Opinion: Sports Betting Education Courses are a Key Step in Mitigating Gambling Harm
Colleges are starting to offer courses meant to educate young people about the sports betting industry. That’s a key step in mitigating potential harms of these fun, but also potentially addicting, products.
Last week, a local Rhode Island news station ran a piece titled “Silent Addiction: The Hidden Cost of Sports Betting in Rhode Island.” It detailed the progression of the sports betting market in the tiny state, partially through the lens of young people’s struggles with problem gambling. One passage in particular caught my eye:
“More than two-thirds of respondents to the NCAA survey — which did not use the terms ‘addiction’ or ‘problem gambling’ — said they believed they could win more money if they gambled consistently. About 80% said advertising made them more likely to bet.”
So, as a society, we’re (successfully) marketing an addictive product to young people, and they also have little idea how it works. That’s a recipe for disaster, if I’ve ever seen one.
The good news is that some college institutions are fighting back against the rampant misinformation and predation. The article details the efforts of a local college professor to educate students on the industry.
Another article, this one in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, delved into a similar class at Carnegie Mellon in Pennsylvania. This one dove even further into betting mechanics, with the professor operating a faux sportsbook to show students how difficult it is to win.
I applaud these efforts, and I think similar efforts would go a long way toward mitigating the harms of expanded legal gambling.
Sports Betting Toothpaste is Out of the Tube
Ohio Republicans have a different solution. They’d like to wind back the clock, take away nearly all forms of legal betting, and close what they believe is Pandora’s Box they’ve opened. Proposed shackles to the industry include a complete ban on online bets, a max bet of $100, and doing away with parlays and prop bets.
This is a laughably unrealistic solution on so many levels. Prohibition only serves to drive the action to minimally regulated prediction markets and unregulated offshore entities.
Harm from gambling can be very real, but the idea that this sort of legislation would do away with such harm is fiction. People have always bet, and they always will.
Instead of fighting that reality, I’m much more drawn to the idea of arming people with knowledge of what they’re getting into when they bet on sports. It can apply to other forms of gambling, too, perhaps. But I think people generally understand that slot machines, blackjack, Pai Gow, and the like drain their money at a slow, inexorable, but mathematically quantifiable rate.
The Sports Betting Industry is Full of Deception
The excerpt from the Rhode Island story, in which students seem to be under the illusion that sports betting is easily beatable, suggests that viewpoint has not yet permeated that subset of gambling customers. For some reason, we’ve let this fiction circulate. And it has to stop for a healthy market to thrive without undermining the very people who prop it up.
Misleading advertising and downright bad actors are everywhere in sports betting. It’s an industry that thrives on deception, and it has clearly pulled the wool over the eyes of far too many people.
I don’t understand why sports betting can’t market itself as a fun gambling activity. That’s what people want, after all. Every time I go to my local casino to play poker, there are far more people at the craps tables, blackjack tables, and slot machines than in the poker room, even though poker is beatable and those games generally aren’t.
Sports betting isn’t even that bad for the customer if done on binary markets with the standard -110/-110 vig. The average player will lose pretty slowly, assuming efficient markets. Not as slowly as they would playing blackjack with basic strategy, but still better than roulette, slots, or many other games.
The deception in sports betting goes beyond the products themselves, though. Take this recent story in Las Vegas, about a sleazy tout who stole clients’ money. Or this look at how British gamblers misunderstand a sportsbook’s welcome offer.
Teaching folks about touts and showing them the math behind betting can save them massive amounts of money and anguish. People need to be educated on these basic facets of the industry so they can make informed decisions.
Know What You’re Getting Into
If all of this sounds like I’m anti-betting, I most certainly am not. Nothing could be further from the truth. I enjoy sports betting, and I built my career around it for the past few years at a different content outlet.
Last night, I had the Heat at +5.5 against the Hornets. By the time the game started, I could see that the consensus line had become Heat +6, and some expensive +6.5s had begun to appear.
Although I got lucky and won, seeing those lines move, I knew I’d made a bad bet. I know that because I understand how market dynamics interplay with the business model of the sports betting industry.
Clearly, though, I’m in the minority. And that’s a problem.
If we’re going to hand these kids pocket sportsbooks and open the door for potentially addictive gambling behavior, we need to do far more than we’re doing to educate them on how sports betting works.
One of the issues is that most parents aren’t capable of bridging the information gap. They themselves likely don’t know enough to educate kids about sports betting. I can hardly blame them, since it’s a complex, nuanced discussion.
That’s where more institution-based education, like these college classes, can step in. I’m happy that there are people out there doing the work to help people understand sports betting.
None of this is to say that people can’t win at sports betting. They definitely can, but they should understand what that really entails (lots of work and discipline), and what it means (fighting to keep live accounts for as long as you win). A student torching a $1,000 fake bankroll at Carnegie Mellon before they fire off their first real parlay provides a perfect, hopefully sobering, picture of what’s ahead.
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