Why is sports betting so popular

Specifically because stats and trends are readily available to the public. Sports betting isn't why is sports betting so popular against the bookie. Sports betting is you. westcoasteaglesfans.com.au › /03/14 › sports-betting-is-so-popular-that-companies-a. NPR's A Martinez talks with Emily Stewart of Business Insider about the popularity and growth of the online sports betting business. Sports betting has grown in popularity because it provides a way for people to create news. People want more insight about their favorite teams and players.

The Phenomenon of Sports Betting: A Deep Dive

When one delves into the world of sports, the allure of sports betting stands out as a significant driving force behind the ever-growing popularity of various games and matches. It is a realm where the thrill of competition intertwines with the excitement of wagering, creating a unique blend that captivates fans worldwide. In this article, we aim to dissect the reasons why sports betting has become a dominant force in the realm of athletics.

The Excitement of Chance and Strategy

At the core of sports betting lies the element of chance. Every game, every match brings forth a sense of unpredictability that entices enthusiasts to test their luck. It is this very unpredictability that keeps fans on the edge of their seats, eagerly anticipating the outcome of each event. Moreover, the strategic aspect of sports betting adds a layer of complexity, as aficionados analyze players, teams, and statistics to make informed decisions.

Entertainment and Social Connection

Sports betting is not merely about winning or losing; it is about the experience. The camaraderie that emerges from discussing odds, sharing insights, and engaging in friendly banter creates a sense of community among fans. Whether at a sports bar, in online forums, or through mobile applications, sports betting serves as a unifying force that brings individuals together, fostering a shared passion for competition.

Technological Advancements and Accessibility

In recent years, technological advancements have revolutionized the landscape of sports betting. Through user-friendly platforms and mobile applications, fans can engage in betting activities with unprecedented ease and convenience. The availability of real-time data, live streaming, and interactive features further enhances the overall experience, making sports betting more accessible than ever before.

Global Appeal and Economic Impact

The phenomenon of sports betting transcends geographical boundaries, appealing to audiences across the globe. From football in Europe to basketball in the United States, the reach of sports betting knows no bounds. This universal appeal not only contributes to the economic growth of the sports industry but also stimulates tourism, fosters job creation, and drives revenue for various stakeholders.

The Future of Sports Betting

As technology continues to evolve and regulations adapt to the changing landscape, the future of sports betting appears bright and promising. With a growing fan base, innovative platforms, and an ever-expanding array of betting options, the world of sports betting is poised for continued growth and global prominence.

Sports betting's rise is a cash cow. Are states doing enough to curb gambling addiction?

Why is gambling so enticing? When you gamble, your brain releases dopamine, the feel-good neurotransmitter that makes you feel excited. You'd expect to only feel excited when you win, but your body produces this neurological response even when you lose.

Why is sports betting suddenly everywhere? During games, promotions for sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings are everywhere… A 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the door for states to legalize sports betting. Tantalized by new revenue, 38 states and counting have done just that.

Why is NFL promoting gambling? Miller says the NFL doesn't get a cut of the amount wagered with these companies. But the NFL and its television rights holders, which pay the NFL more than $13 billion a year to broadcast games, have seen a boon from advertising by the legal gaming industry.

Why is sports betting growing so fast? US sports betting has rapidly grown into a $10 billion industry since a 2018 Supreme Court decision allowed US states to legalize the practice. Significant expansion could remain ahead, according to Goldman Sachs Research.

Is sports betting just luck? Whilst absolute forecasting skills improve, the difference between the best and worst narrows; since betting is a game of skill and luck, if the variance in relative skills has shrunk, consequently the influence of luck is greater.

What percentage of people bet on sports? Among the general population, 37 percent said they had placed a bet; that number was 34 percent in 2023 and 28 percent in 2022. For self-described sports fans, 49 percent said they had placed a bet at some time in their lives; in 2023 that number was 48 percent and in 2022 it was 41 percent.

