Sports Betting Sites Make It All Too Easy to Lose Everything You’ve Got

A man in Connecticut named Matt who teaches fifth graders told me how he started gambling with DraftKings to pass time during the pandemic. What began as innocently wagering ten or twenty bucks on games escalated to putting $5,000 on long-shot parlays, day after day. “We’re talking well over 100K blown in a year and a half,” he said.

There’s nothing special about how he got sucked in. A lifelong New England sports fan, he’d been playing season-long fantasy football and baseball for years, so when Connecticut legalized daily fantasy and book-making in 2021, it seemed harmless to try out the new apps being advertised everywhere he looked. In fact, given how savvy he is about sports, Matt figured this was a chance to profit off that knowledge. He dabbled in DFS—daily fantasy sports—and, before long, won $10,000 and $6,000 on two contests. “When you get that win, it’s like the best high in the world,” he said, “because you’re like, ‘I can pay off my car now, I can get my wife something, go on vacation,’ whatever.” Instead, he began wagering four figures at a time. “I should not be doing this,” he remembers thinking. “I should have walked away with $16K. But that’s what happens when you gamble.”

He felt an irrepressible “itch” to relive that high, he said, and as he chased that feeling his betting spiraled out of control. Eventually he found himself wagering on cricket and Middle Eastern soccer: he couldn’t name a single player in these games, but when he assembled random parlays, it activated that rush. “It was so easy to hit that little green plus sign in the upper-right-hand corner and just deposit another couple grand,” he said. As he was developing an addiction, his in-laws gifted him and his wife a substantial amount of money for a down payment on a house. His wife earned more than he did, but he managed their money, including the new funds for the house. “I had access to all of it,” he said. And as he gradually siphoned her parents’ gift into his DraftKings account, “my wife had no clue.”

“Gambling disorder doesn’t start the day somebody starts gambling,” explained Michelle L. Malkin, director of East Carolina University’s Gambling Research & Policy Initiative. “For some people it’s very quick, and for others it can take five years or fifteen years.” Part of why gambling is such a uniquely brutal addiction, Malkin added, is because gamblers think the source of their problems is also their antidote. Sure, an alcoholic might have a drink to numb a hangover or a smoker might light another cigarette to satisfy a craving, but in the mind of someone with a gambling problem “the next win can fix your financial problems, your relationship problems, everything. You need that big win, but the thing is, it never fully comes. It’s never big enough. You keep chasing. Your brain no longer thinks rationally; your dopamine, your serotonin—all your neurotransmitters—have been impacted by gambling. Nothing can replace that high.”

“I’ve never been an anxious person,” Matt said, “but gambling pushed me through the roof.” It felt especially “uncontrollable” because it fed on his love of sports. He was teaching from home on Zoom because of Covid and had a lot of down time during the workday, but even a quick trip to the bathroom turned into an opportunity to place a bet. “I was really good at hiding my emotions, even when I was losing big,” he said. For his students’ and his own children’s sake, he’d “put on a smile,” he said. “I knew deep down I was killing myself emotionally and spiritually”—plus burying himself and his family in debt—“but I didn’t show it.”

Matt earned VIP status at DraftKings, and his host texted him basically every day to check in, offering bonuses and free tickets to games. He turned down the tickets, since people might wonder how an elementary school teacher could afford amazing seats, and had DraftKings ship various freebies to his school rather than his home. (“I can’t have a package with DraftKings all over it mailed to my house,” he explained. At work, the boxes blended in with all the classroom supplies teachers have delivered nowadays.) Not once, Matt said, did DraftKings ask what he did for a living, whether he could afford to gamble so much, or whether he had a problem, even as he aggressively ramped up how much and how often he was betting. “I had no business doing that. So, why didn’t someone question where is this guy getting this money? And is there something else going on? But to them, it’s just money in their machine.” DraftKings declined to comment.

