SPORTS QUOTES

By the time someone recognizes the need for a deposit limit, their dopamine pathways may already be rewired in a way that makes it difficult to slow their gambling -- and therefore makes them unwilling to opt into a program to do so.

While sportsbooks contract with their fair share of athletes from active players like LeBron James to recent retirees like Rob Gronkowski to old-timers like Charles Barkley they select actors and comedians in an attempt to strike a broader appeal. It likely comes as no coincidence that Hart, Smoove, and Foxx and many of the former athletes are Black. African Americans are more likely to have a sports betting account, more likely to check their account at least daily, and twice as likely to say they typically bet more than $100.

In April 2021, forty-year-old Luke Ashton died by suicide after sinking £18,000 into debt, primarily through gambling with Betfair, a part of Flutter. Ashton had utilized numerous RG [Responsible Gaming] tools, including self-exclusion and deposit limits. But in the ten weeks prior to his death, he ramped up his gambling. In March 2021, he made 1,229 bets and deposited £2,500 into his account. Ashton received eight generic RG emails from Betfair, whose algorithm labeled him “low risk” for problem gambling. In a landmark move, the coroner listed gambling disorder as a cause of death, noted that RG tools are “inadequate” for protecting gamblers, and castigated the company for not adopting practices that would meaningfully prevent harm.

The classification of gambling as an addictive activity means that at some point, problem gamblers are not choosing to gamble. The road to addiction is smoothed for them by sportsbooks. The design of the app interfaces, the nonstop stream of betting options, the relentless advertising, and the auspiciously timed bonus offers all serve to keep people like Kyle engaged, maximizing their “customer lifetime value,” the industry’s holy grail metric dating back to the days of DFS. If sportsbooks have smoothed bettors’ paths to heavy losses and gambling disorder, then states have smoothed sportsbooks’ paths to products that let them do so.

67% of sports bettors said they watched more than usual when they had bet on an NFL game. While a quarter of all sports bettors said they watched more than usual when they had bet on an NFL game, watching a game that was a blowout, just 10 percent said they would do so if they had money on the line. This was music to the league’s ears. As a former DraftKings employee observes, gambling is “scratching the itch of people who are competitive . . . or somebody that just wants a reason to watch a Thursday night Titans/Texas game.

Gambling addiction is not an addiction to winning money. Problem gamblers’ brains do not release any more dopamine when they win a bet than non-problem gamblers’ brains. The largest difference—when problem gamblers release markedly more dopamine than non-problem gamblers—comes at moments of high uncertainty. These instances provide the rush and the fleeting pleasure/pain equilibrium to which problem gamblers are addicted.

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.

Isaac Rose-Berman explains, many professional bettors purposefully engage in betting behaviors that make them look irresponsible, such as logging in at odd hours or withdrawing money and then canceling the withdrawal to keep money in their account (to give the appearance that they can’t resist betting). These sharp players know that sportsbooks don’t want to cut off bettors like Andrew. They reason that the longer they can make the sportsbooks think they have an addiction, the longer they will be allowed to bet without limits on their account.