Sports betting sounds like it’s everywhere.
Advertisements for online sportsbooks like BetMGM, DraftKings, or FanDuel are everywhere, whether it’s on social media or while watching a game – and they all offer some free money for your first wager.
During pregame shows or sports podcasts, you’ll hear the odds for each contest; you’ll hear about prop bets, like whether LeBron James will be the first scorer for the Lakers against the Warriors on Christmas Day; and you may have heard of risky, high-stakes bets called parlays that can turn a $25 wager into $237,553.
Gambling’s explosion in the zeitgeist is the result of a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a nearly nationwide ban on competitive sports gambling. Since that decision, sports betting has been legalized in 38 states and the District of Columbia, and the American Sports Illustrated Association reports that the American sports betting industry has posted a record high of revenue of $10.92 billion by 2023; According to a recent study by the Seton Hall School of Business at Stillman University, more than one in three Americans have gambled on sports.
For competitive athletes, like three-time NBA champion and podcast host Danny Green, who retired from basketball in the fall, hearing from bettors upset about losing bets is and custom. “They said, ‘You owe me money,'” Green said Today, It’s Explained about angry sports marketers messaging him on social media. “It is clear that they are cursing each other, saying, ‘You are crying! You son of-you-know-what! You paid me. Couldn’t you get two more rebounds?
Superstars like Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving also spoke about how legalized gambling has changed the relationship between athletes and fans. “Betting and betting on sports has taken away the purity and fun of the game at times, let me be honest with you,” Irving said on Twitch last year.
Bullying doesn’t stop at professional sports, either. The NCAA, which governs college sports, released data this year showing that one in three high school players received abusive messages from someone interested in gambling. and that 90 percent of abuse against athletes occurs online through social media.
Charles Fain Lehman recently wrote about sports betting for The Atlantic, where he argued that legalizing sports betting was wrong. As the holidays continue and more sports on television, Today, It’s Explained reached out to Lehman — who often writes about addiction, drugs, and public safety — to ask: What’s wrong with legalized gambling?
An excerpt from the essay, edited for length and clarity, follows. Listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find podcasts.
Charles, what do you think legalized gambling is doing for our country?
When you do the cost-benefit calculations, gambling looks like any other addictive activity, in that most people who engage in it get some minor hedonic benefits. They get fun out of it. And then a small group of those people will become very addicted and cause serious harm to themselves, to others, and can ruin their lives.
Gambling addiction is associated with all kinds of terrible consequences, including losing your home, losing your family, losing your life through personal actions. So, we created this big social risk, and because of that, we got a lot of tax money and a lot of publicity everywhere. Doesn’t seem like a good business to me.
Yooh. It sounds like you don’t like it.
I don’t do that! I don’t do that! I don’t like it because I suspect a lot of bad stuff. I think we tend to underestimate their risks, but the problems are the same in all cases, which is that they focus on a small number of users who will make the most of the use and will have a lot of risks . And all the rest of the people profit off their backs, which is a horrible arrangement to me.
Do we really have the receipts for the widespread legalization of gambling increasing how many lives have been lost due to legal sports betting in this country?
Really. You know, and I think at this point, most Americans know someone who has been affected by this. I was recently at a wedding and a friend of mine from college told me about a friend of hers in Erie, Pennsylvania. He works at the post office. He’s not a rich guy with $28,000 in a sports betting hole. It’s just a big problem. An interesting fact about legal betting: We have some information about this, mainly from the UK experience, which is very disappointing. Another estimate is that 8 percent of all suicides in the UK are due to gambling addiction.
Because gambling was legalized in different states at different times in the US, economists can use specific methods to determine the outcome of sports betting – not just the things that are related to gambling but what the game is. money that causes many different effects. . One of the studies I’m pointing to, from economists at Northwestern University, estimates that for every dollar spent on gambling, households spend $2 less than their accounts. investment.
There is a huge increase in the chances of spending more money in your bank account or adding a credit card. There is another paper from economists at UCLA and USC that looks specifically at online gambling. They find that legalization increases the risk of bankruptcy by 25 to 30 percent.
One thing that really comes out of those studies is that the risks tend to be concentrated among the worst in the economy, right? Risks tend to be concentrated in areas with the highest levels of poverty, and they also tend to be concentrated among young people who are already vulnerable to all kinds of big financial decisions. And so it’s not just the risk of gambling that happens to other people, it’s the risk of gambling that often happens to people who can’t afford it.
Do we know how much money on average people lose compared to winning?
Really. There is another study from the people at Southern Methodist University where they have a group of 700,000 people who bet on sports and they show a few very interesting things. Only about 5 percent of the panelists withdrew from the programs they entered. So 95 percent of people lose money. The most interesting thing is that about 3 percent of the people who bet drive 50 percent of the gambling profits.
How much money people lose has to do with how much gambling has changed with the little devices we keep in our pockets?
It’s a huge part of the story in more ways than one. Part of it is that it’s accessible, which is to say, if I have to go to a casino to gamble, I probably don’t want to take the time out of my day. Maybe I can’t get hooked, and over time, you produce less addicts because they’ve never been exposed before. The beauty of gambling in Las Vegas is that you have to go to Vegas to do it.
What’s even more alarming is that app-based gaming facilitates algorithmic discrimination on the part of the sportsbook provider. They can tell who will spend the most money. They know when you check your badges in the middle of the night.
They know when you watch the game, they know what you do and how much you bet. Then what they can do is confirm that with an algorithm. They can give you offers, they can give you someone who encourages you to bet more. This is basically what they do in Vegas casinos if you’re a whale, a big spender – you’ll get all kinds of goodies. But instead of that happening in a crappy hotel or a fancy hotel, what happens on your phone all day, every day, until they get all your money.
It’s clear from talking to you that there is a lot of harm being done around the country from legal sports betting and it hits young people hard. But it was legalized with the promise that it would bring many benefits to the countries that adopted it. You seem to believe that is useless.
I think there have been several arguments here. One is tax revenue, and that’s a big selling point. And the fact is that the income tax has been reduced significantly. If you look at the 38 legal states in their latest count, gambling collectively generates about half a quarter of a billion dollars, which is nothing but a drop in the bucket compared to most of the government’s revenue needs but also less than a large amount of money. you get alcohol, tobacco or marijuana.
Another argument is that you can limit access to offshore gambling sites. That doesn’t seem to be happening. There is a study from Massachusetts where they found that dealers can also operate illegal gambling sites after legalization. But it makes sense – if you’re an active sports bettor, you bet at many sportsbooks, you try to get as much action as you can. So the oceans are just extras. They are not substitutes.
And then the third argument is one that I think we should take seriously, which is the hedonic benefits and the benefits of individual freedom. But we didn’t live in a terrible dictatorship in 2017. If you and I bet together, none of us would be in danger of going to jail, right? That is, it was not a crime for us to bet among people. What was legal was for big business and countries to get involved. And I’m not offended by restricting the freedom of the state of Georgia to participate in your gambling and mine.
#gambling #stayed #Las #Vegas