When did sports betting become so popular? The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a boom in online sports betting. Online sports betting is popular due to its simplicity, accessibility, and broad selection of sports and betting markets. And organized gambling legislation and online sports betting changed sports betting in the 20th century.

Sports betting is booming, but at what cost?

And you can imagine how addictive that is. If I can bet on, not only who's going to win, but will the next pitch be a strike or will the runner on first try to steal second. It turns a three-hour betting experience into a every 30 second betting experience for some people. It's a lot. The NCAA is not terribly happy, or leadership is not terribly happy with all the betting that is going on in college sports for a bunch of reasons.

One of them is player safety. And talked about this. Citing an NCAA survey that suggests about a quarter of power five conference schools, the biggest sports schools in this country, have received reports about athletes getting harassed by people with betting interests. FUNT: It's pretty scary and it certainly happens at both the pro and the college ranks just when we're talking about young adults.

They're extra vulnerable, so I can understand why people like Charlie Baker are concerned about it. The harassment might range from going to class the day after a game and the person sitting next to you says, "Hey, you know, your missed free throw cost me bucks. And immediately once states began legalizing sports betting and including college sports. Those sorts of concerns came up.

Now, the pushback you get from people in the industry and people who are advocates for as much gambling as possible is that if we ban that sort of thing, it'll just go on illegally through some campus bookie or some offshore online sportsbook. And when that happens, we won't be able to detect it as easily. We won't be able to identify suspicious gambling, like what we were talking about with Jontay Porter and rush to people's safety as quickly.

So it's a bit of a devilish dilemma. But I can certainly see a strong case why college students, college athletes are under so much pressure to begin with. To think that they're costing people money on their individual performance and could be brutally harassed for it. Why is sports betting so popular Is there also a concern on the other side where, we've done any number of shows about the fact that the biggest athletic schools make billions of dollars from their top athletes, particularly in, say football and basketball.

That, and they, because of NCAA rules, the athletes can't benefit from that really at all. FUNT: Definitely. Just last summer, there were a rash of scandals at Iowa and Iowa State with players found to be betting on sports. Just a few weeks ago, a former Vanderbilt quarterback said he was approached by mobsters who tried to entice him to fix games. So there's all sorts of problems that anyone who wants this to go on, will have to deal with.

Not only players betting and people around the teams betting, but them being extorted, facing harassment. And as you said, they're not seeing the money that comes from sports betting. Maybe it trickles down in some way if more people are tuning in. Because they have a bet that could raise the potential for these NIL deals that student athletes get nowadays.

But yeah, I think it's understandable why they don't want to be subjected to that. Just recently, an NBA player, so not a college player, but I think he made a valid point. He said that prop bets make him feel like a prop. And I could understand why. People betting on your individual performance is dehumanizing in a weird way. We've also seen with the sharp exponential growth in the money flowing through legalized sports gambling in this country, there are many reports of an increase in gambling addiction, especially amongst the young men that seem to form kind of the core target audience for sports.

The sports gambling industry and before I go any further, I just want to remind folks that if you or anybody you know is suffering from a gambling addiction or even has the concern that might be the case, there is a national hour gambling helpline. And of course, if there are significant mental health concerns that are going along with a gambling problem, the number for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline, which is free and confidential, is available at Okay, , that's the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Danny, hang on here for a second because I want to bring Richard Daynard into the conversation. And in fact, when it comes to how large industries target and market to people, Professor Daynard has been one of the leaders of forming the legal basis upon which the tobacco industry was held legally liable for the consequences caused by tobacco use.

Professor Daynard, excuse me, by tobacco use. Professor Daynard, welcome to the show. You're making a case against them, a legal case. It's the first case we brought. I'm sure there will be other cases following by us and by other concerned attorneys and citizens. This case was, we think it's an easy one. It'd be very embarrassing if we're wrong on this.

