America Is Falling in Love With Gambling. I’m Worried About What’s Coming Next.

This is Emotional Investment, Joel Anderson’s column about money and how we think about it. To suggest a subject or get in touch, email emotional.investment@slate.com.

When sports betting became legal in New Jersey, a guy I’ll call Rick downloaded an app and started going crazy making wagers on games. He lost $15,000 that first year. He could handle the loss—he’d recently gotten a promotion at work and was living frugally on his new $85,000-a-year salary, sharing an apartment in Philadelphia with two roommates—but he saw how quickly things could spiral.

Rick had been gambling since college, starting out placing bets with a classmate who had his own little sportsbook. Once, he’d lost so many bets in a row that he didn’t have the money to pay up—thanks to LeBron James’ curiously passive play in Game 5 of the 2010 Eastern Conference semifinals. His bookie, rumored to be part of the Russian mafia, decided to cut him a break.

“I was nervous because I met this guy through my friends who were doing [cocaine],” Rick said. “But he was, like, ‘Usually it’s an issue. But I know you, you’ve been a customer for a while. So I’ll let you pay me back with interest.’ ” It took a year for Rick to pay off the debt, and it involved stopping his regular contribution to his 401(k) through the drugstore where he worked in school.

Today, Rick still takes gambling very seriously, even though he’s much more cautious and thorough in his approach. He told me that he uses mathematics and statistical data to make his bets. For a while after that $15,000 loss, he reined things in: “I put some controls on myself,” he said. “I’d only go place bets in person, and with the cash on hand.” But he found that he still loved the thrill. “It’s different from drugs or alcohol or sex. It’s like the ultimate test of Can you put your money where your mouth is.”

Rick even felt secure enough to return to the apps last year. But first, he figured out how to set deposit limits, and he opened a bank account dedicated only to sports gaming. And he mostly limits himself to wagering around the Super Bowl—this year he let himself bet $4,000.

He’s not alone. The American Gaming Association said the U.S. sports betting industry brought in $119.8 billion in 2023, a nearly 28 percent increase from the year before. This Super Bowl, 68 million American adults planned to bet online (legally or illegally), at a retail sportsbook or with an illegal bookie, on the Super Bowl—an increase of 41 percent from 2023. This turnaround has been surprising for anyone who spent decades watching the NFL shun sports betting—before holding the game in Sin City itself. But not even most of the gambling happened on the Las Vegas Strip—the vast majority happened online. Gambling’s surge in popularity has been one of the most startling cultural shifts in my lifetime, rivaling the expansion of legal marijuana and the effects of the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage.

Today it’s never been easier to place a bet on a game, or visit a casino, or buy a lottery ticket.

Betting has always been part of American life, from the gambling houses during the California Gold Rush to the underground numbers racket in New York to the riverboat casinos along the Mississippi. It dates back to at least the 17^th century, when wealthy Virginia landowners put some of their immense fortunes into horse racing. But things have really opened up in recent years, particularly after 2018, when a Supreme Court ruling killed the federal law restricting sports betting to a handful of states including Nevada. Today more than three-quarters of states offer legal sports betting, clearing the way for professional sports leagues to partner with gambling companies and plaster their stadiums and arenas with gambling advertising.

So how did Rick do this Super Bowl?

“I’ve crushed it,” he said, particularly proud of his strategy to keep live-betting on the Kansas City Chiefs even as they trailed early in the game en route to a 25–22 win. “To be correct on the analysis—it feels good to win and outdo the so-called experts.”

To hear Rick’s story is to understand a little bit about what makes gambling attractive—it’s not just about the money, it’s about the strategy, the smarts, the thrill of being right. But this is still gambling—most people don’t win all the time. And even a gambling enthusiast like Rick has been taken aback by the surge in sports gaming in America. He thinks people get too much bad information, particularly from mainstream sports media, that leads them toward risky bets. Rick sent me a screenshot of a text message from his younger brother, who placed a $15 bet that Deion Sanders’ son Shedeur would win the Heisman Trophy. The odds against it happening were so steep the payout would’ve been $2,265. “Waste of money,” Rick texted back to his brother. “I got faith,” his brother wrote back.

“It was so shocking to me when he did that—he’s not even a sports fan,” Rick said.
“They’re pushing the product on people that don’t need it or don’t have any other outlet to enjoy themselves. It’s the CNBC-ification of sports betting.”

I’ve been watching close friends and family place bets since before it went online. I’m from Houston, where it wasn’t uncommon to make the two-hour drive east on Interstate 10 to visit the L’Auberge Casino in Lake Charles, just over the Louisiana border. It was just something fun to do on a weekend—not really about the gambling as much as it was the camaraderie. Once, when I was making $35,000 a year in my first journalism job, I lost $700 on the roulette tables that I didn’t really have to lose. That hurt. But I shook it off, thinking it was just part of the price of making a good memory. The buffet that afternoon was incredible.

A few years later I moved to Shreveport, where I worked at the daily newspaper and became intimately familiar with riverboat casino culture. After a night out, my friends would regularly meet up at the Horseshoe casino in Bossier City across the river. I wasn’t making much more than I made in my first job, but I’d still get about $100 in chips for roulette to be social and use a few rum-and-Diet-Cokes to calm the dread I felt at playing with my meager earnings. When family came to visit, I’d take them to the Sunday morning buffet brunch at the old Eldorado casino. If you wanted to see a musical act of any renown, you went to the casinos: I saw Kool & The Gang at Sam’s Town in 2006.

Why did I do this, if I felt so cleareyed about gambling’s risks that I had to calm myself as it was happening? It’s important to remember that the casinos were pretty much the only hint of glamour—some of the few places for miles around where you could stay in a luxury hotel and enjoy fine dining—in an otherwise dingy, declining region of the country known as the Ark-La-Tex. They were bright lights just off the highway, beckoning to those in need of a fun night out or just a hideaway from the monotony of small-town life.

