Rein in the rainmakers: gambling apps aren’t going anywhere

I’ve been losing all my money sports betting, so I’m selling my car at CarMax so I can get some money and bet on tonight’s Cowboys-Bengals Monday Night Football game,” TikTokker ReeceMoneyBets told his 9,000 followers in early December, gesturing to a faux-gold Ford in the CarMax lot.

“They just gave me $3,000, and I know I shouldn’t do this, but I’m betting it tonight on Monday Night Football.” He bet his car on a same-game parlay — all his bets needed to hit in order for him to win — that included the Bengals’ Ja’Marr Chase getting fifty receiving yards, Bengals QB Joe Burrow throwing two passing touchdowns and Cowboys QB Cooper Rush notching 200 passing yards.

“Easiest bet ever… I know I’ve been losing my bets, but tonight’s bet is a lock,” he said. “Ain’t no way it don’t hit.”

Cooper Rush finished with 183 passing yards.

The car was gone.

ReeceMoneyBets is far from alone. It’s not hard to find countless other examples of gamblers — almost always young men — destroying their lives through these apps. And lest you think these companies are blissfully ignorant of their impact, there’s plenty of evidence that the books do everything — from tasking personal concierges to coax their biggest gamblers into betting more, to gifting bonus bets to gamblers who stop betting after losing almost (but not) everything — to extract as much money from their customers as possible.

The Super Bowl is the annual high-water mark for sports betting. Last year, an astonishing $23 billion was gambled on the big game. This year’s number will surely be higher. And that surge in sports betting brings with it a surge in other social ills.

A June 2024 study found that the increase in sports betting that followed its legalization “does not displace other gambling or consumption but significantly reduces savings, as risky bets crowd out positive expected value investments.” Notably, the effects of sports betting “concentrate among financially constrained households, as credit card debt increases, available credit decreases and overdraft frequency rises.” Another study, published in October, found similar effects, warning: “If no action is taken, it is highly likely that the large increase in sports betting will lead to a long-term increase in financial stress on many consumers and policymakers and financial regulators should be prepared for this.”

The real-world results have led to calls to ban sports betting altogether.

At this point I should include a personal disclosure: I love sports betting — for myself. The upside is obvious to anyone who has placed a wager. You can take any game, from the college football championship to a midlevel D1 basketball match, and make it interesting. Like many vices practiced in moderation, sports betting has its social upsides. The fellas’ group-chat brainstorming the best bets for Sunday Night Football — and celebrating our wins — is a rare instance of organized male camaraderie in an atomized world.

I’m also not stupid. I’m a decent bettor but I rarely bet more than $5 to $10 on a game. I’m under no illusion that it’s anything other than cheap entertainment — $5 for three hours of entertainment is a deal you won’t get at the bowling alley or movie theaters — and certainly not a way to get rich quick. I keep myself honest by telling my wife what my bets are and — because I married a keeper — she tells me her bets as well.

More importantly, I’m aware that too many people simply can’t handle online sports betting. Online gambling makes it too easy — literally just the push of a button — to destroy not only your financial wellbeing but that of your family as well. The potential harms are so great, and so easily realized, that I support banning one of my favorite pastimes — for the good of society.

But that’s not going to happen anytime soon. For starters, the American public opposes banning sports betting. A December survey by the Manhattan Institute found that 52 percent of Americans believe sports betting should be legal, while 32 percent say it should be banned.

Then there’s the money. DraftKings — whose major investors include Vanguard, BlackRock and T. Rowe Price — has a market cap of nearly $20 billion. Disney has $2 billion worth of skin in the game via ESPN Bet. And if you think Fox News will champion the grassroots revolution to ban sports betting, you should know that its parent company, Fox Corp., not only owns a 2.5 percent stake in FanDuel but plans to exercise its option to increase that stake to 18.6 percent — at the low, low price of $4.3 billion.

That money makes its way back into politics, too. Since 2016, DraftKings and FanDuel alone have contributed more than $96 million to political candidates and committees, according to data maintained by OpenSecrets. And it’s not just the books putting their money behind making — or keeping — sports betting legal, either. The NBA and MLB have formed a lobbying alliance to influence sports betting legislation in eleven different states, nine of which have yet to approve legalizing gambling on sports. If you know who Pete Rose is, you might be forgiven for thinking that the leagues are lobbying to outlaw sports betting, but they’re not. The leagues want states to mandate a tax — they call it an “integrity fee” — that would give the NBA and MLB a cut of sports-betting revenue. That is: the leagues aren’t worried about sports betting; they’re worried about making sure they get their share of the pot.