Brian Hatch, who served as Matt’s addiction counselor in Connecticut, told me that “in every recovery room, there’s always somebody who’s also addicted to drugs or alcohol. And without fail, all of them say that gambling was the hardest one to stop.” One researcher after another told me they believe the prevalence of gambling addiction is surging nationwide, fueled by the availability of legal sportsbooks and the ways their games are designed to keep customers engaged for as long as possible. The industry, meanwhile, won’t concede an inch on that subject. Rick Wolf, a pioneer of fantasy sports who, more recently, has lobbied on behalf of the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association, assured me that sportsbooks go to great lengths to promote responsible gaming. “Because of that,” he said, “I think people aren’t as afraid of it as they used to be. They used to think, ‘Oh, I’ll get addicted and it’ll ruin my family,’ you know? And now they realize it’s something you can do recreationally to make the most of watching games.”

Sure, I said, but if between 6 and 8 percent of Americans now have gambling problems, that’s not an insignificant number.

“Well, they’re not using regulated services,” he countered, “because all of them are protecting against that.”

With people like Matt in mind, I told Wolf I knew that not to be true.

“I don’t know what you’re investigating,” he said. “I’m in the middle of the industry, and I’m not hearing those stories.”

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Everything about online sports betting seems like a recipe for getting people to overdo it: the mere seconds it takes to deposit money from a bank, PayPal, or Venmo account, or even a credit card in some states; the vast menu of games and props available for betting at all hours; the incessant ads; the daily emails beckoning customers with promotions whenever they take a break from gambling. To ward off negative publicity, sportsbooks trumpet their programs for responsible gaming. These initiatives suggest that people should bet responsibly but also that operators have a responsibility to look out for their customers’ wellbeing.

At PointsBet, for instance, a former VIP host told me that when customers said something concerning, like that they’d just wagered the last of their savings, the host “would flag that to RG.” An ex-trader explained that if bettors exhibited potential signs of compulsive gambling, such as frenetically emptying and refilling their account balance, the trader would check if RG wanted to reach out to make sure the customer was OK. A former marketing official said RG was consulted on promotions so they didn’t misrepresent the risks involved in gambling. After hearing so many allusions to PointsBet’s responsible gaming department, I was eager to speak with Teresa Fiore, who served as the company’s RG manager from 2021 to 2023. By then, PointsBet was handling nearly $3 billion a year in wagers across fourteen states.

For starters, I asked Fiore: How big was her team? She’d left the company about a year earlier, so I said it was fine if she needed to ballpark it.

There was no need. “It was just me,” she said.

Eventually an analyst was hired to work alongside her, which still left the department grossly understaffed. Beyond the “huge challenge” of having one or two people tasked with ensuring the safety of several hundred thousand customers, Fiore said there was a fundamental “misalignment” at PointsBet, though she noted it is by no means unique to her former employer. Often, sportsbooks are receptive to implementing consumer protections—as long as they don’t affect the bottom line. Considering that people with gambling problems are also some of the biggest spenders, this is a massive caveat. Making matters worse, Fiore added, “is just how fast everything moves. Like, I can’t overemphasize enough: it is go, go, go. And state regulators, they’re moving like turtles.” Another former PointsBet employee was even blunter about the marching orders from sportsbook executives. “Your job is to maximize value to the shareholders. It’s not to be a good, moral citizen.”

Among responsible gaming employees, that sense of being handcuffed extends to the country’s biggest operators. “I have too much work and not enough support,” one such person summarized, asking that I not publish any identifying details, including the name of their employer. The person said sportsbooks embrace the lowest common denominator for consumer protections, and executives tend to view anything beyond that as “a competitive disadvantage.” Even at sportsbooks that employ several dozen people in responsible gaming roles, ultimately, if the C-suite won’t heed their advice on influential policy decisions, having a bunch of people with “RG” in their title can amount to window dressing.

With these departments either understaffed or marginalized, vulnerable customers are falling through the cracks. I asked this RG employee whether sportsbooks are diligent about confirming that people who lose the most money can afford to do so. The short answer was no. “It needs to happen,” the person said.

