Thanks to their embrace of addictive sports betting systems, states have made it easy for young men to bet their futures away.
Thanks to their embrace of addictive sports betting systems, states have made it easy for young men to bet their futures away.
K yle couldn’t wait to start gambling. A 26-year-old working at a Denver marketing firm, Kyle figured the arrival of sports betting in Colorado would let him combine two of his favorite pastimes: watching sports and making some easy cash. He started gambling, and his bets quickly escalated, from a few dollars on European soccer to a few hundred on major tennis tournaments. Then minor tennis tournaments. Then, when he felt an itch to gamble in the middle of the night and couldn’t find anything else to bet on, minor-league British darts.
Online gambling took up the space in Kyle’s life previously occupied by hobbies, dating, family, and work. To cope with the stress, he started smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. Unable to focus on anything other than betting, he was fired from his job. After gambling through his unemployment checks, he was forced to move back in with his parents outside Wichita. Gambling, he concluded, “tore me apart.”
Over the last eight years, versions of Kyle’s story have been quietly playing out across the country. The culprit is not gambling itself. Neither is it the moral failing of the Americans — disproportionately young men — who run into trouble betting. Rather, the fault lies with the arrival of gambling apps with few guardrails that seem designed to part bettors from their money.
The millions of Americans filling out March Madness brackets this week need not worry that an office pool will lead them into the throes of addiction. But this year’s college basketball tournament offers an opportunity to reflect on what the nation has wrought with the rise of sports gambling. Without some serious reforms, the nation will create many more Kyles — young men with lives torn apart by America’s all-in bet on betting.
Modern sports gambling arrived courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2018 overturned a law preventing states from legalizing sports betting. Since then, what was once the domain of bookies, Las Vegas, and sketchy illegal websites has been brought into the mainstream. Forty states and the District of Columbia have authorized sports gambling, with 32 also permitting it online. Legalization has caused interest in gambling to surge: Last year, Americans bet $165 billion via state-licensed sportsbooks, almost all of it online.
But states did not just legalize any old sports gambling. They authorized supercharged betting apps that mimic the dopamine delivery of the most addictive social media platforms. From their cellphones, Americans can bet on everything from who will play in next year’s Super Bowl to who will win the next point in a Czech table tennis tournament.
Kyle had been to a casino numerous times and had never run into problems. But once betting arrived on his phone, he would stay awake gambling for 40 consecutive hours. “I don’t think I would’ve ever gotten into it if I couldn’t do it online,” he told me.
The sports betting business model relies on bettors like Kyle. During the 2023–2024 NFL season, 82 percent of revenue on football wagers came from just 3 percent of bettors. Some of these are wealthy individuals with plenty of cash to burn. But many are ordinary guys like Kyle, gambling much more than they can afford.
It’s little wonder, then, that evidence is already emerging of the financial harms of sports betting. Working papers show a correlation between a state’s adoption of online sports betting and an increase in bankruptcies, auto loan delinquencies, and the use of debt consolidation loans; a reduction in savings and investment in low-income households; and an increase in cases of child maltreatment. According to a 2023 study, 19 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in New Jersey are at high risk for developing a gambling problem.
It would be easy to blame Kyle for running into trouble with gambling. By his own admission, he was young and dumb, spending too much time on his phone and acting too loosely with his money. Most people who gamble on sports do so safely and lose very small amounts of money. Why shouldn’t the big losers bear full responsibility for their actions?
The reason is that young men have been set up to fail by the contemporary gambling ecosystem. They are the first generation to have frictionless betting apps in their pockets. And they are subjected to gambling ads every time they sit down to watch a game, as well as a barrage of gambling content across social media. In the United States, men are already underperforming in higher education and at the lower end of the labor market. Many have taken up a sense of financial nihilism, a grudging admission that the American Dream is unavailable through pluck. But perhaps, many reason, they can get it through luck. So, they turn to gambling, placing long-shot bets that offer at least a small possibility of a life-changing jackpot.
Representatives of the gambling industry claim they are doing the country a favor by making it so easy to bet. They suggest that all this money would have been gambled anyway, without producing tax revenue and on platforms where it is more difficult to detect evidence of athletes betting on their own performance. Except, by all accounts, the black market has thrived alongside legal markets. The existence of illegal operations does not justify the existence of state-sanctioned platforms designed to bleed bettors dry.
A different sports betting setup would have helped Kyle. State regulators should require gambling platforms to instill friction in their systems — to enact speed bumps that stop someone from chasing their losses and eventually placing out-of-control bets. For example, bettors under age 25 could face automatic limits on how much they can lose, a system currently in place in the United Kingdom and Ireland. If someone can’t rent a car without incurring additional fees, they should not be able to download a legal app that, in a matter of minutes, will let them gamble the value of a new car.
These days, state-licensed sports betting is just one piece of the gambling puzzle. Not only has legalization failed to eradicate illegal operators, but prediction markets allow residents of all 50 states to bet on everything from sports to election outcomes to Taylor Swift album sales. Effective measures to make sports betting safer must account for these platforms as well.
Any new solutions will be too late for Kyle. He still lives with his parents outside of Wichita. He is working again, and it has been a few years since his last bet. But gambling wiped out his savings, his mental health, and a few years of his career. The question now facing lawmakers is how many other Americans will have stories like Kyle’s — and how big a price they are willing to pay for the nation’s bet on sports betting.