The Three Pillars of Responsible Gambling

Keep your life intact, your bets small, and your math honest

A couple weeks ago I was a guest on Christianity Today’s podcast, The Bulletin, where we spoke about the dangers of online gambling. At one point during our conversation, the host asked CT’s editor-in-chief, theologian Russell D. Moore, whether it was possible to gamble responsibly.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “This is something the church ought to talk about, and one of the reasons that doesn’t happen is because people don’t want to feel legalistic or fundamentalist.”¹

I disagree with Dr. Moore that it is impossible to gamble responsibly. But I strongly agree that we need to have better conversations about the topic. Most existing efforts stink, in part because they are funded by casinos, but mainly because, as I wrote a few months ago, they “frame everything around personal responsibility” and “individual weakness, instead of the environment designed to exploit those weaknesses.”

I mainly write about the public policy side of gambling, which tends to focus on how politicians and regulators can force or incentivize gambling operators to behave more responsibly.² But the consumer side still matters. Gambling is here to stay, and just as we teach young people about safer sex and alcohol use, we should teach them about safer gambling.

With that in mind, here are my three pillars of responsible gambling for gamblers.³ Not everyone bets, and that’s ok. But if you do, these are the beliefs and habits you need to keep in mind to play safely.

Pillar #1: Life First

As with any substance or vice, gambling is most problematic when it begins to affect other areas of one’s life. That can mean skipping school or slacking at work, spending less time with (or lying to) friends and loved ones, or diverting money meant for other things to gambling.

Gambling doesn’t have to visibly crowd out other activities to be a problem. If one is preoccupied with gambling, or routinely feels depressed or anxious because of it, it isn’t healthy and should be curtailed. Those feelings can easily lead to more gambling, or to using drugs and alcohol to escape.

It can be hard to pin down exactly what “negatively affecting one’s life” means, and even harder to self-regulate. After all, we’ve all engaged in activities—be it gambling, drinking, social media, whatever—in unhealthy ways. But gambling’s rapid expansion, especially on young people’s phones, means more people are at risk of harm. Maintaining a “life first” heuristic—stopping when gambling interferes with commitments, relationships, general finances or mental health—can help gamblers, and those around them, recognize when the activity has crossed the line from fun to dangerous.

Pillar #2: Knowing the Odds

One of the most worrying things about modern sports betting is just how delusional users are. Polls show as many as 70% of online sports bettors believe they are winning or breaking even. That’s more than 20 times the real rate.

Being delusional about how much money you’re making is not necessarily correlated with dangerous behavior. Sixty percent of NFL bettors account for just 1% of profits, suggesting that most overly optimistic gamblers aren’t ruining their lives. Online casino players, meanwhile, are far more likely to know that the odds are against them. Yet they still lose more money than sports bettors and have higher rates of addiction.⁴

But it’s simply not possible to be a responsible gambler—on sports or anything else—without having a rough idea of how much you’re losing or are expected to lose. Just as credit card users must understand how interest works and smokers must understand they’re at a higher risk of cancer, gamblers must understand, roughly, the price of a bet. This is especially relevant given the increased popularity of parlays and same-game-parlays, complex bets that give gamblers far worse odds.

One does not need to be a math savant to responsibly place a bet; it can be enough to understand that “the house always wins,” set an amount you’re willing to lose, and stick to it. But as online gambling continues to spread, millions are risking their hard-earned money on what they mistakenly believe are good bets.⁵ The old advice about investing applies equally well to gambling: Don’t put your money in something you don’t understand.

Pillar #3: Risk Management

The house doesn’t beat the player; it just gives him the opportunity to beat himself — Nick “The Greek” Dandolos

Putting aside the emotional costs, sports betting can be a fairly cheap hobby.⁶ A bettor who wagers $25 on a team to win in every single NFL game is expected to lose just $320 over the course of a 5 month season.⁷ A Yankees fan who bets $10 on Aaron Judge to hit a home run—one of the worst performing wagers—has to bet on every game for two months before their expected losses equal the cost of an Aaron Judge jersey.⁸ Most gamblers are able to keep their losses manageable most of the time. The problem is the few times they can’t.⁹

Some are lost from the beginning. The gambler with $100 to his name betting $50 a game will go broke regardless of how skilled he is at picking winners.

But most gamblers who ruin themselves do so by “chasing,” or placing more and more bets trying to get even. Chasing usually follows multiple losses or one particularly bad beat. But it can also be triggered by a big win or hot streak, and the gambler’s desire to reach that same high, often by betting larger and larger amounts.¹⁰

One of the reasons gambling is so dangerous is that it purports to solve the very problem it creates.¹¹ This is true of many vices—as Homer Simpson famously quipped, alcohol is “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” But it is particularly true for gambling, because unlike alcohol and drugs, more bets can, at least in theory, remedy past losses. Gambling addiction is, after all, “the only disease where you can win a bunch of money.”

Being a responsible gambler means knowing when to stop. This is easier said than done, of course, and it’s also, in my experience, something you only learn after some very painful mistakes.

