How Did Sports Betting Become Legal in the Us?

"Estimates of the scope of illegal sports betting in the United States range anywhere from $80 billion to $380 billion annually, making sports betting the most widespread and popular form of gambling in America."

which seems surprising even at the low end.

similarly from https://www.americangaming.org/new-aga-report-shows-american... in 2022

"AGA’s report estimates that Americans wager $63.8 billion with illegal bookies and offshore sites at a cost of $3.8 billion in gaming revenue and $700 million in state taxes. With Americans projected to place $100 billion in legal sports bets this year, these findings imply that illegal sportsbook operators are capturing nearly 40 percent of the U.S. sports betting market."

I think what would be more interesting to me is estimates on the unique number of citizens betting. Is it up? If so, how appreciably?

They are a harm to others. People with gambling addictions don't just hurt themselves - they hurt families, friends, and also the society at large as they come to be dependent on the safety net for substeance.

I think you dont need to make it illegal to keep it in check. A simple rule saying: IF a person spends more than 20% of the overall W2 or 1099 income on gambling, then the gambling house is liable for every 95 cents of every subsequent dollar paid out. We transfer liability for selling alcohol to irresponsible bartenders - casinos should also take the heat for the malaise they inflict.

You'd see very quickly how things get real.

Also, because their gambling asses smart wifes divorced get lonely and somehow it becomes contribution to male loneliness epidemic and then we have right wing using them as argument to stop "no fault divorce" and restrict women so they have no choice.

We as a society should get to decide what "freedoms" and what "constraints" make for a better society as a whole, don't we?

It seems totally unbalanced, predatory, like an overt scam.

I would feel a lot better about the law permitting sports gambling if it also required companies to accept bets from all gamblers. It likely would reduce margins and feel a lot riskier to the companies. Like with poker… you can’t sit down at the table hoping to win big without also risking to lose big.

Then FanDuel and DraftKings arrived with a lot of investor capital, and had the money and power to push through the legalization.

It was never morals that kept gambling from being legalized elsewhere, it was protectionism.

But even on top of that, the coverage of this issue is severely lacking. There were already many online sports books "legally" HQ'd in the Caribbean or other offshore locales. They were pointed to as proof of how much money could be made and money won. That's the story. We allowed greed to addict millions of young men on sports gambling because we lost our spines in this country.

If DFS is legal roulette should be legal as well because it has fewer negative consequences for society.

I know it's popular narrative among pro gamblers that games of skill deserve a different (better) treatment but it's just self serving nonsense in my view (I've spent most of my adult life in a gambling world as both a pro player and software developer).

And it really saddens me to see American children being introduced to gambling at a younger and younger age via things like loot boxes, blind boxes, and trading card game speculation.

I find it telling the the people that have this opinion always seem to believe that they are going to be the arbiters of how other people should live, and that they themselves are without the vices that they would regulate.

And I even agree on the betting bit: it's bad. But then again, so is voting for criminals and yet, we allow it and arguably that causes a lot more damage than betting.

I would also spend way more money on gambling when at a location to do so. The desire to bet on sports on my phone is really low because it's boring so I won't do more than enough to make a game interesting.

When I used to have to make an effort to get things that are now legal but previously illegal I would be much more compelled to make that effort to avoid having to do it in the future when I wanted the thing. Which inevitably would lead to more doing of the thing. Now that I know I can get it anytime I don't actually care about it.

Some other good examples (I think) are simply watching things. It doesn't need to be porn, think about how many people are chronically watching mindless trash content for hours at a time because we've made constant scrolling an immersive experience available all the time everywhere. I know I am. We've gone so far as to even eliminate the necessity to decide what to watch, the media companies have automated the process of turning what used to be customers into their products and delegated the friction to the telecom companies. When you think about your phone bill, really we should be paying basically nothing for it (and in some places it's nearly that cheap), but in expensive places we're paying like $80/month to engage with 5 free addictions that only take value away from our lives. They're charging us to sell ourselves to each other.

Weed: I agree that it should be legal, but how many new customers have been created since a store opened in every available vacant commercial space within a legal jurisdiction?

The pursuits of car and oil companies have literally re-shaped the built environment in the name of making it as easy as possible to be sedentary when you'd otherwise have to move—most significantly so in places that missed out on dense urbanization in the pre-industrial period—and now all we know how to do is get in our big SUV and drive to Costco, then to McDonalds, because otherwise there's a near-zero likelihood you have access to more economical healthy choices that are persuasively close to not drive to. Most North American cities effectively made it illegal to do anything else but sprawl, and concentrated as much wealth and power as possible in the hands of mega-franchise companies and private equity while we watched our wetlands get paved over for parking lots (we unironically should have listened to Joni Mitchell on this one). Good luck opening up a new corner store, those only go on the main avenues and shockingly someone owns that land already.

Credit Cards: Obvious one, but if you obscure how much you've spent and eliminate the requirement to keep track of what's available to you, maybe even add a nice little ding sound when you tap your phone, you're going to buy a hell of a lot more.

These new sports books are operating purely to enrich the owners of the platform. Ban 'em.

So if there aren't any natural incentives you just make up artificial ones. One such mechanism is regulation, just like with the tobacco industry.

It's probably included because some states require it and it's easy to just make one commercial. For example, Virginia 11VAC5-70-240.B "Advertising, marketing, and promotional materials shall include a responsible gaming message, which includes, at a minimum, a director-approved problem gambling helpline number and an assistance and prevention message, except as otherwise permitted by the director for certain mediums such as social media messages. "