Betting Big

Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet On Sports Bambling
By Jonathan D. Cohen
Columbia Global Reports
$18

Does anyone have the bandwith to care about an exploding online sports gambling crisis? Let alone do something about it?

In his new book Losing Big, Jonathan D. Cohen urges us to find that bandwidth.

With a scholar’s rigor and a writer’s commitment to fleshing out statistics with compelling personal stories, Cohen tracks the impact of a 2018 Supreme Court decision that has led 38 states (including Connecticut) to leap headfirst into legalized around-the-clock online gaming.

Up to 40 percent of Americans are now placing bets; that includes a stunning 60 percent of Gen Zers. Many can do so safely. (Cohen, for one.) Others are glued to their screens desperately thrusting their paychecks or savings or borrowed cash into bets on tennis matches or basketball games or other contests around the globe at all hours, losing as much as $300,000.

“Gambling is a public health issue,” Cohen writes, and continues to muted-scream, throughout the book. He proves the case beyond question.

Meanwhile, gaming companies like FanDuel and Draft Kings are making fortunes blanketing airwaves and cyberspace with promotions drawing people in and addicting them. Government decision-makers eager for new revenue streams have allowed the industry to write its own rules to open floodgates of profit without meaningful public-interest restraints. The promised tax-revenue payoffs for state governments have proved illusory, along with promised help for problem gamblers. Cohen documents how the industry’s use of free bets to hook potential problem gamblers also lowers its tax bills; at one point Colorado technically owed the companies money when their official amounts owed fell below zero.

Sound familiar? We saw a similar story unfold generations ago with the cigarette industry before a public health outcry led to government regulation. We’re seeing the same deflated hopes accompanying the legalization of cannabis.

While addictive gambling disproportionately harms the poor, Cohen shows its widespread toll. He tells the story of a 26-year-old marketing SEO specialist named Kyle and a Millennial Greenwich attorney named Andrew whose descent into the grip of the online gaming vortex wrecks their relationships, jobs, finances, and health.

Of the latter’s case, Cohen writes:

Andrew's doubling down speaks to an important feature of gambling disorder: It represents the only addiction where the affected individual can reasonably hope their addiction will solve the problems that stem from that addiction. Someone dependent on alcohol, for instance, has no reason to hope that their next drink will relieve them of their substance abuse disorder. A problem gambler, on the other hand, can hold on to the belief that all it takes is one big win to wipe out all of their debt, and therefore all the negative consequences of their gambling. As a result, many keep betting, and keep losing, which only makes them more desperate to bet ...

Cohen uses interviews and transcripts from the public record to document how the industry played regulators in Colorado as patsies, one of the first states to set the framework for setting up gaming. As a reporter, I wondered: How did he get all these people to talk? Including the industry people describing how they got to write their own rules into government regulation? Cohen shows that the capitulation to industry is so complete that it doesn’t occur to the big players that they have anything to hide.

Cohen, a New Haven-based program officer with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, is the author and editor of previous books about state lotteries and on Bruce Springsteen. In the final chapter of this tightly-written 158-page volume, Cohen lays out specific steps he’d like to see government and the industry take to protect rather than prey on vulnerable citizens.

He knows Prohibition would not work. So he supports two Congressional bills (cosponsored by Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal) that would require more safety measures on gaming platforms and support for addiction treatment. He’d like to see sports books voluntarily take more responsibility for conducting thorough affordability checks on bettors rather than luring them into ever-deeper debt holes. He’d like to see state or national regulators start regulating. He’d like to see state or national standards established to protect bettors who can’t protect themselves. He calls for the establishment of a government commission to study the issue further. He’d like to see states ban sportsbooks from cellphones, the effective crack pipes of the industry. (Writes Cohen: ​“Scholars have documented that casino chips help dissociate gamblers from the size of their bets, encouraging them to act more liberally than they ever would with case. Smartphones take this dissociation to a whole new level.”)

That all sounds good. Intellectuals have a history of influencing decision makers, or at least once did. (See: Michael Harrington’s The Other America and Lyndon Johnson’s subsequent ​“War on Poverty.”)

But reading this section, I couldn’t help wondering:

Is it still possible for policy research to drive legislation?

Is it possible for our current crop of elected officials to craft deliberative legislation that take on special interests?

Is it possible to rise to interest people in new public health issues as measles returns to killing children?

Is it possible for the public and politicians to focus on the perils of a popular pastime like sports betting amid the daily maelstrom of collapsing financial markets, creeping fascism collapsing America’s constitutional system of government, masked government agents sweeping up innocent immigrants on the streets to send them to out-of-state prisons or out-of-country hellhouse prisons without a chance to defend themselves, life-saving research and aid suddenly yanked with no notice, existential assaults on universities and free speech, essential government departments from social security to the post office to public health … not to mention, say, a White House war on law firms and judges?

I asked Cohen about that challenge — of having his book lead to action — at a recent book talk we conducted at RJ Julia Booksellers.

He acknowledged the hurdles of enacting legislation. He spoke of the need for a ​“cultural change” broader than government action, including a ​“destigmatization and normalization” of problem gambling and addiction. That would include parents ​“especially of young boys talking with kids about gambling” the way they discuss sex, alcohol, internet use. 

“I talk to a lot of people who gave their kids their log-in” and social security number to ​“let their kids play, not knowing how easy it is for someone to get carried away. … This new generation that hasn’t even started watching sports yet, for whom gambling hasn’t become normalized yet — we can change something for them.”

I would argue that it also still makes sense for smart, concerned people to write books describing social challenges and crafting policy prescriptions, no matter how steep a climb awaits action. That beats the odds of giving up.