Opinion: Betting Should be Fun, Not Addicting

About the author: Nick is an award-winning journalist who has worked in a variety of media and on a wide array of subject matter, including financial journalism (Bloomberg), sports and cannabis. Originally from the U.K., he is based in Denver where he enjoys hiking, birdwatching, playing golf with his teenage sons and drinking snobby European wine. The piece of writing he is most proud of getting published was a long-form essay on the intersection between cricket and racial justice.

I remember the thrill and trepidation the first time I entered a betting shop on the high street of my hometown in England.

It was sometime in early 1988, and I wanted to place a bet on England’s premier domestic soccer cup competition, the Football Association Challenge Cup, more commonly known as the FA Cup. To pick an eventual winner in one of the earlier knockout rounds, you had to choose a plausible team but not one of the big guns because the odds would clearly not be in your favor.

I entered the cigarette-filled air of the claustrophobic betting shop (it was 1988 after all) to find myself among men, apart from maybe the staff who took my nervously written betting slip — 16-1 on Wimbledon Football Club (FC) to win the competition. The rest is history — the Crazy Gang, as they were then known, went on to shockingly beat the mighty Liverpool at Wembley’s showpiece final in May of that year.

Each year since then, with varying degrees of success, I’ve placed a bet on a team to win the FA Cup on or about the same stage. This year, my choice was Crystal Palace FC which lost in the semifinal the other weekend. I don’t really bet on anything else.

The point is I was thrilled to win the money, but I never wanted to bet much more than that. Kind of like when I once won $80 at a casino and never played the tables again.

Got Me Thinking 

Writing as I now do about sports betting companies —  they are everywhere both in print and on screen — I do worry sometimes about the messages we are sending to the more impressionable, our children, for example.

Back in 1988, there weren’t massive TV ads with celebrities persuading you to bet. You just walked into town and found the grizzled old men and their dangling ciggies in the betting shop.

As the digital age ramped things up, and as the United Kingdom realized there was the chance for a nasty corollary to the increasing prevalence of sports betting — namely the risk of addiction — more and more attention was paid to people getting into serious trouble.

Betting in the U.K. has been around for a long time, and some things have been learned from the mistakes made. Legal betting in the United States, by contrast, is rather young, and there may be a lot to learn about how to shelter the more impressionable from possibly dangerous addictions.

So far, the lure of making a lot of money from a new industry appears to be outweighing the potentially dangerous side effects. The experience of a more mature market like the U.K may deserve attention as the market here in the U.S. takes off.

Picture credit: Konstantin Evdokimov on Unsplash