’re just some guy with no insider knowledge who watches sports events just like anybody else. Gambling also thrives on impulsiveness: During the last Super Bowl, online bets were made at a rate of nearly 15,000 per second.

But unlike the obligatory old people at the casino gif, today’s new-style American sports bettors are younger. According to one survey, 39 percent of men 18-49 years old and 20 percent of women 18-49 say they have an account with an online sports betting service, and 59 percent of them place a bet at least once a week. And while 93 percent of them say it’s “fun and exciting,” 37 percent of the same people also say they have felt bad or ashamed after losing a bet, and 38 percent said that they’ve felt that they bet more than they should have.

Modern sports bettors aren’t using their spare cash to do it either, like the way oldsters would roll into Vegas with a fanny pack of quarters then retreat to the shrimp buffet when their money was gone. They’re dipping into savings and going into debt to bet. Gambling is an addictive activity, no shit, and bettors tend to wager increasingly higher amounts, and get more inured to losses. Always double your bet when you lose so that you can make your money back all at once!

Gaming apps also use all the tricks to encourage a bet-more-and-more-often mindset, pinging users with push notifications, enticing them with bonuses to apply to wagers if they deposit more money, running ads all over every app from kid’s games to Spotify to TV, hiring celebrities like LeBron James, Jamie Foxx, and Kevin Hart to make betting seem like a goodtime party social activity instead of like a guy crying in the bathroom because he has to tell his wife he’s lost the kids’ tuition.

Speaking of college funds, sports betting companies have even paid universities to allow them to promote on campuses, such as a deal between the company PointsBet and the University of Colorado Boulder: Each time someone downloaded the PointsBet app with a special promotional code, the university got a $30 kickback, plus seven no-show jobs at the Esplanade and a UHaul full of boosted furs (JK about the last two, but geez, kickbacks, really?). And at least seven other universities have other promotional deals letting sports-betting companies advertise on campus.

And there’s currently no federal laws regulating the online gambling industry; any regulations are at the state level. If you feel wronged you have to sue in state court, such as this New Jersey woman suing DraftKings after they allegedly ignored signs of her husband’s problem gambling at let him wager four times his annual salary, getting in the hole for a almost million dollars after enticements that she says were violations of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act.

Rep. Paul Tonko and Sen. Richard Blumenthal have proposed the federal SAFE Bet Act, to limit customer deposits to five in a 24-hour period, prohibit companies from using AI to track individuals and customize betting enticements for them, or target known problem gamblers or people under 21.

But that’s got about 1000-1 odds of passing!

PSA: The house always wins! People go broke fast, they get full of shame and even suicidal, it’s no cute Kevin Hart /LeBron party, kids. You wanna be cool, bet your friend so the loser has to mow somebody else’s lawn in a house dress! Teach your kids about statistics!

It is lucky to win on your first bet, but more lucky if you lose, if it makes you cringe hard enough that you say to yourself, well, that was dumb and picture your cash swirling down the toilet, and then don’t do it again.

Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to go buy 100 scratch cards for stocking stuffers.

[The Economist “America’s gambling boom should be celebrated, not feared” archive link/ The Economist “Gambling is growing like gangbusters in America” archive link/ The Atlantic/ NY Times, “‘I literally can’t stop.’ The descent of a modern sports fan” archive link/ NY Times “How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life” archive link]

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