In 2024, there is no longer any barrier of entry to get into gambling. FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, PrizePicks, Caesars, Underdog, Hard Rock Bet, Bally Bet, PointsBet, ESPN Bet, Bet365. If you watch football–even sports in general, you’ll know they’re plastered everywhere on the broadcast.
They’ve made it so watching sports and betting on sports are just two sides of the same coin, like you can’t have one without the other. It’s become so normalized that it might be easy to forget that gambling can be kind of bad, actually.
About 10 million people in the US alone struggle with gambling in some way. A good portion of which are under the age of 25. Gambling addicts attempt suicide at a rate 15 times higher than the general population. The average debt of a gambling addict can range from 15,000 to $90,000. But where most people would see this as a problem, a few people saw it as an opportunity. All that extra money is siphoned from struggling families and into the pockets of like 12 CEOs.
So in 2018, the Supreme Court overruled the federal ban on sports betting. And since then, Americans have collectively lost over $245 billion on it. That’s almost a thousand dollars per person, and that number was from last year.
Viewers are bombarded with the temptation to do it every time you turn on a basketball game. Even though it’s only been six years since the federal ban on sportsbooks was overturned, technology has already evolved well beyond what was available at the time. And now the gambling has gone from being confined in a sketchy casino to something accessible on your phone at any moment. There’s nothing stopping these apps from trying to lure you in constantly, and they’re really good at doing that.
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