As one sports bettor put it, “You have to be able to go to bed a loser… Discipline is the key. Too many chase after losses and let ego get in the way. All ego does is make you go broke.”

Final Thoughts

It’s difficult to proactively describe what responsible gambling is, in part because so much is about avoiding pitfalls. But one of the reasons it’s so hard is that many people’s reasons for gambling are problematic, even if they’re not problem gamblers.¹²

Some people gamble for a bit of fun, just like some people have a couple drinks for fun. But some don’t. As Norm Macdonald wrote in Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir, many gamblers “gamble in order to escape the reality of life.” This is just as true for the $5 bettor who becomes fully immersed watching his favorite team as it is for the professional who grinds out thousands of tiny edges. It is, often, true for me.

Is that wrong, or even sinful? I don’t think so. As Macdonald noted, escaping the reality of life is, to a degree, “why everyone does everything.” More importantly, I’m not inclined to moralize, and I acknowledge that the urge to gamble is human.

The question thus becomes how to mitigate harm, which requires better policy but also better conversations and cultural norms. Hopefully this is a good start.

1. For a fuller encapsulation of Moore’s beliefs on gambling, here is a 2015 article he wrote on the topic. His beliefs and comments almost perfectly mirror those of Charles Spurgeon, a 19th century baptist preacher who wrote in the wonderful (and remarkably prescient) essay The Serpent In Paradise: or, Gambling at Monte Carlo, “What is wanted of us all is that we should endeavor to form a healthy and righteous public opinion on the subject of gambling, draw away the veil which hides its guilt, and exhibit it to our congregations in its real deformity.”

2. In the academic literature, this distinction is known as the responsible provision of gambling vs the responsible consumption of gambling.

3. These are pillars I came up with, after consulting with various people I trust, although there is lots of overlap between these and other existing criteria (including the DSM5). They may not be a perfect fit for all, and they do not apply to those with a gambling disorder/addiction. They (sort of) apply to professional gamblers. My intent is not to position myself as some sort of all knowing responsible gambling expert, especially since I often fail to gamble responsibly according to these criteria. It should also be noted that while these should apply for all forms of gambling, they were mainly crafted with online sports betting in mind. Some may question why I don’t mention/include the use of responsible gambling tools such as time and deposit limits, which are the focus of so many existing RG campaigns; that is intentional. While those tools may be useful for some, it is clear they will never enjoy widespread adoption (evidence from some states show as few as 1% of gamblers use them), so it seems silly to center them in conversations about responsible gambling.

4. This is mainly due to the speed of the games (slots resolve far quicker than sports bets) and the game design (online casino games are, quite literally, designed to be as addictive and dangerous as possible, whereas sports bets are based on real world outcomes).

5. Operators are of course in part to blame here, not only for promoting myths about gambling and how to win (telling gamblers their hunches are likely to result in riches) but also by actively discouraging more intelligent forms of gambling by limiting and kicking out gamblers who have even a semblance of skill. To be clear this is also true of investing; the vast majority of modern retail traders lose money, especially with more exotic financial products like options, and operators who encourage them to gamble under the guise of “investing” and promote the “democratization of finance” are also, in my opinion, quite evil.

6. This is true for many brick and mortar casino players and some online casino players as well, but online casino in particular is far more dangerous. Having spoken to many operators and industry experts, the life cycle for online casino players is far shorter than online sports betting; the expectation is that people will lose all their money and stop gambling after at most a year or two, compared to online sports bettors who can sustainably gamble for much longer periods.

7. $25 bet * 285 games * house edge of ~4.5% = $320.62 expected loss. This assumes straight bets, which have the lowest house edge; if the person were placing parlays or same game parlays for the same amount that expected loss would be 3-4x as high. Fanduel, the leading American sportsbook, now has an average hold of 14.5%, meaning if that $25 bettor was wagering on bets as bad as the average Fanduel user they’d be expected to lose about $1,033.

8. An Aaron Judge jersey costs ~ $135. “Player to hit a home run” markets generally have a ~ 25% Vig, meaning a $10 wager has an expected loss of $2.50, meaning ~54 bets would be needed to reach an expected loss of $135.

9. Once again, my intent is not to frame this as simply a user issue. Sportsbooks and casinos, particularly online ones, target their users and encourage them—via incessant push notifications, conveniently timed promotions and more—to gamble “to extinction.”

10. This is why it can be so dangerous for a gambler to win early on, and why “bet $5 and automatically get $200” or “risk free first bet” promotions can be so lucrative for casinos; they help users win (or avoid losing) early, which can result in them chasing that high later on.

11. Gambling addiction/problem gambling usually isn’t about money, but the problem often presents as a financial one.

12. I dislike like the term problem gambler, in part because it places blame on the user but also because it’s very difficult to define—problem gambling is so often episodic, meaning many people sometimes gamble problematically even if they aren’t problem gamblers—but I am using it here for lack of a better option.