Kyle 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.”
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