Jan. 14, 2025 -- One of the biggest gambling days of the year is coming. Are you ready?
Everyone else is. Give or take a couple of people and a couple of bucks, 68 million people bet $23.1 billion on last year’s Super Bowl LVIII, according to the American Gaming Association. If recent online gambling trends hold, a whole lot more will throw down their money on Feb. 11.
Not that anyone is waiting. If it seems gambling is everywhere, it is. If someone is playing a sport somewhere on planet Earth right this second, you can bet someone is betting on it.
A new report from The Lancet Public Health Commission on Gambling says gambling is an underrecognized global public health issue with potential to harm future generations. The commission estimates that 448.7 million people worldwide gambled in an unhealthy way last year, and 80 million people are addicted to gambling.
One reason: The gambling industry has become a presence in our increasingly digital lives, using online and mobile platforms and social media promotion to deal games directly into our (and our kids’) hands, says Mark Griffiths, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Behavioural Addictions at Nottingham Trent University in the U.K.
“Anyone with a smartphone is walking around with a casino or a betting shop in their back pocket, 24/7, and if you're vulnerable or susceptible, that obviously can cause major problems,” he says.
Like most games of chance, the odds are stacked against you. You aren’t just battling the urge to place a bet, you’re fighting saturation advertising, promotional bonuses, odds “boosts” to keep you betting, sports culture, social media hype, and carefully crafted apps designed to tap right into your brain’s most vulnerable regions.
Here’s how it all works.
A Lot Changed in 2018
There was a time when legal gamblers had to go to Las Vegas or Atlantic City to find a roulette table or play blackjack. If you lived in Pittsburgh and wanted to bet on a Steelers game, you made a friendly wager with a (sucker) buddy or you found a bookie.
That world is gone.
Slowly more and more brick and mortar casinos became legal state-by-state, but sports betting remained off-limits until 2018 when the Supreme Court ruled that individual states could legalize it.
And we were, to coin a phrase, off to the races.
Since then, gambling has become fully ingrained into sports culture. Odds are shown on broadcasts. Companies spent $1 billion last year on ads for digital sports gambling. Americans wagered $35 billion just on NFL games in 2024, betting on everything from who will score the first touchdown to how many tackles each linebacker will log.
“Over the last 10 years, I personally think that the biggest shift that I've had issues about is in-play betting,” says Griffiths. “Traditionally, if you wanted to gamble on sports, the only bet you could make is whether somebody won or lost.”
The smartphone is the gateway because by the time sports betting exploded, we were already conditioned (addicted?) to our phones. Between texting, social media, and our favorite apps, our daily average phone use has ballooned from 2 hours 54 minutes in 2022 to 4 hours 30 minutes in 2024. We look at our phones about 144 times a day.
None of this will stop or be even remotely tempered because the money is outrageous. FanDuel is the No. 1 sports betting app – their revenue in 2019 just after the Supreme Court ruling was $490 million. Multiply that by 10 in 2023: $4.84 billion.
Consider what’s happened to the NFL alone. Gambling has increased viewership and online engagement and, most importantly, franchise value. The 32 NFL teams’ combined value in 2018 was $82 billion, according to Forbes. In 2024 it was $208 billion.
The fastest-growing gambling categories — online casinos and slots and sports betting — are also the most addictive, which is one of the reasons The Lancet Public Health Commission is urging people to start paying attention ASAP. About 15.8% of adults and 26.4% of adolescents who play online casinos and slots get addicted. So do 8.9% of adults and 16.3% of adolescents who bet on sports.
At the extreme, gambling addiction can cause financial trouble that makes essentials like food and housing unaffordable. However, you don’t have to go broke to struggle. Research links problematic gambling with poor diet, lower exercise levels, poor general health, low mental well-being, and a higher risk of domestic violence and suicide attempts.
Worldwide, gamblers could lose $700 billion by 2028.
All from tapping on your phone.
Start ‘em Young: From Gaming to Gambling
More than 200 influences can turn gambling from fun to problematic, from genetic susceptibility to having a social circle that gambles to the way your favorite games were designed, says Griffiths.
Ancient Romans gambled with dice. Today, adults and kids alike can enter the world of gambling in an instant. Sometimes it starts with a seemingly innocuous game like Roblox, which has 89 million daily active users — a 27% increase just over this time last year.
“The lines between gaming and gambling are pretty much fused, and increasingly so,” says Lia Nower, JD, PhD, director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University.
Online games with digital leaderboards, confetti, trophies, microtransactions, Roblox loot boxes – where you trade real money for random digital items – they all keep you engaged and ready to spend in exchange for the possibility of a reward.
