When legal sports betting surges, so do Americans' financial problems

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/04/nx-s1-5773354/legal-sports-betting-research-credit-bankruptcy

by pseudolus • 4 months ago

224 145 4 months ago

SoftTalker3• 4 months ago

Gambling can be a fun way to make a game more interesting. Some people can't stop there, but government lost any moral high ground when they legalized state lotteries.

dolphinscorpion• 4 months ago

Fun turns to disaster when you lose. Sadly, many can't control it, destroying entire lives in the process.

(Not passing judgment)

gruez2• 4 months ago

but government lost any moral high ground when they legalized state lotteries.

What's the implication here? "In for a penny, in for a pound", so might as well legalize every other form of gambling?

SoftTalker3• 4 months ago

I think so. If you're going to regulate sports betting (and I think there are good arguments for doing that), but you yourself run a lottery which is a tax on people who don't understand probability, then you are just preaching in a "do as I say not as I do" kind of way.

chistev4• 4 months ago

Does it really make games more interesting? If anything, doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game?

Is anxiety interesting?

And if you only bet a negligible amount of money, then the outcome of the game doesn't really matter all that much.

JumpCrisscross5• 4 months ago

doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game?

I don’t generally like gambling. On a recent trip to Vegas I socially gambled with friends and won about $5k, but then lost $500 of it and was more annoyed about losing that sum than the net amount gained. Such is my personality.

That said, a friendly game of poker is absolutely more fun with a $10 buy-in or whatnot. So I can see the general idea holding water. What we don’t need are (a) ads or (b) large bets.

emptybits• 4 months ago

Does it really make games more interesting?
If anything, doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game?
Is anxiety interesting?

Yes. Adding anxiety generally makes things more interesting. Think of watching a story or a film or a game play out. Good stories often involve giving the reader some anxiety. Tension. Not knowing what's going to happen, but being somehow invested in it ... to stay engaged.

roland35• 4 months ago

I am staying away from sports betting, but I have done fantasy football a few times. I was constantly on edge from it all, even when I was winning! Constantly thinking of who I needed to pick up, who to trade, which matchups were good, it was a time sink.

And I ended up losing to my 10 year old nephew for the championship game!

laughing_man2• 4 months ago

Personally I suspect American football viewership would collapse if you actually managed to ban all the gambling people do on it, from office pools to Vegas lines.

actionfromafar• 4 months ago

"Someone did a bad thing, now we must do all the bad things."

unethical_ban• 4 months ago

There are significant, real differences in betting on a random number generator once a week and betting constantly on the real outcomes of individual behaviors. Most notably with sports, institutionalized prop bets destroy the integrity of the game.

At least with win/loss, the ability to outright manipulate the outcome for financial gain by players, coaches and refs is a lot harder to accomplish without detection. Prop bets? Who knows if a player or ref or coach made a decision on who gets the first 3pt basket of the second half?

SoftTalker3• 4 months ago

Yeah I've never made a prop bet, or even a points bet, that feels too degenerate to me. I have occasionally made a $10 money line bet on a game and that does make it more interesting to me in that now I have a small stake in the outcome. YMMV.

And people do spend stupid amounts of money on Powerball tickets too. I just think if the state is running a numbers racket, that they don't have much of a leg to stand on when they want to regulate other gambling.

recursivedoubts3• 4 months ago

remember when gambling was illegal?

and the idea of advertising gambling on television wasn't even something conceivable?

and, even more so, the idea that sports entertainment channels would be directly involved in the operation of gambling of was just completely beyond comprehension?

ahhh, the remote, halcyon, bygone days of 2018...

deadbabe• 4 months ago

All those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned.

prpl• 4 months ago

It would be interesting to make that sort of thing generic. A law couldn’t legalize something without backporting the legalization.

sandy_coyote• 4 months ago

Pete Rose: reprehensible pariah or radical pioneer?

georgemcbay• 4 months ago

All those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned.

That is certainly on the table... as long as they have a couple of million stashed away to put into World Liberty Financial and the charges are federal.

The unwashed poors though... they are SOL.

skdhfkdjfhsjk• 4 months ago

It was a quaint, simpler time. Now we are much more sophisticated and modern.

fasterik5• 4 months ago

Remember when alcohol was illegal? Ahh, the remote, halcyon, bygone days of the 1920s.

How about we treat adults like they're adults and let them make their own choices?

hgoel2• 4 months ago

I guess you also think we need to stop policing drunk driving? Because the reasons for regulating gambling are similar.

