How widespread sports betting affects NFL players
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/700398 ... -football/
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A 2024 study out of Connecticut found that 1.8% of problem gamblers in the state accounted for 51% of sports betting revenue. And the companies have created sophisticated technology products designed to squeeze maximum engagement out of them, just as social media companies like Meta did years earlier with users of Facebook and Instagram, added Darragh McGee, a researcher at the University of Bath. In fact, as The New York Times reported, DraftKings employs machine learning and data scientists to identify losing customers and entice them with promotions to keep them going — even if those are exactly the kinds of customers at risk of becoming addicts.
In Massachusetts, on average, just 0.64% of gamblers were limited as of December 2024 and within that group winning bettors were more likely to have their bet maximums lowered than losers. Sportsbooks could do the same to customers at risk of becoming addicts. In fact, the Times reported, data scientists at DraftKings had developed a tool to identify customers headed in this direction of digging deeper and deeper holes, but the company didn’t adopt it.
“Took a loss? Now take a beat,” it read, <>I clicked “Maybe Later,” and the interruption was over. But DraftKings’ apparent concern for my well-being was belied by a promotion the company sent me just hours later: A 20% profit BOOST on bets of up to $250 for an unlimited number of live microbets on baseball plate appearances. This was exactly the kind of bet that had led me to lose so quickly at the ballpark. Now the company was encouraging me to run it back at even bigger dollar amounts for as many times as I wanted until the promotion expired later that day. I could practically hear the crank of a slot machine lever.
Midway through June, the unimaginable happened: The Knicks won the NBA championship for the first time in more than half a century. The unlikely win resulted in sportsbook operators reporting a $48.5 million loss for the week ending after the Knicks secured the championship, the first time that’s happened since state lawmakers legalized online sports betting. I’d erased all of my previous losses and netted a couple grand in profit.
This confusing series of events presented a wrinkle in my experiment: What does the problem gambler who has been a consistent loser do when, by the grace of God, he comes out ahead? “Congrats on becoming a huge world cup fan,” Minnick texted me. <>So I threw myself into World Cup betting with enthusiasm. And guess what? I was winning. A lot. I was up $16,000 on top of my initial investment — astronomical heights. I frankly started to wonder: What if I was really good at this? What if I kept on winning? My experts knew better. “I always say on my channel, like all wins are just future losses because when you don’t stop, it eventually gets given back.”
DraftKings was eager to get me into the action. With my account newly fat with house money, the company turned back on the push notifications notifying me of BOOSTS and betting opportunities. I had to keep going. I was putting more money than ever into play, placing between $3,000 and $7,000 a day on games (Think about that. That’s well above monthly rent for most people.), going for lucrative, unlikely parlays (DraftKings heavily promotes parlays, offering “profit boosts” that juice their potential payouts. Mathematically, however, you’re actually four times more likely to get three out of four legs of a parlay, for example, than all four.) DraftKings lifted the qualifying bet amount for a profit BOOST from $250 to $500 and even $1,000. But I was hit in the app with responsible gaming prompts on only one of the 10 days. In all, I’d lost $10,702 and decided enough was enough.
But before closing out my experiment, I wanted to see just how far DraftKings would let me go. So I asked my VIP rep if I could get a match on a (hypothetical!) $25,000 deposit. If I deposited more, my rep said, he could “look into the account and see what is available to add in.”
Overall, “the system worked the way it was supposed to” in my case, Kalani said. While I often played late into the night, I wasn’t playing in the wee-est hours, between 1:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., she said. I found this response revealing, though perhaps not in the way she’d intended it to be. I’d deposited $21,600 into my account in less than eight weeks, exhibiting just about every sign of compulsive gambling there is, according to my expert consultants.
By DraftKings’ metrics, I didn’t even register for a manual review.