Because this was a promotion that I think is in large part still going on by DraftKings. And it turns out that the fine print had some small restrictions on that. It's just credit for further betting. So that seemed to be a, if there was ever an unfair or deceptive act or practice in commerce, this strikes, this seems to be a classic case of that, which is a legal standard, one of the legal standards for holding marketers liable for, basically lying about their products.

But what really changed the tobacco industry was the successful argument that they were knowingly advertising a harmful product. In fact, that they had ample evidence of their own about the harms of tobacco use and that they were marketing it to not just everyone, but including kids. The marketing is, clearly, as Danny was saying, it's clearly aimed at young men, and young doesn't, there may be age limits for particular kinds of bets, but big surprise, kids figure out how to get around that.

And the pitch of having these macho player heroes marketing this product, clearly designed to get the kids, and particularly boys and young men, into this. And the fact is that the part of the brain, I think it's called the prefrontal cortex, that tells you, "Hey, that may not be such a great idea, betting your whole future on this thing.

That part doesn't fully develop until you're about 26 years old. Their market are people who basically, for relevant purposes, are not fully adults. And even though they can be in their early twenties. And that's who they're going after. And the marketing, our concern about the marketing, is part of it is what does it take to qualify for this. We go back to what I said. What that means is a lot of bets, unless you're going to, blow it all in one bet, very unlikely.

It means you're doing betting regularly, and that's what gets you addicted. That the regular hit, pressing the button and it was all demonstrated, really developed by the gambling industry. The casino industry figured this all out about 30 years ago, when they started. If you think about casino gambling, Agent or whatever in Monte Carlo or something, you're not talking about slot machines there.

You're talking about 21 tables or roulette tables. But around 30 years ago, these tables started to be removed from casinos. Where can i make sports bets They weren't making the money, and they were being replaced by slot machines. And what was the thing about the slot machines. The thing about the slot machines was the fact that you continually Point well taken, but slot machines are legal.

If you're an adult, you can go into any casino and there's been no, no one's been, no casino has been sued for having them. And these are legal too. In other words, we're not saying that this is not legal. What we want to say is that making, designing something, because after all, when the legislatures gave the green light to sports betting, to online sports betting.

They clearly were not thinking about what's going on now. They were not thinking about betting on every play in a game. Nobody was articulating that for them. And they thought this was something, going to be something pretty much gambling, when you're sports betting, in the past, you're betting on which team is going to win. And I did want to mention that in various times and places, the industry has made comment about the criticisms mounting against them.

For example, the American Gaming Association has said its industry is quote, "One of the most highly regulated in the U. That legal online gaming products are for adults and the vast majority of bettors enjoy gambling as entertainment. They've also said, as the industry has grown, so has attention for money and money for problem gambling support.

The same cannot be said for the vast illegal offshore gambling market," the AGA says. And then in addition, comments from the Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association include that the sector is already, quote, "Highly regulated. Now, the question is there actually a large body of reliable data on just how much or how little gambling addiction has increased since ?

Though that is not yet firm, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence across multiple states about its rise. Contacts to the state's problem gambling helpline have more than doubled since the launch of online sports betting in December. While specific numbers are not yet available, the helpline received more than 25, contacts between July 1st of and July of Danny, I said that there doesn't seem to be much robust data around the rise of gambling addiction.

Congressman Paul Tonko of New York proposed legislation just last month that was seeking a crackdown on betting, advertising and a number of health interventions to deal with these sorts of problems. His office said roughly 7 million people in the U. A pretty alarming number when you think about it. But what I'm curious about is beyond the people who are really at grave risk and have a serious mental health issue, that requires treatment.

There's certainly forms of problem betting that are far more pervasive, that fall short of a clinical diagnosis. And I think that's an area that could be studied a lot more. Why is sports betting so popular And as that legislation I referenced calls for a surgeon general's report to assess these type of public health challenges, I think a lot of that remains unknown.