Instead, the onus is often shifted onto the gambler themself. “The common perception is you can just stop,” explained Adam Warrington, who oversaw a responsible drinking campaign at Anheuser-Busch before holding the title of vice president of responsible gaming at FanDuel and, more recently, Underdog, a sportsbook and fantasy site. “If you tell me you’re an alcoholic, I most likely will be sympathetic and have at least an understanding of what you’re going through. Same if you told me you’re a drug addict. If you say, ‘I have a problem with gambling,’ someone might call you a degenerate. They might say flippantly, ‘Just don’t gamble.’” If someone appeared inebriated, he added, it would be socially acceptable to encourage them to call an Uber rather than drive. With gambling, people tend to get extremely touchy if a friend or family member suggests they’re wasting too much money. “We’re not there yet in terms of understanding, peer to peer, how to have those conversations,” Warrington said.

The gambling equivalent of calling an Uber might be signing up for a “cooling-off” period or, if needed, volunteering for self-exclusion, which blacklists someone from gambling in their state. It’s a brave step to take, yet some states treat people who pursue self-exclusion almost like criminals, requiring them to be fingerprinted in the presence of a police officer and photographed as though taking a mug shot. I heard Marlene Warner, CEO of the Massachusetts Council on Gaming and Health, describe this lack of compassion during a panel discussion that took place at a Pittsburgh casino where, just down the stairs, a sign warned that anyone on Pennsylvania’s self-exclusion list who entered the building was breaking the law and risked being arrested.

“Honestly, I don’t know what to say about that,” Warner told me afterward. “Someone comes to you and says, ‘I have a problem. Please help me.’ And you say, ‘OK, sign this legal document and we’ll help you, and if you violate it by doing the very thing you’ve just admitted you have a problem with, you’ll get thrown in jail.’ It kind of boggles my mind.”

It strikes many people as common sense that if states want to legalize something known to harm a portion of the population, they should divert some of the ensuing tax revenue from that industry to address the collateral damage. According to health experts, the general rule of thumb is that 1 percent of tax proceeds from gambling should go to research, harm prevention, and treatment. Keith Whyte, who served as executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling from 1998 to 2025, once explained to the Pennsylvania Senate Joint Committee on Gambling that, following this guideline, the state should be diverting $7.6 million each year to those services. “They broke out laughing,” Whyte told me. At the time, Pennsylvania was spending less than a million dollars on gambling treatment and prevention services.

Most states still aren’t coming close. North Carolina, for example, allocates $2 million. Michelle Malkin walked me through some back-of-the-envelope math: the state has 10 million residents, and an estimated 5.5 percent of them have a gambling disorder. If just 10 percent of those people seek help, that’s 55,000 people. If they all participated in a twelve-week counseling program, it would cost $137.5 million. Some of those people might have private insurance that covers gambling treatment, but “if you’ve lost all of your money and your job,” Malkin said, “how are you going to pay for that?”

When Governor Chris Christie announced his support for legal bookmaking in New Jersey, he promised that half of revenue (gross revenue, that is, not tax revenue) generated would go toward treatment programs for compulsive gamblers. In 2023, that would have resulted in about $500 million going toward treatment. In reality, New Jersey allocated about $8 million, which was less than 1 percent of state tax revenue. Following the 1 percent benchmark, the country should allocate about $1.5 billion each year but instead spends roughly $100 million.

Research into problem gambling is even more neglected. There hasn’t been a national study of gambling prevalence since 1999. The federal government spends about $1.6 billion annually to research drug abuse, $600 million annually to research the effects of alcohol, and $0 to study gambling. One potential source of funding is the federal excise tax on sports wagering handle, which goes to the government’s general fund. In 2023, Congress proposed the Gambling addiction Recovery, Investment, and Treatment Act (a.k.a. the GRIT Act), which would spend half of the money collected from the excise tax on treatment and research.

“I’m opposed to it,” Representative Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat and cochair of the Congressional Gaming Caucus, told me. “That puts that money into responsible gaming funds. All the states pretty much have those already.”