With all that money and influence driving sports betting forward, it shouldn’t be surprising that politicians aren’t exactly eager to ban it. Donald Trump, the former Atlantic City impresario, is no exception.

A source close to the president doesn’t expect him to get behind a total ban on sports betting anytime soon. “Frankly, I don’t think the issue is even on his radar, as it isn’t on most politicians’ radar,” that source said. “When was the last time you saw a senator talk about it or a Fox segment on it? Mind you, Fox has ownership in a sports betting app.”

Thus, if you’re someone who’s actually concerned about mitigating the harms of sports betting, you have a choice to make: you can either keep yelling “ban sports betting!” into the void or you can (sorry) play the odds and work to limit its worst outcomes. Luckily for you, I have ideas.

First: set caps on losses. Like alcohol distributors, sports books receive the majority of their revenue from a minority of addicts. There’s an easy solution: set a loss limit. You could set the threshold at, say, $250 per year across all apps, and force the books to coordinate. (Coordination would be key to keeping someone from losing $250 at one app, $250 at another — or the limit will have to be divided by the number of books.) If the books can’t do that, the feds can set up a central clearinghouse — funded by the books — to do it for them. But what about the high rollers (and the medium rollers) who can afford to lose $251? There’s an easy solution to that as well: if you want to gain the right to lose more than $250, you can submit your W-2 to the books — who will be legally obligated to share that info among themselves — and your new limit will be (to throw out a number) half of a percent of your annual income. So if you make $100,000, then you can lose up to $500 before you’re cut off for the year. Maybe you’ll end up in the black. But you definitely won’t end up any more than $500 in the red. Legislators and lobbyists can argue about an exact threshold but that’s an easy way to protect working stiffs from gambling away their family’s houses.

Next: ban parlays. This idea was actually suggested to me by someone in Trump’s orbit. The reasoning: parlays are roughly six times as profitable for the books as straight bets. It’s not surprising. After all, the impulsive gambler who gets down more than he can afford is the one who most can’t resist the siren song of the parlay — even if it means selling that car.

Also: get it off TV. This is the easiest victory of them all. Everybody, even the most prop-addicted gambler, is sick and tired of seeing their TVs flooded with ads for sports betting. The ads’ only purpose is to get people who don’t gamble already to do so. You won’t anger gamblers by banning the ads, and you’ll reduce the likelihood of more Americans becoming addicts. We can take it a step further by banning TV channels from discussing or promoting gambling. The way it is now, with ESPN’s news network promoting lines for ESPN’s gambling app, is simply a conveyor belt for turning casual fans into hardcore gamblers. That has to stop.

Sportsbooks should also be forced to prominently display their most profitable bets each week, as well as the percentage of their profits that comes from parlays versus straight bets. We should also force sportsbooks to be honest: DraftKings, for example, will promise profit boosts on “any” parlay for a given event — until you accept the promotion and look at the terms, which reveal the boost is only good on bets with +400 (4/1) odds. The books know that once you’ve psychologically committed to taking the boost, you’re more likely to place the long-shot odds required to earn it. All the sportsbooks play those bait-and-switch games, and they should all be forced to stop. Another transparency feature to require: translating the odds. Most players look at a +1000 bet as an opportunity to turn $5 into $55. But the books should be required to translate that into another language: they should have to describe the likelihood of losing — “Your bet is listed as +1000, which means we expect you to lose at least 90 percent of the time.”

Finally, even the playing field. Anybody who bets on sports knows there’s always the question of what the books “know.” You can’t prove that they know, but the books will offer you a deal on a star player to hit his usual yardage, only for him to aggravate a hamstring injury in the first quarter that he had secretly been battling all week in practice (unbeknownst to the public). What the books know is one of those things that savvy gamblers always take into account when a line seems too good to be true. An easy solution is to force the books to play by Wall Street rules: if they change their lines based on non-public information, their executives should be financially ruined. Additionally, the books should be barred from treating gamblers differently based on how good they are. The pollster Nate Silver, for example, has revealed how the books have restricted his betting access because of his prowess at working the numbers. That simply can’t be allowed if sports bettors are going to have any semblance of a fair shot. And on the flip side, the books should be banned from incentivizing poor gamblers to keep gambling.

The reality — happily or unhappily — is that sports betting is here to stay. The money, the media and the fact that gambling is now the status quo will all make sure of that. The question now is: what are you going to do about it? My money is on nothing — but DraftKings knows my bets aren’t worth much.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2025 World edition.