1bpp• 4 months ago

These are systems completely designed to prey on vulnerable people, addicts who can't control their impulse to gamble. That's their purpose. I think it's worth regulating intentionally predatory and harmful industries.

raverbashing• 4 months ago

And yet you can't do a quick Google search to understand that "expecting adults to act like adults" is a ridiculous idea when 80% of people have NPC agency

Prohibition was a mistake and it goes a long way of sorting how people will act stupid regardless

umanwizard• 4 months ago

Adults can and do become addicted to gambling (and drugs, etc.) and ruin the lives of themselves and those around them.

Recognizing this fact isn't treating them like children, it's treating them like the adults they are.

JumpCrisscross5• 4 months ago

Remember when alcohol was illegal?

I don’t really gamble. But I agree with you. Prohibition is never the answer.

Our current regime, however, is one where bartenders face zero liability for their patrons’ drunk driving. Making gambling companies liable for problematic gambling is a good start. Banning gambling ads, within apps and without, is a great end. I’d also argue for a cap on bet sizes, but I’m open to being talked out of that.

Teever• 4 months ago

Let's combine the idea of hyper-targeted advertising based on mass data collection with custom tailored addicted substances.

If I design a chemical that will specifically make you fasterik so dependent on it that you'll do any sexually depraved things that a line up of random strangers want so that they'll give you pocket change so that you can get another hit of that chemical should it be illegal for me to surreptitiously give it to you in a product that you buy from me?

Why or why not?

andrepd2• 4 months ago

There's a fine line between prohibition and all-out attack, everywhere all at once, from TV internet and sports, trying to get everyone addicted to gambling, from 9 to 99 years old.

Like... cigarretes aren't prohibited. But you're hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't agree that we're MUCH better off now with full advertising bans, indoor smoking bans, bans on sales to minors, steep tax, etc, than what we were in the 70s with disgusting cigarrete smoke everywhere.

dandanua2• 4 months ago

It increases GDP. Also, have you seen the Dow?

JumpCrisscross5• 4 months ago

It increases GDP

I want this rigorously studied.

If it does, I’m more open to it. I don’t think it does. It’s a minuscule industry, macroeconomically spwaking, with massive negative externalities. I think regulating the marketing and conduct of industries proximate to addiction is something productive societies do. (On the other side of the spectrum we have the Qing.)

Ferret74462• 4 months ago

Humans have tried to ban gambling for as long as gambling existed, and gambling has existed for about as long as homo sapiens. Gambling still exists.

notTooFarGone• 4 months ago

Ah yea and 1 billion $ or 100billion $ it's all the same

recursivedoubts3• 4 months ago

Humans have tried to ban murder for as long as murder existed, and murder has existed for about as long as homo sapiens. Murdering still exists.

blueboo• 4 months ago

For those who find this appealing: Fires still burn down houses so what’s the point of fire departments?

sghiassy• 4 months ago

If you’ve seen Back to the Future 2, you would know we’re in this state because Biff got the Sports Almanac

gz5• 4 months ago

and the US govt often helps facilitate gambling during downturns so we could see even more direct and indirect promotion of the problem. examples:

+ in stagflation of 70s/early 80s - states create state-run lotteries to help fix their budgets

+ 2008 great recession - states legalize casinos to recover lost tax revenue and prevent folks from traveling out of state to gamble

+ C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue

kotaKat• 4 months ago

"Lottos help your school!" they said. Until you're in rural bumfuck nowhere, and your lotto win suddenly drags your community's average income from "dirt poor" to "middle class" by becoming Spiders Georg and you end up costing nearly half a mil in state aid to go up in smoke.

https://www.syracuse.com/news/2017/07/one_mans_huge_lottery_...

bityard• 4 months ago

I'm not sure you read that article all the way through... The loss is $450k, but that's only 3% of the year's state aid and an even smaller amount of the district's operating budget. And it only impacted that one year. Inflation and random political feuds usually impact public school budgets to a far greater degree.