And for proper reforms to be put in place, we need to know that the scale of the problem we're dealing with, and we just don't at this point. Because while they don't necessarily want to be part of an industry that creates addiction problems, on the other hand, gambling as a whole, and of course, sports betting, is now a major part of it, is quite lucrative for states.

Actually, that's according to the industry itself. It's a fine line they're walking there. That leads me back to the question of tobacco, right. Because also states, they tax cigarettes as well. Professor Daynard, if memory serves, you couldn't just establish legal liability for the tobacco industry overnight.

It was a long, years long process. Can you just quickly remind me again, I'm trying to see how close the corollaries are. Where did that process begin. And is it similar to your lawsuit that you brought against DraftKings for the misleading marketing practice that you're alleging. The tobacco cases were mostly, and continue to be cases of people who became addicted, it's highly addictive, highly deadly product designed to be highly addictive.

Lots of analogies here, that the product we have with sports gambling, we have AI there, when you're gambling with them, AI is trying to figure out, okay, how do I keep you gambling, how do we maximize the amount of money we get from you. And very similar to, with a much simpler, less sophisticated technology, what the tobacco companies were doing with their cigarettes.

Cigarettes weren't just tobacco that had been grown and left out to dry and then wrapped up in a piece of paper. They were carefully designed products that were designed to get people hooked and keep them hooked. And that's what's happening with these gambling products, these they're not what the fantasy was, they're not what people think back to was, "Oh, gambling, yeah, if you're in Boston and you're a Red Sox fan, you bet on the Red Sox winning.

So that's the kind of thing people had in mind, I think, when they thought, okay, this isn't so bad, let's bring this up to date and allow people to do it. This is a very different product. One is that people, let's say, that they're gambling at the casino. They have to go physically to the casino. Whereas we're in a world now where the casino's in your pocket with your phone, but also the degree to which they can narrowly target what they're serving to users of the sports betting platforms is quite remarkable.

Through this technology you're talking about, they can, they'll know the teams that you like or the types of bets you want to make, and they can even target them at certain times, right. Suggest certain, actually, I don't know if they can suggest certain amounts, but they can basically serve you through the app the most enticing combination of possible bets based on what you like. It's amazing.

So that leads us, Danny, actually, to what you had just mentioned about some action possibly on the federal level to regulate or bring sports betting under greater regulation. I should say that several states have already begun that process. I believe New York, several of them are prohibiting college campuses or sports betting from being marketed on college campuses. Others aim to prevent deceptive marketing or targeting underage bettors.

And we spoke to him and he says the industry targets young men in particular. Something he saw when Tonko recently visited patients at addiction clinics. And, you know, that chasing Larsen Syndrome impacted him, and he was at that point where he felt he needed the clinical help. Ads would also be limited to simple brand awareness, instead of promoting things like bonus deals that would encourage gambling.

TONKO: Just like you don't see people drinking in alcohol ads, we shouldn't see celebrities teaching you their favorite parlay in sports book advertising. Of course, deposits to sports betting sites. It would also prohibit deposits by credit card. It would also require operators to conduct affordability checks before accepting excessive wagers.

TONKO: Drawing back to the alcohol analogy every state in this country has dram shop laws that prohibit the sale of alcohol to visibly intoxicated individuals. We need to have that same order of standard for sports books. As mentioned, who currently use these technologies to do data deep dives on customer preference and behavior.

And make certain that you're on their platforms in a saturated way during those hours. These practices are predatory, and they need to stop. Professor Daynard based, on what you heard, do you think that it would, if passed, it's got an uphill battle, but if passed, the SAFE Bets Act could actually make significant positive change?

Because there's really no regulation. You have to clarify, even though the American Gaming Association, like the Tobacco Institute, was always such a regulated product, such heavy government regulation, almost no regulation, historically, of tobacco products. Almost no regulation today. There's some nice words in the statute that are given to the State Gaming Commission, that then basically ends up being the law by the experts, who they're supposed to be regulating in these gambling apps.