“Increasingly, gamifying things that have a gambling component primes young people to the excitement that comes from gambling,” says Nower.
Telling stats: 82% of Roblox players are younger than 25. More than half are under age 16.
Why does gambling feel so good, at least at the start? Like any pleasurable activity, such as eating cake, gambling can send a jolt through the reward pathways in our brains.
“It's the most addictive form of operant conditioning, because the more you do something, the more you're going to be rewarded at irregular intervals,” says Nower. “You're going to have anticipation that at some point, the more you invest, there's going to be this big payoff.”
Long-term, the payoff is a mirage. All casino games favor the house, and the more you play, the more you lose. But when you become addicted, gambling lights up your brain like cocaine so you want more despite the risks.
The Gambler’s Brain: How You Get Hooked
A social media ad for a casino app might intrigue you. The vibrant color scheme on an app might tempt you to download it. The promotional cash bonus might get you plotting. Maybe an onscreen prompt hooks you while watching a football game. Maybe you just want to play some blackjack. Then, once you start playing, structural characteristics built into the game entice you to keep rolling.
For example, near misses make online (and real-life) casino games hard to resist. Research by Griffiths and others shows that when you almost win, your brain lights up almost as much as it does during a victory, enticing you to continue.
Event frequency, or time between wagers, is the most important structural characteristic linked to problem gambling, says Griffiths. The shorter the interval, the more you will want to continue because fast play dampens your response inhibition, or ability to stop unhelpful behaviors, his research shows.
“That's why slot machines are often called the crack cocaine of gambling, because you can gamble 12 or 15 times a minute on a slot machine,” he says.
When you play the digital versions, gambling companies gather data about you so they can suck you in with future ads and bonus offers designed to be most attractive to you.
Today, in-play sports betting offers event frequency akin to slot machines, says Griffiths. Take a soccer game, for example.
“Ten years ago, most people only bet on who won or lost,” he says. “Now there are 60 or 70 markets per game, so you can gamble on who's going to score the first goal, what the score will be at halftime, who's going to score the first penalty, how many red cards are given. Anything that can happen within a game can be bet on now.”
With the rise of global streaming, you can now watch worldwide sports 24/7 and bet for hours on end.
Just as online games can prime your brain for gambling, there might be a pipeline from fantasy sports to betting. A yearly draft with friends probably isn’t a big deal. Research in JAMA Network Open found no link between casual participation in fantasy sports and problem gambling. But if you’re playing fantasy every day or betting on e-sports, your risk of developing a gambling problem is higher (DraftKings, started as a fantasy sports site, now includes a sportsbook that averaged about 750,000 gamblers daily during the 2023-2024 football/basketball season).
Another red flag is thinking you can turn your fandom into a side hustle. People with financial motives for gambling are more likely to develop problems, suggests a study review in the journal Addiction.
“People who have gambling problems have skewed ideas about how gambling works, as well as their control over the gambling games, so they believe that they can win, they have special methods to win, there are things that they could do to increase their chances of winning,” says
Rory Pfund, PhD, clinic and research director of the Tennessee Institute for Gambling Education and Research at the University of Memphis.
This illusion of control can be especially blinding for sports fans. DraftKings announced a new subscription-based feature this month that offers gamblers increased payouts on complex and longer-shot bets for $20 per month. These parlay bets with multiple “legs” appeal to the harder-core sports fans and not coincidentally are the most profitable for the bookmakers.
“A lot of our clients who bet on sports want to believe that they have special skills and knowledge about games,” says Pfund. “For men, it's kind of culturally embedded in masculinity to be risky and to take chances on things.”
In-play betting is also more likely to be harmful if you add drinking or drugs to the mix. No surprise there. But it can also turn sour if you’re motivated by a desire to feel like you’re part of the game, according to research in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors. Nower says she often sees gambling problems in athletes and coaches, who tend to be competitive, action-oriented risk takers.
And remember how kids get hooked? The same can apply to sports-oriented youngsters. Pfund has seen cases where parents act as bookmakers for youth sports teams, taking bets for other parents and even kids on the team.
“There is a very strong intergenerational effect when members of your household are gambling,” says Nower. “The kids that grow up in those households are much more likely to develop not just gambling problems, but other addictions. And right now, because gambling is glamorized, there is a very large proportion of people who are betting on sports with their kids and unwittingly maybe setting them up for a lifetime of problems.”
Kids who follow sports are now exposed to gambling in ways previous generations were not, since odds are now shown in broadcasts.