The problem in this case is not that the lotto exists, it's that the formula for awarding school funding is (or was?) broken in this state. This is a textbook example of why you almost always use the median instead of mean on things that have a bell curve.

gruez2• 4 months ago

+ C19 - states fast track the legalization of mobile sports betting and online casinos to secure immediate tax revenue

This seems questionable given that covid-19 relief funds from the federal government left states flush with cash, causing them to spend lavishly or even cut taxes. It also makes me suspicious of the other examples. Recessions happen every 5-10 years, and if you count the few years after a recession as part of the recession, it's not hard to pattern match a little too aggressively and think it's tied to economic downturns, when it's really a secular trend.

bmitc• 4 months ago

American citizens have willingly given up their freedom and allowed themselves to be captured by corporate control.

nikanj2• 4 months ago

Gambling seems like a rational choice, when all the ”traditional” rational choices just lead into a mountain of student debt, not being able to afford a home, and general failure to launch

Summed up very nicely in https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy

revlsas• 4 months ago

How could it possibly be the rational choice if the ev doing so is so ridiculously negative?

Having student debt doesn't justify throwing away the rest of your residual income

toast03• 4 months ago

What's the ev for going to college once you factor in graduation rates?

People that get two or three years of college debt and no diploma have a big hole to fill and a small shovel.

Anyway, I think ev isn't the right tool to model gambling behavior; dollar utility isn't linear. It's more about a small spending for a large potential. But then you get into repeated small wagers and such.

nikanj2• 4 months ago

-If I don’t gamble, I’ll live my whole life as a poor serf

-If I gamble and lose, the same wage cuck life awaits me

-If I gamble and win, I may actually ascend and have the kind of life I aspire to

watwut• 4 months ago

Seeing gambling as rational choice is spectacular fail of logic. It is an emptional choice of action.

caditinpiscinam• 4 months ago

Was "emptional" intentional, or a typo? Apparently it's a real word.

From emption + -al Adjective (obsolete, rare) Capable of being purchased

chistev4• 4 months ago

The house always wins.

I don't know of any long term profitable sports gamblers - but that makes sense because why reveal yourself and your methods if you're profitable?

By long term I mean at least 1,000 bets while still being profitable. Even more impressive if they are making a living off of it.

The only person I can think of is Picks Office on Twitter.

gnopgnip• 4 months ago

If you profit at sports betting they limit your bet size severely

awakeasleep• 4 months ago

Even if you don’t profit but place what looks like smart bets

chistev4• 4 months ago

You can just jump bookies.

NickC253• 4 months ago

Except in the state of MA.

They rightfully passed legislation banning such practices. The idea is that if casinos and bookies refuse to cap your downside, they have zero right to cap your upside.

idontwantthis2• 4 months ago

Not everywhere. Circa wants winners.

conscion• 4 months ago

Sports betting is the one place that "prediction markets" make the most sense. Instead of there being a house to win against, the market just skims a fee. The line is set organically by betters, not be the house targeting a profit margin, and the house has no incentive to restrict successful betters because they solely profit on flow, not losses.

jfengel3• 4 months ago

You do have to be careful to avoid letting whales manipulate the perceived market. There are ways to con other gamblers with carefully timed bets.

The bigger the market the harder that is, so maybe it doesn't apply at the level of online sports betting. But organized crime could make trouble at horse tracks.

jeffbee2• 4 months ago

What about Frank Rosenthal? Admittedly these guys are extremely rare, that's why the handful of successful ones are famous.

chistev4• 4 months ago

Never heard of him

n1b0m• 4 months ago

Tony Bloom, the billionaire owner of Brighton & Hove Albion FC seems to be managing it.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/dec/05/brighton-ow...

NickC253• 4 months ago

Tony is also super smart in how he gambled. Your average degenerate is nowhere near as intelligent as Tony is.

I have a very small edge in sports betting although I don't really do any of the deep overpriced/underpriced arbitrage or any special types of bets outside of wins/loses. And it's limited to tennis, a sport I've played my entire life and have followed the pro circuit closely for 3 decades. And even then my edge is very small, and the strategy I use when I do bet doesn't make me much in total return.

Vaslo2• 4 months ago

We all have the occasional friend that brags about every time he wins money at the casino. If you accompany them a few times, it’s incredible how the “always winning” story just changes.

dudul• 4 months ago

I used to work for a sports betting company. These people definitely exist. They are few though because they are the ones who understand that the sport/game/match/whatever is irrelevant. They bet the "odd line". They bet on the platform that screwed up and didn't adjust their line quickly enough to follow the market. They don't know baseball, or football, or tennis. They just know the numbers.

sidrag222• 4 months ago

And research shows young people are particularly at risk of sports gambling problems, lured in by splashy advertisements often featuring celebrities and promises of low risks and high rewards. The Fed study found that the sharpest drop in credit delinquency rates were among people under 40 years old.

