How Gambling Ate the World
Even as they strive to lure players in, sportsbooks are also perfectly willing to kick people out, to limit bets and arbitrarily reduce payouts. Sports betting is not pure chance, and while amateur gamblers are prone to making ill-informed bets for bad reasons (betting on personal favorite teams is a big one), smart gamblers and close followers of statistics and betting lines are quite capable of making money. “Increasingly,” Funt writes, “sportsbooks are seeking to boost profits by weeding out winning customers…. Sometimes customers don’t even get a chance to make money: They’re limited simply for demonstrating glimmers of competence.” A “Chicago-area attorney” and regular DraftKings customer named Beau Wagner, for instance, makes a sharp, $1,000 bet on a long-odds NBA scoring outcome and wins 50 grand. The next day, he finds himself limited to $100 bets on whole game outcomes and less than $4 a bet on single-game, single-player scoring. Funt goes on to quote DraftKings CEO Jason Robins, “This is an entertainment activity. People who are doing this for profit are not the players that we want,” and then an unnamed former DraftKings employee: “At the end of the day, these companies are built on losers.”
Many losers appear in both Funt and Cohen’s narratives, such as Kyle, a pseudonymous young man who opens Losing Big on a losing streak that costs him his job and financial independence, and who closes it by relapsing into gambling after a failed recovery. Several of the features of online gambling make it easier than ever to lose large amounts. Bettors are able to instantly re-up their accounts with more and more money. This enables them to “chase their losses,” to imagine that the next winning bet will cover all the preceding losses. And if that doesn’t work? Bet again. Unlike traditional casinos, to which access is at least somewhat limited by physical location and hours of business, mobile betting platforms afford opportunities to gamble constantly. Bets can be placed continually throughout games and events. And bettors have access to any sport in any time zone. Too early or late for American football? There is a soccer match in England, boxing in Thailand, snooker in Australia. In this way, online sports gambling mimics social media’s endless, addictive scroll.
The industry claims to support “responsible gaming,” and it allows “self-exclusion,” a porous and ineffective mechanism for voluntarily banning oneself from gaming, but these are a tissue. Since 2017, and especially since the pandemic, whose limits on social activity unsurprisingly turbocharged online gaming, calls to gambling addiction hotlines have exploded: From 2022 to 2025, calls to 1-800-GAMBLER quadrupled to 19,000 a month. There are now recovery centers for gambling addicts such as one run by Right Choice Recovery in Dayton, New Jersey. Athletes, including college athletes, routinely face abuse, harassment, and even death threats over their performance and appear resigned to it as background noise to their vocation. And everyone now openly speculates that someone—the players, the coaches, the refs—is on the take.