So yeah, no I think Representative Tonko's bill would deal with most of the, much of the major problems. I would add one more thing if I were in a position to just pass whatever legislation I thought was appropriate. Which I would also ban, during the game, the in-game betting, these micro betting, and Danny made a point which I think is incorrect, but it's a point that's always made by the American gaming industry.

But I feel like through satire, he's accurately describing something about just how inescapable gambling has become, even just in the watching of sports. And as you said, ESPN getting in the game with licensing their name and getting a stake in a major sports book recently is a huge development in that. I was speaking with a former person who worked in the industry setting odds and used to be a professional sports better just yesterday, and he was saying that his eight-year-old son sees so many ads, especially on ESPN Bet.

Now he felt obligated to walk his kid through the basics of probabilities and why it's so hard to actually win money on sports. And he was saying, just as I might teach my kid how to drink responsibly or why cigarettes are dangerous, gambling falls into that boat now.

Pretty incredible. Yeah, it's much easier now to list the outlets that don't take money from gambling companies than those that do. And I would just respectfully quibble with one thing you said. You said basically every sports media company now has someone on the sports betting beat. They certainly have all sorts of staffers promoting bets and talking about all the different ways you can bet on sports.

There's actually a pretty shocking dearth of reporters who cover this industry aggressively, as they might cover tech or tobacco or any other major sector of the economy. I think we could wonder why that is. The fact that advertising dollars are pouring in must play a part. But as much as these media companies are promoting gambling, I think they're dropping the ball in reporting on it.

You could just be like, "No Meghna. That was a mischaracterization. Full stop. I will take that point. Very humbly, that's exactly right. We've got just about 30 seconds before we have to take our first break here, Danny, just let me quickly ask you, for you as, I'm going to presume you're a lover of sports. Also, you live in Fort Collins, so that's a major sports city in this country.

How has betting or sports gambling just changed your relationship with watching or being a fan. FUNT: I think, if you're a food critic, you should go out to eat at restaurants. So as a sports betting reporter, I do wet my beak a little bit, but the more you learn about sports betting, for me personally, the more it's a loser's game.

FUNT: Oh yeah, I talk to so many people who are diehard fans of teams, but if they forgot to place a bet that day, even if their team wins, they seem more bummed out than excited after the game. Okay, so we're going to come back to that in terms of how it's changing sports fans as well. So Danny Funt, stand by for just a quick moment.

Back in a second. This is On Point. There's at least one other headline grabbing scandal I want to get some information from you on, and that's regarding the Toronto Raptors Jontay Porter. You never know who's listening. We have huge, we got big time sports fans that listen to public radio. But go ahead. No, yeah, I just say that only because he's a bench player on the Toronto Raptors, he's been in and out of the league.

Makes the minimum salary, but he made headlines recently because the NBA was investigating two games, he played in one in January, one in March. Where he played less than 10 minutes in one of the games. He only took one shot. The first time he left the game with a nagging eye injury. The second time, I guess it was due to an illness, but these forgettable games got people in a tizzy recently.

Because DraftKings, one of the market leaders, one of the top sports books in the country flagged that a huge amount of money had been bet on prop bets for Jontay Porter, which means how many points he'd score. How many three pointers he'd make, stuff like that. And a rush of bettors before the game tried to bet the unders on those props.

So now the question in everyone's mind is, was Porter yanking himself from the game to look out for his own bets. Did someone within the team have inside information and try to profit from that. Lot more mysterious than known at this point, but it's the sort of thing that people said would be inevitable once you started making, not just betting on the game, but betting on every micro aspect of the game available to the masses.

To underscore, it's not just you bet on who wins, and who loses and by how much. It's basically, every aspect of different games, can you bet on, let's say, with the Women's Final Four now, how many, not just points, but let's say rebounds, assists, or even three pointers, Caitlin Clark bags?