Still, working as a journalist in Shreveport made me turn a more critical eye on the whole enterprise. I started to be able to identify the desperate regulars who came as soon as direct deposit hit on Friday.

I couldn’t relate to whatever it was that pulled people back into the gloomy casinos over and over again, or what compelled them to place bets on games of little extrinsic consequence. I easily turned down invitations to join fantasy sports leagues over the years. Not because of any professional obligations as a sports journalist, but because the games were either dramatic enough to hold my attention without a bet riding on them or—well, they weren’t. Unlike Rick, I simply didn’t want to invest more time or mental energy in them than necessary.
And I definitely didn’t see how adding my hard-earned money to the mix made them better.

I now count myself as merely lucky that it held no appeal to me. I know this because I’ve read Heavy, the bestselling memoir of Kiese Laymon, a MacArthur Fellowship–winning writer and English professor at Rice University in Houston. “I’m not even sure I came to the casino to win,” Laymon wrote about his old gambling addiction. “I’m here because I’m sad, lonely, and addicted to losing.”

Laymon opens Heavy as an 11-year-old boy watching his mother play the slot machines at a Las Vegas casino. In the memoir, his mother wins almost $65 in quarters. “If you’re [11], that’s a lot of money,” he said to me recently over the phone. “So that was my first time at a casino.”

In 1993, a few years later, Laymon’s home state of Mississippi was one of a wave of six states to legalize riverboat gambling along the Mississippi River. In time, going to the riverboat casino became just another family activity for Laymon. “I never thought this was a place you go to lose money,” he said. “When I would meet people who could see there was something wrong, I was just like, ‘What do you mean? We just go to have fun.’ It was normalized to me.”

Laymon told me how bad things eventually got for him: A decade ago, as a professor at Vassar College, he spent all of his $73,000 advance check for Heavy at the blackjack tables at the Mohegan Sun Casino and Resort in Connecticut.

“The book became the book it became because I lost that advance,” Laymon said. “Then, you’re writing for your life.”

Laymon said that experience changed him. He was embarrassed, knowing that his family and friends could have used that money much more than the casino. He stopped going to casinos for a while, but eventually he allowed himself to return. He summoned the restraint to stop putting down money he couldn’t afford to lose. But to be honest, he said, “I also just started making a whole lot more money, bro.” He worries about the rest of us who won’t sell thousands of books, get a big promotion, or win an $800,000 MacArthur genius grant (he managed all three).

We’ve always known that the consequences of going too big on bets are stark, if only from the memorable losers of pop culture—Howard in Uncut Gems, Bernie in The Cooler, Giant in Mo’ Better Blues. And surely we can all remember the cartoonish mob movies featuring an unlucky goof who loses way too often and ends up the victim of a beatdown.

The data tells a more serious story about the largest and fastest expansion of gambling in the nation’s history that we’re all living through now. The National Council on Problem Gambling says the risk for gambling addiction rose 30 percent in the three years after the Supreme Court opened sports betting to the rest of the country. The council estimates 2 million U.S. adults meet the criteria for a severe gambling problem every year, another 4 to 6 million are considered to have mild or moderate gambling problems, and children and teens are actually at highest risk for developing a gambling problem that turns into an addiction. (A recent poll found only a quarter of the parents of teenage children have discussed the risks of online gambling with them. And though most states restrict casino and online gambling to those over the age of 21, experts warn that tech-savvy children can evade those security measures, leaving most of their parents in the dark about the potential risks.)

Laymon knows better than most, having followed his mother and other family members into those riverboat casinos on the Mississippi. When he was old enough to go with his own money, he brought his own family and friends, and let them partake in the perks of repeat business—free drinks, free rooms, great concerts. Now, Laymon can see how he perpetuated the problem himself.

“And maybe they too aren’t psychologically wired to be around this much spectacle, where there’s so much shit, you know?” Laymon said.

Laymon worries that an under-covered consequence of gambling’s expansion is that many more people will lose their money and not talk openly about it, shame shielding everyone from the damaging effects of our nation’s newest habit. “There’s got to be more addicts than there were, because gambling seems to be so much more pervasive than it was,” he said.

Even as there are all of the logical, easy-to-prove reasons why gambling has taken off lately—the Supreme Court ruling, the rise of the apps, the embrace of the endeavor by the major sports leagues—both Laymon and I think there’s one more factor that’s turned the volume on gambling up in the U.S. As Laymon said, it makes more sense if you think about the emergence of Donald Trump as a powerful political figure. “Fifteen years ago, if you would have talked about a country that elected a Donald Trump, you have to then think, ‘Oh, and then gambling will be normalized everywhere,’ ” Laymon said.

Trump has long been closely affiliated with gambling. He famously used Atlantic City’s casino resorts to build his name and brand in the 1980s and early ’90s. He was the first to own New Jersey’s mandated limit of three casinos. “This motherfucker got his name on all the casinos,” Laymon said.

I’m not sure how good Trump is at blackjack or picking Major League Baseball games—it seems much more likely that he abstains from playing in the way that he abstains from drinking. But I do know the gaming empire he once presided over in New Jersey is now in tatters: By 2004, all three of his Atlantic City resorts had filed for bankruptcy.

Trump walked away from the town without much damage to his personal reputation or bank accounts. He put up very little of his own money, shifted his personal losses to the casinos, and still made millions. The house always wins, you know?

The problem for the rest of our country is that most of us, whether we realize it or not, will always be the suckers on the other side. And we’ll lose in the long run, no matter how glamorous it looks.