Gambling, and gambling addiction, is nothing new. But the ability to access the casino in your pocket and fund bets on a credit card is.
U.S. bettors have only been able to wager on their phone within the past decade. But they’ve done so enthusiastically since getting the privilege, with wagers on sports growing particularly fast.
U.S. News and World Report recently released a survey about gambling and debt, which found that a full 25% of sports bettors in the U.S. didn’t have the money to pay all their bills because of money they’d lost on wagers.
Lots of people are getting rich off this new model, but not the gamblers themselves. Without additional regulation, some experts believe that problem gambling may become an epidemic.
Rachel Volberg, a gambling expert and research professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, spoke to the Texas Standard about regulatory options to prevent this.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: I’m sure you saw this article laying out findings about American gamblers and their debt, which also found that roughly 15% of bettors are at least $500 in debt from gambling. Were you at all surprised by those figures?
Rachel Volberg: To be honest, no. It’s important to understand that while sports betting has only recently been legalized in the United States, in fact we’ve been seeing things in this gambling space rolling out for over a decade in Europe and Australia and some other countries in those parts of the world.
And so we do have some international research that led me to not be surprised by that particular number.
As the federal government and state governments look at what they can do to curb some of the problematic gambling that is happening or could get worse, what is it that you would say – as an expert, someone who studied this – what sort of policy solutions might there be at this stage of the game?
Well, so the important thing to recognize is that as regulators and policymakers, you don’t want to wait until people like fall off the cliff and then build fences, you know, or wait for them at the bottom of the cliff with ambulances. You want to build fences up at the top of the cliff.
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So, what we recommended here in Massachusetts – not all of these things were adopted, but these were our recommendations – we recommended that all of the online operators be required to let people establish deposit limits, loss limits, time limits, and betting limits that would be presented at signup and before anyone ever placed a bet, so they would be offered, they would have to sort of set these limits ahead of time.
We recommended, and the gaming commission has implemented, a self-exclusion policy that would be applied to all of the online sports betting sites in Massachusetts.
And when you say self-exclusion – did I hear you correctly?
Yeah, so a self-banning option, basically.
There’s been a considerable discussion about how much responsibility major sports leagues – you think of the NFL, the NBA, that sort of thing – they should have to shoulder given the current gambling situation in the United States, the rise in sports betting.
Where do you come down on that question, that issue of responsibility?
Well, I do think that the leagues have a very important role to play, not just in addressing issues of gambling harms and gambling problems, but as we’ve seen over the last week or so, there’s also a huge integrity issue.
And, you know, I think the professional leagues, and in some cases the collegiate organizations as well, sort of got into this thinking only about what a great source of revenue it was, much like many of the states, but not fully recognizing the negative impacts and the social impacts in particular that come along with a very rapidly expanding gambling market like sports betting is in the U.S.
