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Kayla, 25, woke up one morning $40,000 in debt from gambling on online solitaire — her entire after-tax salary for a year. Kayla is not her real name, but she could be anyone’s child, sister or friend: addiction experts say the rise in sports betting and online gaming in the US has led to a dramatic increase in Americans looking for help with problem gambling.
Gambling has never been easier in the US — especially since a landmark 2018 US Supreme Court ruling paved the way for states to legalise sports betting. Some 38 states now offer legal sports betting. Total sports wagers have risen from just under $5bn before the ruling to $121.1bn in 2023, 94 per cent of them placed online. Seven US states also allow online casino gambling or “iGaming” and several others are considering legalising it — for the tax revenues but also so they can regulate betting that now occurs illegally.
But if it’s easier to gamble now, it’s also easier to get into trouble over it.
Kayla, for example, says she wagered tens of thousands of dollars she didn’t have — even though iGaming is illegal in her state, Illinois — because it was so easy to gamble on her phone. She spent eight to 10 hours a day doing it, starting as soon as she got home from work and skipping sleep. “I played mostly at night, in bed”, she told me “but sometimes I was placing bets while sitting right next to my mother, watching TV.”
It was the combination of convenience and secrecy that made it so appealing. “I’m quite lazy, so if I’d had to drive to a casino I wouldn’t have done it,” she said. “The app let me win a lot at the beginning and then once I started to lose, I was sure I could recoup it if I just kept playing.” She now attends a gambling addiction treatment programme daily.
There are very few social cues to let you know you’ve been gambling too long online. And with 24/7 availability, “it can be very easy to become untethered from reality”, Rachel Volberg, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who’s been studying problem gambling since 1985, told me.
Derek Longmeier, executive director of the Problem Gambling Network of Ohio, told me gambling addiction can take a terrible toll on families and society. “One in five individuals with a gambling disorder will attempt suicide”, much higher than the rate for other addictions, “and that’s because [it] can fly under the radar for so long,” he said.
According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, 2.5mn people in the US have a “severe gambling problem” and another 5mn-8mn have “mild or moderate” problems. A 2022 Ohio gambling survey found that even before sports betting took off in the state, nearly 20 per cent of its population had a problem with gambling or was at risk, including 24.1 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds. Ohio is considering legalising iGaming.
Regulation may be able to help people avoid problem gambling, experts say. In testimony before the Ohio senate, Scott Ward of the Sports Betting Alliance, a trade association for legal online gaming companies such as FanDuel and DraftKings, said he understands concerns about putting “a casino in every pocket”. But, he added: “Unfortunately . . . there is already a casino in every pocket in Ohio. It is just illegal and/or unregulated, untaxed, and provides no consumer protections or problem gambling resources.” One study estimated the Ohio illegal and unregulated market at $5bn a year.
Volberg says there are measures that can help protect people. Gambling sites can invite players to opt in to self-imposed limits, or preferably force them to opt out. These can cover how much someone can gamble, for how long, how much they can deposit in their accounts and how much they can lose.
Other advocates of regulation say operators should provide clear tools so players can see total losses, and a timer that shows how long they have been playing. Platforms like Gamban also allow consumers to self-block from tens of thousands of gambling websites and apps.
“We should build fences at the top of the cliff rather than park ambulances at the bottom,” says Volberg. That might help stop the Kaylas of the world from ruining their finances with online gambling when their lives have barely even begun.