The gambling industry doesn’t like the excise tax to begin with, but it’s been in place for more than seventy years and likely isn’t going anywhere. So why would anyone take issue with using a gambling tax to learn about the effects of gambling? Democratic Representative Andrea Salinas of Oregon, a cosponsor of the GRIT Act, shared a theory. “Once you put the camel’s nose under the tent, that is when you start to expose the real harm,” she said. “Let’s use smoking, for example. Once scientific data really started to come out on that, you recognize, oh, my gosh, there is no safe way to smoke, and so the industry is culpable for causing harm.” Keith Whyte feels similarly about states’ resistance to studying the prevalence of gambling addiction: “Fundamentally, it’s a cynical approach. The more they fund problem gambling programs, the more they’re going to see the actual costs. It’s not ignorance; it’s deliberate. They want to count the revenue. They do not want to count the bodies.”

Scholars speak of the “adaptation hypothesis,” which posits that most people learn to moderate their gambling no matter how accessible it is, and addiction rates will settle around 1 percent. Las Vegas is a good example: new residents have some of the highest rates of problem gambling in the world, yet among longtime residents, instances of gambling addiction are consistent with the national average.

There are a couple of important caveats, however. For one, adaptation can only happen if the opportunities to gamble are stable: the allure of blackjack tables and poker machines wears off after a while, but sportsbook apps are constantly updating to offer more ways to gamble and shorter intervals between bets. In other words, there’s no time to adapt, and in the meantime a generation of American sports fans is bearing the brunt of that learning curve. The Las Vegas example also describes people who decided to move to the country’s gambling capital. It’s one thing to paddle out to surf fifteen-foot waves and quite another to have a tsunami crash into your house.

When daily fantasy swept into New Jersey in 2017, Rob Minnick was finishing high school. Growing up in Washington Township, Minnick had an all-American upbringing: his dad, a local sports reporter, coached Little League; his mom baked the team cupcakes; he played basketball and hockey with his younger brother in their driveway; and the family congregated with friends to watch Sixers, Eagles, Flyers, and Phillies games. He played season-long fantasy sports beginning in middle school, and by freshman year of high school he and his friends competed for money. Giving a buddy twenty bucks for the chance at winning a pot of cash sixteen weeks later didn’t feel like gambling. That changed when he turned eighteen, making him eligible to play DFS on FanDuel and DraftKings. “We were all really excited,” he said. He and his friends were saying, “We have this opportunity to make money doing the thing we’ve already been doing. We should explore that.”

In high school, Minnick played varsity baseball and tennis and the cello in orchestra. In 2017 he enrolled at Georgetown, his dream school since visiting D.C. in eighth grade, and by then he was interested in upping the ante after getting a taste of DFS. This was pre-legalization, so he signed up for Bovada, an online sportsbook based in Curaçao. In one of his business classes, a student sitting in front of him had ESPN and a sports betting site open on his laptop. “I was like, ‘Oh, dude, me too. Come sit with me,’” Minnick said. “It was something that I do to feel productive, as weird as that sounds, like, I can make friends while making money.” As one state after another legalized sports betting, everyone seemed to be talking about it, even if it wasn’t yet legal in the D.C. area. “In the younger generation,” Minnick explained, “sobriety is becoming a big thing, but people don’t view gambling as the same kind of problem. So they’ll say, ‘Yeah, I don’t drink. I vape and gamble.’”

On the bus to Georgetown basketball games at the downtown Capital One Arena, Minnick and his friends would place their bets. “I don’t think I saw a basketball game without betting on it,” he said. He’d started playing online casino games, too, but that was “fun money.” He still thought of sports betting as investing no matter how much he lost, partly because he could always explain his wins and losses in hindsight.

“You can tell everyone, hey, I won this bet because I knew that Novak Djokovic doesn’t lose games on grass courts to players from Spain,” he said. “You pull out the most insane references to justify your dumb luck.” Minnick’s gambling addiction was consuming almost every available minute by the time he left for a semester in Sydney, Australia. When he got there, he dropped his bags at the student center and walked to the nearest casino. Instead of going to Coogee Beach or Bondi Beach to socialize and enjoy his once-in-a-lifetime experience, he’d find the nearest oceanside bar and barely look up from his phone, swiping incessantly to update the score on whatever game he’d bet on. He lost an alarming amount of money on that trip, but his parents assumed he was just going out too much with friends.

