Gambling has a sports problem

When your bookie is your phone, the opportunities are everywhere, and your bank account feels like Monopoly money

Welcome to the wide world of losing it all, where you can experience the thrill of maybe and the agony of near certain defeat.

It’s just a matter of when, and how you lose it. And how easy they made it for you to do so. And, also, how much. And how.

Webcams of streaming amateur sports, or at least performative versions of amateur sports, are just some of the action you can take on 1xBet, one of the world’s largest online casinos.

Blacklisted by several countries, with warrants out for the arrests of their founders. Their reputation has soured such that bad press led some Premier League clubs, like Chelsea, Liverpool, and Tottenham Hotspur to cut ties. But still others, like Paris Saint-Germain FC and FC Barcelona are still in a cozy, and lucrative, spot with the controversial platform.

Below those highest ends of global sport, there’s also something on offer to try to give you your fix, something produced to let you lay down your virtual chips. The amateur sports that 1xBet makes available to you include short games of people playing a stripped-down version of professional sports. Miniature soccer pitches, two on two cricket. Tabletop arcade basketball are all performed for the gambler via video stream. You get a fixed camera shot and low production values. You see players, but these are players in a performance, not players on a team. People donning familiar jerseys to create the simulacrum of reality. Some are children. To the extent that it is a real contest, there is the underlying question of just how real the play may be.

And with all of that action it’s difficult to hear the cry for help of an inveterate gambler using, or exploited by, an outfit that is banned in Russia, suspended in the UK, and under a complaint in Morocco.

The online bookmaker takes bets on all these events – as well as eSports, casino, world politics and the weather – 24 hours a day. The estimated number of visits to 1xBet averages more than five million a month, according to SimilarWeb, a data firm that tracks web traffic. But 1xBet’s global footprint is far larger. Its mirror websites that are accessible in other jurisdictions record millions more visits.

But all of that is just a small gateway for 1xBet, says Ismail Vali who monitors online gaming sites.

“The big play here is always to get the customers to casino because the profit margin there is far higher. The average customer on sports betting will produce a single digit profit margin: sports – legal and illegal – runs to around a 9 to 10 per cent profit margin. Casino, however, can run far higher – as much as a 50 per cent profit margin depending on product and gameplay.”

Vali finds that 1xBet is also the leading advertiser on illegally sponsored streamed content. At its core, they’re experts “on manipulating audience behavior.” And that’s the key.

Consider the plight of Jordan Holt, the central character in a recent story from The Athletic. Here was a man who’d previously gambled and lost, got control of himself, and then eventually fell into FanDuel’s vortex.

He won at first, and so he was bitten by the bug. Soon he was chasing, trying to recoup his loses. Watch and win, as they famously say.

It was all in the app. All in the bank accounts. All digital. Ones and zeroes felt like harmless ideas. And then the loans piled up. The mortgage was up. The gambling stopped briefly but became a fixture again, an in-vain effort to pay off bills accrued from all the gambling. It was a classic spiral, a not-at-all-original story of placing bets in the hopes of getting back on top, so no one would ever find out this miserable, huge secret.

He hated himself. Several times, he tried quitting and would go days without placing a bet. Then his phone would ping. It was his VIP representative from FanDuel with a text message.

Hey Jordan … I just gave you a $200 bonus bet into your account.

They had their claws in him, and he knew it. The ease of betting on his phone, and the come-hithers that FanDuel unleashed as his losses mounted, were an irresistible combination. It was mobile app vs. human willpower, and it was a total mismatch.

In all, Holt’s problems, and his criticisms of FanDuel, mimic what anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll discussed in her 2014 book, Addiction by Design. Her years of field research examined machine gambling and found the process, the rapid play, the continuous format and even the solitary nature of it, pulls people into a trancelike state, “the machine zone,” one not at all easy escape.

There are serious repercussions even beyond the bank accounts and loans. A newly published study from scholars at the University of Oregon examined the relationship between legalized sports gambling, emotional cues, and domestic violence. The authors found that legalized gambling has increased domestic violence by about nine percent when an NFL home team is upset.

One of the economists observed in an interview that the industry is worth about $100 billion per year, and soaring. Gambling is now legal, in various formats, in 38 states across the country. So, there’s perhaps no going back. There are also economic positives, to be sure, they point out, but there are these many troubling problems.

The other growth area has to do with the demographics of gamblers.

GWS Magnify found that sportsbook betting surged in young users in 2023, with 36% more 21–28-year-olds using sportsbook apps than the same time the year before. In December of 2023, 21-28 year olds accounted for 1.2 million out of a total of 7.9 million Americans actively using the apps. In just a few months, by April of 2024, the total American numbers GWS Magnify had found using those apps had grown to 9.3 million people.

How could we not see explosive growth, with the relentless advertising and media onslaught that Fanduel, Draft Kings, and ESPN Bet are putting forth? It’s difficult to go through just one commercial break of a broadcast of your favorite big four teams without seeing Rob Gronkowski, Jamie Foxx, Wayne Gretzky or some other eminently likable household name shilling one of those platforms. During a recent NFL game I saw three such spots, in one commercial break.

At that point, we could enter what might be a thorny ethics debate. What does it mean, ethically, that the “Worldwide Leader” is now providing you the sport, offering exclusive coverage, exclusive access, hours of people shouting their hot takes and segments devoted explicitly the over/under, who’s playing, who’s hurt and more insider access if you subscribe and partake?

There’s another debate to be had about regulation, control and support, and defense against exploitation, which is all too often implicit in the cautionary tales about gambling woes.

In the immediate and practical sense -- whether it’s some obscure sport you’ve found on the web, a more traditional format of gambling, a casino, an app -- there are real, and growing, consequences. As The Athletic noted, as they followed Jordan Holt’s story:

A spokesperson for Gamblers Anonymous said that since 2020, men like Holt are increasingly common at their meetings. Before 2020, a person in their 40s attending a meeting would be the youngest in the room. Now, it’s the most common age range, a direct result of sports gambling. Experts say gambling problems develop over years, which is why Gamblers Anonymous is bracing for a surge from the scores of people who have started betting on sports in recent years.

The pathology is traditionally thought to take years to develop, but is that accelerating with online ease and volume? And if it’s starting earlier, it’s an easy bet to say it will last longer. The parlay of being more personally, financially, emotionally and relationally damaging could be easy action, too. It’s a huge personal gamble.

If you need help, the National Problem Gambling Helpline (1-800-GAMBLER), serves as a non-emergency one-stop hub connecting people looking for assistance with a gambling problem to local resources. The National Problem Gambling Helpline offers call, text, and chat services in the form of support, information, and service referrals, 24/7/365.

In New Jersey, the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey can be reached at 609-588-5515, or at www.800gambler.org.