There are so many portions of the post Muprhy vs NCAA world that bum me out, but this is by far what makes me the most annoyed. There seem to be so many objectives being achieved while hiding behind the guise of protecting the children. Yet we just let these advertisements slide by and infest broadcasts that children largely consume. Not like getting an older person to buy you a GTA game when you are 12 or something either, this is just watching any sort of sports broadcast, aimed at all ages.

I see some other people here mentioning how we gave into legalized state lotteries and its why we arrived here, its such a stark difference though. There was a ton of back and forth for state lotteries, the results were tons of advertising restrictions, and the profits largely benefited the education system.

Murphy vs NCAA was passed in 2018, we have legal sports betting now in 38 total states after ~8 total years.

New Hampshire legalized state lotteries in 1964, from that point it took 32 years to reach 38 total states with some form of a state lottery.

vkou• 4 months ago

the profits largely benefited the education system.

The profits didn't benefit shit. Yes, the money went into education, and that same education system saw commensurate cuts from regular tax revenue.

What it did is shift the state's tax burden towards people who play the lottery... While permanently entrenching the lottery (How can we ban it! It would gut our education budget!).

sidrag222• 4 months ago

I agree with your point, its something i kinda didn't really consider how its perversely intertwining itself with the education budget and making itself effectively immune. I still think its a solid demonstration that comparable sports betting legislation surely lacked any sort of compromise at all, as it was all pushed through so aggressively fast.

seanalltogether• 4 months ago

When I was in college I got lured into one of those pyramid schemes advertised in the middle of the night hoping to make extra money. I wonder how much money I would have lost if I had instant access to betting on a "sure thing" back then.

gbacon• 4 months ago

Is there a causal relationship? If so, in which direction does it flow?

carefulfungi2• 4 months ago

A 2024 Wall Street Journal report, for example, found that 70% of the profits from one online gambling company came from less than 1% of its users.

Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts.

For most, a lottery ticket or an online bet is just buying entertainment - not much different from a movie ticket or steam game. Turns out, though, this majority isn't the target customer; we're just the top of the funnel as these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy.

OptionOfT• 4 months ago

The same thing happens with in-app purchases.

A friend of mine worked at Disney, and it is insane how much data they capture on their players/spenders and how they use it for the sole purpose of triggering a popup at the right time, at the right price, that would maximize spending/gambling on loot boxes.

andrepd2• 4 months ago

Algorithmic optimisation will be the death of us.

Over-dramatic? Maybe, but this thought springs to my mind more and more.

Triphibian• 4 months ago

The first time I heard "whale" mentioned in the video game space was at a GDC panel around a game called Puzzle Pirates, where the dev noted that the bulk of their in-game purchases were made by a small group of "whale" players. In 2003 purchasable skins, pets, hats, etc were pretty new.

dandanua2• 4 months ago

these platforms algorithmically search for personalities they can abuse, rob, and financially destroy

With the AI progress, there will be no need in a search for personalities - algorithms will make you one. And this can be applied to any company producing entertainment (e.g. social networks), not just gambling.

serf• 4 months ago

Betting platforms assign highly profitable customers "concierges" who reach out and prompt them to gamble, offer incentives, and work to keep them betting. It's insidious and wrong - the platforms actively identify and take advantage of addicts.

this isn't new. a relative is an MVP at a casino she dumps cash into. The pit bosses comp all of her meals and call her on days that she doesn't show up. It's all sold to the customer as friendly-people-who-care and the people eat that up, especially lonely elderly folks.

She fell at one such casino and ended up suing them, she wondered why all her friends stopped calling her, so she moved casinos and low-and-behold she was able to make friends there, too!

To be fair, like another poster mentioned, they do this everywhere people spend a lot of money, not just gambling. Car dealerships are lousy with this kind of 'concierge'-ness. They, too, take advantage of elderly folks who have the money for a new car that they don't yet realize they need.

JumpCrisscross5• 4 months ago

To be fair, what you’ve describing strikes me as closer to hospitality than gambling per se. I live in a ski town. There are absolutely regulars at the Four Seasons who tip well in exchange for being “friends” with the staff. The fact that they never hang out outside work hours doesn’t seem to bother them.

DANmode• 4 months ago

this isn't new.

Bullshit.

If the person you’re raising kids with starts living at the casino 1-4 days a week, you notice.

