I have been a profitable sports bettor. Across Fanduel, DraftKings, and ESPN Bets, among other sportsbooks I use, my overall profit is hundreds of dollars across all sportsbooks. At first, I just bet for fun and followed my hunches and instincts.
But recently, I have followed a tactic called EV betting, a betting tactic where you only go for bets with positive expected value and a return on investment, backed by mathematical models of probability gaps with sportsbooks.
Ever since I got into EV betting, I’m making enough on sports betting for it to be a third income stream. I do not win every day. Within my budget, there have been days I lost $50. There are a lot of good days, but there are also a lot of bad days.
But there was also a day I won over $300, and on the average day, I win more than I lose. My overall winnings have been greater than my overall losses, so I had to get over the short-term thinking. I have a plan and budget, and I stick to it.
. . .
The problem with sports betting isn’t that I’m hemorrhaging money I can’t afford to lose. It’s that I become a worse person. If I were just putting down the bets, closing my sportsbook apps, and then checking when I go to bed or wake up the next morning, that would be one thing.
But that’s not how I bet. The first day I started sports betting, I was checking my phone and the ESPN app on my phone non-stop.
I did not become a monster or a gambling addict, but I won’t deny that I stopped doing as much housework, paid less attention to my wife and my friends, and just got too consumed in the thrill of seeing whether bets would or would not hit all too often. I would be checking stats and watching sports games of games I had bets on, only to see that 10 to 15 minutes of time had passed. It wouldn’t be the time I spent checking on sports games that was the problem as much as the constant interruption and task switching.
I understand that this is just normal human behavior, and your average American might spend much more time watching football on a Sunday. But it was what this checking would do to my mood and mental state that made me realize sports gambling was making me a worse person. When my bets were doing well and I was making $70 to $150 per day, I was somewhat happy, but then I was thinking of the next day and how I should tinker my strategy for the next day. When my bets were losing, however, the despair I felt was always significantly worse than the happiness I gained from winning. The problem wasn’t that there weren’t highs, but the lows were much lower than the highs.
. . .
According to Oliver Staley at TIME Magazine, the sports gambling boom is driving a crisis of gambling addiction in students. Campus counselors all over the country are seeing students spend their financial aid money, lie to their parents, and ignore their academics so they can sports gamble, and students from low-income families are particularly vulnerable since they lack a financial safety net. Unlike drug addiction, however, gambling addiction is very hard to catch and is often only caught by campus counselors when there are comorbidities with other mental health issues, like depression or anxiety. Often, schools don’t ask about gambling and students often do not self-report having gambling addictions.
A 2023 meta-analysis in the Journal of Gambling Studies, conducted by professors at the University of Buffalo, found that one in 10 college students is now a pathological gambler, significantly higher than the 2–5% of the general population. College-educated, young men are particularly susceptible to problem gambling.
I do see the argument that we have the language for what it means to be an alcoholic, addicted to opioids, or addicted to cigarettes. But we don’t quite have the language for “addicted to sports gambling” because it hasn’t been legal that long in so many places, despite gambling addiction being recognized in the DSM-III.
Personally, I don’t have a gambling addiction because I can stop when I want and I have scaled back substantially on how often I check my bets, but I can totally see how difficult admitting a sports gambling addiction may be. I don’t think it’s the fear of judgment or the shame of possibly being a gambling addict that is the reason gambling addiction among young, college-educated men might be reluctant to share they gamble too much.
I think it’s because this population of entrepreneurially minded men (myself included as a 27-year-old college-educated man) wants to project an image and signal to the world and to themselves that they are sharp, analytical, and brilliant. Somehow, being a lucrative or profitable sports bettor is a status symbol of that image. I think of sports betting as not that different from how so many of my peers and I (to a lesser extent) bought into the crypto craze by investing in Bitcoin or Ethereum.
