Legalized gambling isn't the problem
What we're missing in our conversations about sports betting
OK, so right off the bat, I’ll admit that’s a bit of a clickbait headline up there.
It reflects something I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past year, and especially over the past few months. It’s inspired by comments and threads I’ve seen on social media and in articles like the one that dropped in The Atlantic earlier this week.
The headline of The Atlantic piece by Charles Fain Lehman is “Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Huge Mistake”
And I think that these headlines, posts, and stories are missing half the story. They’re not necessarily wrong, but they’re incomplete.
The problem, the issue, isn’t that sports gambling is now legal.
The problem, the issue, is that sports gambling is now legal and accessible.
That last part, the accessibility of sports gambling, is the key.
Legal sports gambling is one thing.
Legal sports gambling that you can access on your phone at literally any moment you want it is a whole other ball game.
One of the fascinating things to me is how the general opinion around sports gambling seems to have changed over the past few years.
Up until the Supreme Court legalized sports gambling1 in the Murphy-NCAA decision in 2018, there was a lot of support for it the idea.
When he was still writing for ESPN, Bill Simmons wrote this back in 2006:
Still, fans are brainwashed to believe gambling is dangerous, that it's a potential gateway to self-destruction, that it can destroy your life if you aren't careful, that everyone is a few errant bets away from a lifetime of depressing Gamblers Anonymous meetings. Watch any TV show in which a character starts betting, and almost always, he loses control before the big "intervention" episode. Gambling is bad. Or so we're told.
And then you see the 400 different poker shows on cable, gambling spreads in every newspaper, March Madness pools in every office, websites and magazines that have made a killing on the fantasy boom, scratch cards and lottery machines in every convenience store ... Ummm, none of this is gambling? We refer to point spreads all the time -- the Steelers are favored by six -- and naïvely pretend they happen in some sort of vacuum, that there's no correlation between the numbers and actual wagering. Everyone participates in this hypocrisy. …
Gambling is a part of sports; we may as well accept it.
Dan Wetzel at Yahoo wrote this the day the Supreme Court announced the Murphy decision:
Regular sports gamblers don’t just watch more game action, they consume more of all coverage, which should be a boon to all types of media. That may especially be true of gambling specific shows, websites and publications. Not only will old media further adapt in coverage of wagering, but a “Gambling CNBC” will sprout up. …Then there are, like Wall Street, the data analysis and advanced statistics companies that can offer both gamblers and the house an edge. Information that suggests a pitcher is tiring or a boxer’s punching power has softened in the last round would be considered an essential premium. It goes on and on. Imagination and innovation will rule.
(It’s) a good day for common sense, not to mention Americans who want the freedom to live their lives to do just that.
This isn’t to call out Simmons or Wetzel2. It’s to point out how common this point of view was before the Murphy decision. The general vibe was “look, everybody gambles on sports or wants to gamble on it. Why not do it out in the open, where more people can do this thing they already want to do, governments and media companies can get a cut of this thing that’s already happening, and it can be legitimized?”
It makes a certain amount of sense. Between NCAA Tournament brackets, fantasy football, Super Bowl squares and a billion other iterations, some level of gambling is common among all sports fans. Sports, sports media, and gambling have always lived an intertwined existence. The basic language of sports reflects this - the hero in a sports movie is always the underdog, and what does being an underdog mean?
So what happened? How did we get from the general vibe being “Sure, it makes sense that sports gambling should be legal” to “We’ve made a huge mistake.”
Part of it, for me, of it is the ubiquity of sports gambling advertising, whether it’s for online sports books or Daily Fantasy3. When every third ad is seemingly for DraftKings or FanDuel, when our sportscasts and social media feeds are filled with gambling tips and segments and it feels like it's in our faces all the time, I’m sure that leads to negative attitudes toward gambling as a whole.4 The scandals involving athletes betting,5 and the potential scandals in sports media, add another layer to this.
More concretely, we’re starting to get some solid research on gambling habits, and it’s not pretty.
In The Atlantic, Lehman writes about three new studies about the impact of legal sports betting. One found that for every $1 spent on sports betting, households put $2 less in investment accounts, and also increases risk of overdrafts and maxing out credit cards. Another found that online sports gambling increases the odds a household goes into bankruptcy by up to 30 percent. A third links sports getting to an increase in intimate partner violence.
The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households. Six years into the experiment, the evidence is convincing: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake.
Now, I’ve listened to enough Maintenance Phase to know that whenever we find research studies that conform to our pre-existing opinions, we should pause because that’s when confirmation bias is at its highest.
But to me, saying the issue is just legal sports gambling misses the point. The point is how accessible this legal act is. How easy it is to do it.
Legal sports gambling is one thing, but if you have to physically go to a sports book or other physical location to place bets, that’s a barrier of entry. There is no barrier of entry with online gambling.
My friend Patrick Hruby wrote this last year for Global Sport Matters:
Start with smartphones. Sports gamblers who use mobile devices have higher rates of problem gambling than those who don’t. That’s no coincidence. Smartphones and their software are purposefully designed to hold our attention and keep us coming back for more. Wagering with virtual money or online credits is akin to betting with chips in a physical casino: It has a disinhibiting effect, which can result in larger and more frequent bets.
Most importantly, mobile technology means that sports gamblers can now wager uall day, every day, on games and matches taking place across the planet. There are also more ways to bet than ever before, both before and during contests: on how many corner kicks will be taken in a soccer match, on whether three different teams will all cover the point spread, on whether the next serve in a live tennis match will be an ace or a fault.
The result? The traditional delay between risk and reward in sports gambling has been erased, replaced by a kind of digital slot machine.
The issue is not legalized gambling.
The issue is gambling that is both legal and accessible
Those last two words make the whole difference. As we write, report, study and think about this issue, I think those last two words need to be a part of the conversation.
My legal friends can correct me, but if I understand the decision correctly, it didn’t so much legalize sports gambling as much as it ruled that the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act was unconstitutional and that states, if they chose, could legalize gambling. A small but important distinction. But for our purposes here, the shorthand will work.
While I’ll never miss a chance to pick on Simmons, this isn’t one of those times. And Wetzel has consistently been one of the best, hardest-working columnists in the country for decades.
Which is technically not gambling but come on, we know it’s gambling
Free study idea to a good home.
Reminder for the people in the mezzanine: It is not wrong or hypocritical for leagues to have rules prohibiting players from gambling on the sport they play and to punish players when they violate said rules.
I've been wondering about how many lives are being destroyed by online gambling and the accessability. I'm also curious now about your issues with Bill Simmons.
I think it's also worth noting that the Draftkings and FanDuels have entered the content creation space as a more passive means of marketing. I love the Dan LeBatard Show, but it is "Brought to you by DraftKings." FanDuel is the lifeline of Pat McAfee. There will be more.
And, speaking as a frequent small stakes mobile gambler, I've stopped. As you noted, I was in the app more than I was present for the sporting event. The chase stopped being worth it.