The Internet, for better and for worse, masks this.

themafia• 4 months ago

not much different from a movie ticket or steam game.

Movies require an investment of your time so it's somewhat hard to become "addicted" to them.

There are "steam game library" addicts though.

this majority isn't the target customer

Of course they are. They just aren't prioritized for high cost user enticements. The company only exists if the majority lose. They have big losers and little losers. They aren't here to "entertain" you. Which features of their service are designed to heighten "entertainment" I wonder?

Spooky232• 4 months ago

That’s like saying cigarettes are the same as scented candles because both involve flame.

The difference is that gambling, like cigarettes, delivers a dopamine fix. The playbook is well aligned with cigarettes — you target brands to the population. Draft Kings is like mass market cigarettes, targeting low income males, soldiers, old people.

The “most profitable customer” metric is misleading - you need mass adoption to lure in the whales. My son is 14 - sports gambling is a routine conversation among his cohort and many kids are actively gambling in school with accounts provided by parents.

PaulRobinson• 4 months ago

This sort of scheme was banned in the UK - the place where bookmaking was invented, and many of the largest global brands are run from (albeit technically trading from Malta or Gibrlatar) - a few years back.

Why? Well... suicides. You're going to start seeing gambling-related suicides in the next couple of years, if you haven't already.

If you can learn anything from the UK, learn this:

- VIP schemes kill people

- Online casinos and video slots kill people faster than sports betting do

- The industry will always "self-regulate" to the point where its still harmful, but palatable enough that law makers will look the other way to keep the tax raised from it coming in

I have skin in the game (I write code that profitably trades on sports betting exchanges), and think it's possible to make gambling a healthy and fun thing to do, but the American market is ~5-10 years behind the UK market, and I can see it's going to get ugly before it gets better (not that the UK market is perfect yet, either).

jjk166• 4 months ago

I strongly suspect if one were to dig a little deeper there would probably be some common factors between loosening financial regulations, community economic problems, credit issues of people in those communities, and impetus to gamble.

retired2• 4 months ago

Gambling is massive in large parts of Europe. For Spain, in 2022 83.9% of the population participated in gambling. Every time I am outside I am confronted with gambling in some sort of way. I don't think society benefits from it.

ginko• 4 months ago

For Spain, in 2022 83.9% of the population participated in gambling

Does that include the Christmas lottery? If so then that’s not really comparable.

retired2• 4 months ago

It does. A large part of the country participates in that one.

NickC253• 4 months ago

I think the issue is a lot deeper than the article suggests.

The problem is, society is fucking broken. The middle class is being decimated. People are going to take their destinies into their own hands, as seen by the growth of daytrading and sports betting. With wages being destroyed, billionaires avoiding taxes, COL skyrocketing for the middle and lower classes, and jobs evaporating, who's going to fucking blame someone for trying to figure out how to use what they know (in this case, sports) to make money?

Plus, this generation has seen another class of gamblers (big banks) get bailout after bailout without any problem.

Sports betting is the symptom, not the root cause that needs to be addressed.

SpicyLemonZest2• 4 months ago

I just don't think that theory of causation works even if we assume the premise for the sake of argument. Both daytrading and sports betting are much larger now than in 2009, when I hope we can agree wages were destroyed and jobs were evaporating on a scale we can hardly imagine today.

jimt1234• 4 months ago

Honest question; sorta related: How long until prostitution is legalized in the United States? Sounds crazy, indeed, but when I was a kid growing up in Missouri - if you told me, someday, businesses will be open on Sunday, alcohol will be legally sold on Sunday, and there will be gambling casinos a few miles from my house, I wouldn't have believed you.

nsvd22• 4 months ago

Already is in Nevada.

Vaslo2• 4 months ago

I’m a pretty right leaning libertarian. That said there are some hills I’ll abandon like smoking bans and this being legal.

tsoukase• 4 months ago

Gambling is a symptom of pre-depression or fulminant one. It's a defensive mechanism, quasi suicidal, in an attempt to distract the person from the real problems. It's the behavioural equivalent of drug addiction. Advertising it is sad for the victims and should be illegal. But... money

tim-projects• 4 months ago

Society needs to stop making blanket statements about psychological behaviours:

https://immunizenevada.org/the-relationship-between-adhd-and...

kjkjadksj2• 4 months ago

I’m not sure that explains the sort of casual gambling on anything at all people might do among friends.

When legal sports betting surges, so do Americans' financial problems

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