“Gambling is now fully integrated into the professional sports experience such that kids growing up now are not getting a pure sports experience that can be disentangled from having skin in the game,” says Nower.
The Gambler’s Brain: Why You Can’t Get Unhooked
Brain imaging studies show neurobiological differences in people with gambling problems, including functional and structural changes in the brain and reorganization of neural circuits governing behavior. One problem is thinning in brain regions that control inhibition — the ones that are supposed to stop you from placing another bet.
“Patients with gambling addiction have generally reduced cortical volume and thickness in the frontal regions of the brain, so the thinking parts of the brain, and subcortical structures of the brain,” says Rayyan Zafar, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Psychedelic Research and Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London.
Meanwhile, problem gamblers have greater cortical volume in the limbic areas that process rewards. Studies in Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience and European Psychiatry show that people with gambling problems have heightened activity in brain regions involved in craving just by seeing a photo or video about gambling. They also have higher impulsivity and higher serotonin transporter activity, which might make impulsive behavior feel rewarding, according to research in Addiction Biology.
As you think less and focus more on what feels good, you lose your ability to deal with the inevitability ahead: losing money. Zafar’s research found that when healthy people gambled and lost, they deactivated the insula and left inferior frontal gyrus network in the brain, which acted like a hand brake to tell them to stop gambling. People with gambling problems didn’t have the same brain activity.
“The brain region involved in inhibiting a response was turned off, so essentially there was no brake on the system,” says Zafar.
There’s a chicken-or-egg problem here. It’s not clear whether these brain differences precede a gambling problem or develop because of it. But gambling does not help.
“There is some evidence to show that some of these changes come with behavior, so the more that you engage in gambling, the more that the brain has reorganized itself to tune your behavior to seek out those rewards,” says Zafar.
The rise and domination of social media — again, keeping us engaged on our phones for as long as possible — also intertwines with mobile gambling as social media addiction can also remodel your brain.
One cross-sectional study from Sweden found that problematic use of social media was associated with internet addiction, gaming disorder, and gambling disorder. They say notifications on social media can be unpredictably rewarding the same way waiting for the outcome of a wager can be. That buzz on your phone could be a reply or comment to your recent post, or it could be an irrelevant notification. You won’t know until you check.
And you will always check.
How to Help Problem Gamblers
Gambling addiction can be hard to kick since it’s virtually impossible to cut off the supply. “You can't realistically say to people, ‘Don’t use your smartphone anymore,’” says Griffiths. Problem gambling support is just a Google search away — however, issues may run deeper, and the following tips can be helpful.
Get screened. “The research is pretty clear that screening works,” says Pfund. Use the Brief Biosocial Gambling Screen, a three-question assessment. A yes to any question indicates a potential problem. Your doctor can refer you to a counselor who specializes in gambling treatment via the International Gambling Counselor Certification Board’s provider directory. Cognitive behavioral strategies can help change behavior.
Acknowledge underlying mental health concerns. Some people know they will lose money when they gamble but do it anyway to blow off steam or escape other problems. Stress and psychological disorders like depression, anxiety, autism, and ADHD can all make gambling riskier, says Griffiths. Are you denying or minimizing other issues?
Don’t overlook women with money stress. Men are more likely to develop gambling problems, but women make up a disproportionate amount of high-intensity bettors, says Nower. “I think if women are having a lot of stress, and if there's some questioning around financial stress, online gambling is just a natural follow-up to that, if they like to play slot machines or video poker or bet on sports or those types of things,” she says. “That is a growing concern.”
Watch for signs of trouble in servicemembers and veterans. Nower’s research shows that active and former military members develop problematic gambling more often than civilians. Many military bases have casinos for troops to use during downtime, and many service members experience trauma. “We know that gambling is one-way people have found to escape the effects of their trauma, the perseveration, the depression, all the things that come along with trauma,” says Nower. “It's a form of escape.”
Reconsider gambling in front of your kids. But you don’t need to be the parents from Footloose, either. Pay attention and have honest conversations about gambling. Researchers in Spain found that parents who are authoritarian, strict, and imposing might put their kids at risk for online gambling addiction. A more involved and accepting style was protective.
Treat gambling like other addictions. “It's pretty well culturally accepted now that alcohol and drug use are psychological problems that could be treated as well as potentially medical problems — gambling, not so much,” says Pfund. “And so there's still a little bit of cultural and societal belief that gambling is simply just a financial self-control problem and if you're struggling with gambling, well, just stop it. I can tell you, from all my professional experience, that is an underdeveloped and uneducated view of this problem.”