FUNT: Yeah, definitely. And immediately, it didn't take a gambling expert to realize that this would be so ripe for corruption. I think, you think of like the Black Sox scandal with players throwing the World Series. That might be a little outlandish nowadays, but it's far easier and far subtler to throw how many catches a certain receiver will have in the first quarter of a college football game, or how many free throws a player will attempt in the second half of a basketball game, those things sports books offer literally thousands of prop bets every day.

They can barely keep track of who's betting what and these leagues, I think, are in over their heads on trying to police that sort of potential corruption. The question I'm about to ask may sound facetious, but I'm serious. Like, how far do the prop bets go. Can you make a bet on how many drama queen dives a soccer player is going to take headfirst into the pitch?

FUNT: I wouldn't be surprised at some unregulated sports books, that the line tends to be things that are actually part of the game. So as much as we hear about, for the Super Bowl, for example, "What color will the Gatorade be that's dumped on the winning head coach's head. Because of course some trainer knows, you know, the sort of Gatorade they put in the cooler before the game.

So it tends to be things that are actually on the quarter or on the field that are part of the game. But yeah, the goal is to make basically every aspect of a game bettable. And you can imagine how addictive that is. If I can bet on, not only who's going to win, but will the next pitch be a strike or will the runner on first try to steal second. It turns a three-hour betting experience into a every 30 second betting experience for some people.

It's a lot. The NCAA is not terribly happy, or leadership is not terribly happy with all the betting that is going on in college sports for a bunch of reasons. One of them is player safety. And talked about this. Citing an NCAA survey that suggests about a quarter of power five conference schools, the biggest sports schools in this country, have received reports about athletes getting harassed by people with betting interests.

FUNT: It's pretty scary and it certainly happens at both the pro and the college ranks just when we're talking about young adults. They're extra vulnerable, so I can understand why people like Charlie Baker are concerned about it. The harassment might range from going to class the day after a game and the person sitting next to you says, "Hey, you know, your missed free throw cost me bucks.

And immediately once states began legalizing sports betting and including college sports. Those sorts of concerns came up. Now, the pushback you get from people in the industry and people who are advocates for as much gambling as possible is that if we ban that sort of thing, it'll just go on illegally through some campus bookie or some offshore online sportsbook.

And when that happens, we won't be able to detect it as easily. We won't be able to identify suspicious gambling, like what we were talking about with Jontay Porter and rush to people's safety as quickly. So it's a bit of a devilish dilemma. But I can certainly see a strong case why college students, college athletes are under so much pressure to begin with.

To think that they're costing people money on their individual performance and could be brutally harassed for it. Is there also a concern on the other side where, we've done any number of shows about the fact that the biggest athletic schools make billions of dollars from their top athletes, particularly in, say football and basketball.

That, and they, because of NCAA rules, the athletes can't benefit from that really at all. FUNT: Definitely. Just last summer, there were a rash of scandals at Iowa and Iowa State with players found to be betting on sports. Just a few weeks ago, a former Vanderbilt quarterback said he was approached by mobsters who tried to entice him to fix games.

So there's all sorts of problems that anyone who wants this to go on, will have to deal with. Not only players betting and people around the teams betting, but them being extorted, facing harassment. And as you said, they're not seeing the money that comes from sports betting. Maybe it trickles down in some way if more people are tuning in.

Because they have a bet that could raise the potential for these NIL deals that student athletes get nowadays. But yeah, I think it's understandable why they don't want to be subjected to that. Just recently, an NBA player, so not a college player, but I think he made a valid point. He said that prop bets make him feel like a prop. And I could understand why.

People betting on your individual performance is dehumanizing in a weird way. We've also seen with the sharp exponential growth in the money flowing through legalized sports gambling in this country, there are many reports of an increase in gambling addiction, especially amongst the young men that seem to form kind of the core target audience for sports. The sports gambling industry and before I go any further, I just want to remind folks that if you or anybody you know is suffering from a gambling addiction or even has the concern that might be the case, there is a national hour gambling helpline.

