Sports Gambling Thrives On Clicks, Not Community

Did you hear about the $3.1 million bet that was placed on the Philadelphia Eagles for Sunday’s game against Carolina? You probably did, and if you didn’t it sure wasn’t for a lack of effort from the sports media. The story made the aggregation rounds extensively. ESPN, itself a casino operator, wrote about the money-line bet last week. Thanks to the Eagles’ closer-than-expected 22-16 win over the Panthers, the unidentified gambler made more than $442,000 on the -700 wager.

These kinds of stories are pretty common: The Large Floyd Mayweather Sports Bet is enough of a story there is a history of his wagers on the website Legal Sports Betting dot com. These predate the mass legalization of sports gambling that began when the Supreme Court tossed out a federal law banning such bets in 2018. This particular $3.1 million bet was mostly notable for being exceptionally large, and I guess also for involving the Eagles. Risking $3.1 million on a thing having to do with Philadelphia, huh? Good luck!

The bet was made at Circa Sports, a reliable provider of these types of stories due to its propensity to take large wagers. Circa advertises itself as a sportsbook that is willing to take sharps—people who are good bettors and might regularly win their bets. It’s legal for casinos to ban patrons if they are too good at beating the house. Circa makes a public point of not doing this.

The idea that you can actually beat the house at Circa is good marketing for casual bettors who also think they might have some sort of edge, but it is not just a saying. If a casino accepts bets from good gamblers, it’s going to have more losing days than an average casino, and Circa’s hold, which is the amount a casino wins from players, really is lower than other books. One thing it’s done to combat that is to make its sportsbook a more engaging place to watch a game than most other gambling halls. Though there really seems to only be one Ideal Sportsbook Design, Circa is nice enough to make some of that missing hold back from drink sales.

I was only there once in 2021, but it was one of the better experiences I’ve had watching games at a book. But those good times are few and far between. When sports gambling was legalized, I drove to all three Delaware horse tracks to place my first legal sports bets outside of Las Vegas. Reading the story I wrote back then, I was reminded that there weren’t many people at the books placing bets that very first day. When Defector met in Atlantic City in October, the sports books were pretty empty, too, even for Monday Night Football.

I don’t get that kind of dopamine rush from it, so I barely gamble on sports. But the U.S. legalization of sports betting has changed the way that I consume sports, as it has for us all. Nearly every single sports broadcast is now inundated with advertisements for gambling; those messages arrive via commercials, on-screen graphics, announcers, and they’re on player uniforms and outfield walls. The line between journalist and shill has forever been blurry in sports media, but plenty of reporters now also have a job where they try to get you to risk your money and lose it. The broadcasters who tell you what is happening in a game are also tasked with offering you a doomed parlay bet on it.

Just behind the deluge of sports gambling content is the anti–sports gambling content. And why not? It also makes for good content. Another story that made the rounds last week was about a working paper released in August that contained this in the abstract: “Our main finding is that overall consumers’ financial health is modestly deteriorating as the average credit score in states that legalize sports gambling decreases by roughly 0.3 percent. The decline in credit score is associated with changes in indicators of excessive debt.”

There was a rare piece of explicit, non-sponsored pro-sports gambling content last week as well. The Economist put out a cover story on “America’s gambling frenzy” that included an editorial with the headline: “America’s gambling boom should be celebrated, not feared.” Hoo boy.

Obviously the free market types at The Economist would be into legalizing sports gambling even if it caused a 3,000 percent drop in the average credit score. (The magazine doesn’t byline its stories, which is helpful for me because it makes it much easier to make over-the-top claims about it. Surely someone there feels that way! Go ahead and try this at home with your least favorite Economist article.) But the story’s additional reasoning for the hip, hip, hooray for sports betting are kind of slim. “Sports betting can be a skill” is one of those. Another is that making it illegal would drive the compulsive bettors that have been created by this legalization underground. There is the point that other bad things, like alcohol or state lotteries, are also legal. The story asserts that when the economy is good more people go to the casino. It does suggest one fix: Casinos should allow winning gamblers to bet, or at least “be more open” about it. The editorial adds: “And sports-betting is a far cry from sitting at a machine, alone, feeding quarters into a slot. It is often a communal activity.”

To which I have to say: Come on. Is there any possible chance that sports gambling has caused a noticeable boom in “friends hanging out to watch sports”? I have celebrated huge, unexpected gambling wins with friends and had a great time. It was never because I was in the space where they’d placed the bet. When I’ve gathered with people to gamble, it’s been for poker. I do not believe there is a real big group that will only go out to watch sports with friends because they can bet on it. One of my other good sportsbook experiences was this summer, when some friends and I watched the Errol Spence-Terence Crawford fight at the lone Atlantic City casino airing it. We got there late, but I had a great time standing for nine rounds cheering and booing with strangers. But almost no one there was cashing out tickets afterward. Anybody who’d bet the fight had already done so on their phone. The casino declined comment for a story I was going to write about how boxing was down so bad in Atlantic City that only one sportsbook in town even bothered showing the fight of the year. That’s a boxing problem, mostly—UFC is what people want to watch—but if the sportsbooks are big enough drivers on their own, shouldn’t that fight be on everywhere? The casino might be a good place to watch a game, but sports gambling is often just what The Economist piece props up as the worst-case scenario—someone sitting alone at a machine, which in this case is their phone, grimly feeding dollars into an app.

Legalization of a vice ought to be done in such a way that minimizes its harm and maximizes its benefit. Take the examples in that editorial, for instance. I would say our legal system for alcohol puts too much onus on the user relative to the maker and seller in terms of minimizing harm, but it has also created some real positives. Bars can be wonderful places for community even if alcohol is poison. They can be popular enough to spur the opening of businesses around them. Even lottery tickets and cigarettes help keep corner stores in business! Sports books aren’t propping up much of anything around them, though.

Sports betting has given us more annoying or just more uncanny sports broadcasts; it has allowed some people to win money and a great many more to lose it. States have received some tax revenue from it. And ESPN bought a casino, and broke a story about a gambler who risked $3.1 million on the Philadelphia Eagles. The unidentified bettor had to sweat it out, too: Xavier Legette had a chance for a touchdown in the final minute and dropped it. I never root for the house, but it was still pretty funny.