The allure of cryptocurrency and sports betting is that they are uncharted territory of Wild West-like financial ventures and speculation. They are a heavy departure from the old, boring forms of investment like the stock market. A lot of people make money on the stock market, but how many people can say they make money on sports betting, or that they make money on cryptocurrency?
Something like sports betting or crypto will always exist at the frontier. But you can scroll Twitter or see your friends’ social media feeds to see countless posts about how much money people are making in sports betting. But are those same people going to post every time they lose a bet or money on crypto? Absolutely not. To an extent, I am guilty of this too. I share my hits with friends when I do hit big bets, but I certainly don’t go bragging to them when I lost $20 on a bet.
Social media accelerates this trend significantly as the instant gratification of seeing all your friends’ success is a boom to sports betting companies, a trend I’m sure DraftKings, FanDuel, and other sports gambling companies aren’t necessarily complaining about.
But I know someone who lost over $30,000 in the cryptocurrency crash — is that information they want the whole world to know? Absolutely not. I know people who have lost $1,000 in a day in sports gambling, and that’s not information they advertise to the world either. I personally lost almost $2,000 a few years ago when someone urged me to buy a blockchain stock — and I did, but it crashed tremendously and rapidly.
We glamorize the wins and possibilities of fast, easy money, but don’t caution on the dark side enough.
It certainly does not help that young men in their 20s are particularly susceptible to risky behaviors, but advertisements for sports betting seem to know and tap into this allure. These ads sell the promise that you can make money and tap into promotions that give you free hundreds of dollars in bets, and my generation certainly feeds into this myth.
It’s not a new phenomenon to be more selective in sharing what they lose versus what they win. However, social media accelerates this trend substantially. This is not to say there’s absolutely no personal responsibility on each consenting adult who gambles, because everyone makes a choice at the end of the day.
But the legalization of sports gambling has happened so suddenly and so fast. Even quicker is the acceptance and embrace of it, and I will say it felt, for a long time, like people were ready for this acceptance and embrace for a long time. I recall that fantasy football leagues were rife for unofficial wagers.
Undoubtedly, people get more invested in sports games when they bet real money on those games. My first sports bets were on AFC Championships and Super Bowls where I was not a fan of either team and I wanted to get invested in the game — not because I wanted to make money.
. . .
This is not a big policy argument or any moralizing about why sports betting is bad — it’s why it’s particularly compelling to Millenials and Generation Z.
Sports gambling, right now, is the Wild West for infinite possibilities of wins, but also infinite possibilities of losses, much like cryptocurrency before the crash.
Again, we have moved very quickly in the direction of legalization and acceptance that some more pause and caution is warranted — not only by legislators or Supreme Court justices and rulings, but for each one of us in our duty to protect friends, family, and ourselves. In 2023, a Seton Hall Sports Poll found that over half of Americans believed that sports gambling should be legal. Because of popular sentiment and will, this may not be an issue for the judiciary and legislature to enforce, but rather an obligation for us to enforce ourselves and watch out for each other.
I think we can all also agree that sports gambling leads us to dehumanize sports teams and athletes as well, much like fantasy football does. We start to see athletes and teams as means to an end rather than human beings or a conglomerate of human beings. I have been personally disgusted at myself the multiple times I see news that a player suffered an injury, sometimes a horrible injury, and my first thought isn’t “are they okay?” My first thought is, terribly, “damn, he’s on my fantasy team,” or “I just lost my bet or parlay.”
I am not advocating for the sudden re-criminalization of sports gambling, because I would be a hypocrite. As much as it makes me a worse person, I love it. I profit off of it. I’m a human being as much as anyone else is. And I am not even venturing into whether the integrity of sports itself is at risk now that sports gambling has become so accepted and embraced by sports leagues like the NBA or NFL themselves.
I think this societal acceptance and embrace have been long desired, as people have wanted to bet on sports games. But it is happening so quickly that we have to consider whether this embrace has gone too far.
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This post was previously published on Invisible Illness.
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