And of course, if there are significant mental health concerns that are going along with a gambling problem, the number for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline, which is free and confidential, is available at Okay, , that's the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Danny, hang on here for a second because I want to bring Richard Daynard into the conversation.

And in fact, when it comes to how large industries target and market to people, Professor Daynard has been one of the leaders of forming the legal basis upon which the tobacco industry was held legally liable for the consequences caused by tobacco use. Professor Daynard, excuse me, by tobacco use.

Professor Daynard, welcome to the show. You're making a case against them, a legal case. It's the first case we brought. I'm sure there will be other cases following by us and by other concerned attorneys and citizens. This case was, we think it's an easy one. It'd be very embarrassing if we're wrong on this. Because this was a promotion that I think is in large part still going on by DraftKings.

And it turns out that the fine print had some small restrictions on that. It's just credit for further betting. So that seemed to be a, if there was ever an unfair or deceptive act or practice in commerce, this strikes, this seems to be a classic case of that, which is a legal standard, one of the legal standards for holding marketers liable for, basically lying about their products.

But what really changed the tobacco industry was the successful argument that they were knowingly advertising a harmful product. In fact, that they had ample evidence of their own about the harms of tobacco use and that they were marketing it to not just everyone, but including kids.

The marketing is, clearly, as Danny was saying, it's clearly aimed at young men, and young doesn't, there may be age limits for particular kinds of bets, but big surprise, kids figure out how to get around that. And the pitch of having these macho player heroes marketing this product, clearly designed to get the kids, and particularly boys and young men, into this.

And the fact is that the part of the brain, I think it's called the prefrontal cortex, that tells you, "Hey, that may not be such a great idea, betting your whole future on this thing. That part doesn't fully develop until you're about 26 years old. Their market are people who basically, for relevant purposes, are not fully adults.

And even though they can be in their early twenties. And that's who they're going after. And the marketing, our concern about the marketing, is part of it is what does it take to qualify for this. We go back to what I said. What that means is a lot of bets, unless you're going to, blow it all in one bet, very unlikely.

It means you're doing betting regularly, and that's what gets you addicted. That the regular hit, pressing the button and it was all demonstrated, really developed by the gambling industry. The casino industry figured this all out about 30 years ago, when they started. If you think about casino gambling, Agent or whatever in Monte Carlo or something, you're not talking about slot machines there.

You're talking about 21 tables or roulette tables. But around 30 years ago, these tables started to be removed from casinos. They weren't making the money, and they were being replaced by slot machines. And what was the thing about the slot machines. The thing about the slot machines was the fact that you continually Point well taken, but slot machines are legal.

If you're an adult, you can go into any casino and there's been no, no one's been, no casino has been sued for having them. And these are legal too. In other words, we're not saying that this is not legal. What we want to say is that making, designing something, because after all, when the legislatures gave the green light to sports betting, to online sports betting.

They clearly were not thinking about what's going on now. They were not thinking about betting on every play in a game. Nobody was articulating that for them. And they thought this was something, going to be something pretty much gambling, when you're sports betting, in the past, you're betting on which team is going to win. And I did want to mention that in various times and places, the industry has made comment about the criticisms mounting against them.

For example, the American Gaming Association has said its industry is quote, "One of the most highly regulated in the U. That legal online gaming products are for adults and the vast majority of bettors enjoy gambling as entertainment. They've also said, as the industry has grown, so has attention for money and money for problem gambling support. The same cannot be said for the vast illegal offshore gambling market," the AGA says.

And then in addition, comments from the Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association include that the sector is already, quote, "Highly regulated. Now, the question is there actually a large body of reliable data on just how much or how little gambling addiction has increased since . Though that is not yet firm, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence across multiple states about its rise.