Covid lockdowns went into effect soon after Minnick returned from Sydney, forcing him to hunker down in New Jersey. He downloaded legal sportsbook apps, and when it was safe to return to Georgetown for his senior year he was old enough to gamble at Maryland’s MGM National Harbor casino, just outside D.C. When Virginia legalized bookmaking in 2021, Minnick remembers dressing in athletic gear so friends would assume he was leaving for a jog, when really he was going less than a mile across the Key Bridge so that he could collect new-customer promotions.

Hearing Minnick’s story of his time in college was unbelievably sad. “I didn’t see most spots outside my room,” he said. “It’s so backwards because I’m such a social person, but I saw the library for the first time senior year. Other than classes, I was in my room.” None of his friends asked if he had a gambling problem, he said. They wondered if he had enough money, but it didn’t occur to them that there was so much else he might be losing.

After graduating, he and his friends went on a vacation to Rome and Amsterdam. “It was, like, the best trip of my life,” he said. “But one night after some drinks, it was like five in the morning, I’m back in the hotel room, and I’m standing in the shower, holding my phone. I open an app and start spinning roulette, and lost the cost of the trip. I was like, ‘Why am I doing this?’”

The last day he gambled was November 12, 2022, when he went to a casino and maxed out a sequence of credit cards over a twelve-hour binge.

He started attending Gamblers Anonymous meetings after that. Nearly two years later, he told me, “I’m working my second job to cover debts that I’m trying to repay to a credit card company that I made in one day.” When he opened up to his parents, they were shocked, though it helped them understand why it seemed like a cloud had been hanging over him. “He was so unhappy,” his mother, Jennie, told me. “He was angry all the time. Everything was so heavy on him, and he wasn’t enjoying life. We’d have family events, and he would always go off, you know, ‘I gotta go to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.’ Or, ‘I gotta make a call.’ When he finally told us the extent of everything, it was a big relief for him. . . .

“On paper, he looks like this perfect kid,” she continued. “As much as we cried about it and got upset, I was sad for him because I know his potential and I knew how he was feeling that all his friends were moving on in life and he was stuck in this hole.”

“I was the one who probably was more angered by what had happened,” said his father, Kevin. “I understand if you made a bet and lost here and there. I guess my philosophy was: How can you be so stupid to keep doing this? What the hell are you doing? How can you keep throwing your money away? It took a little while for me to adjust to the fact that this was a problem that wasn’t going to go away simply by Dad saying, you know, stop it.”

They said they’re enormously proud of what Minnick is doing more recently, working for several problem gambling nonprofits and posting videos on social media about gambling addiction, something he decided might help people after his video explaining how odds are stacked against gamblers got more than a million views on TikTok. Videos like that can be pretty histrionic, but Minnick has a laid-back, almost serene way of discussing his recovery.

His parents are supportive of that work, but they haven’t gotten over what sports betting did to their son. “Have you ever had someone in your life who smoked and quit, then hated the smell of smoke?” Jennie asked me. “My sister is like that. That’s how we feel about gambling commercials. We used to like Kevin Hart, but now he’s constantly in those ads, so now we’re all like, ‘We hate him.’”

Minnick told me he went from loving sports, to only rooting for his prop bets to hit, to feeling miserable even watching his beloved hometown teams. He’s now rediscovered the joy of watching sports for their own sake, and when we spoke, he and his girlfriend had recently gone to a playoff game between the 76ers and the Knicks—probably the most thrilling series in an otherwise forgettable 2024 NBA postseason.

“I was sitting in front of a group of, like, eight Knicks fans,” he recounted. “They were all gambling, and they were all cheering for very obscure things during the game. I was talking to them a little; they actually took a ferry from Long Island to Manhattan and a train to Philadelphia. They spent the whole day getting there to cheer for Jalen Brunson to get a steal. I was thinking, ‘Hmm, I’m really happy I’m not in that position anymore.’”

From EVERYBODY LOSES: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling by Danny Funt. Copyright © 2026 by Daniel Isaac Funt. To be published by Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.