I Have A “Can’t Lose” Bet!

Understanding the importance of digital gambling

—By Jevin Nishioka

“At the end of the third quarter the Los Angeles Lakers lead the Miami Heat 26-22.” The sound comes from a mediocre TV in a dirty room of 8 guys, lacking natural light but not cigarette butts and food wrappers. The group keeps their eyes peeled to the television with nervous anticipation. “Kentavious Caldwell Pope dribbles up the court…throws the ball across the court and out of bounds. Miami Heat ball.” Jumping, screaming, fist pumping goes on for about 30 seconds of pure ecstasy. The room full of guys who just second-guessed their ability to afford the Jimmy John’s they doordashed is a few hundred dollars richer off of a single turnover from a random player on a Tuesday night in November. 

Gambling is cool again

For a long time gambling and those who participated were cast into a negative light. Nowadays, it is impossible to watch your favorite team play without being bombarded with alluring offers of “deposit matches” and other tricks casinos use to acquire new customers. The reason for these companies being willing to spend top dollar for air-time is simple, it works. Since sports betting has slowly started to become legal in certain states it has boomed in popularity. Commercials and social media posts of people winning glorify the practice. For most of our parents, they were taught that gambling is a vice, while we are being force fed “success” stories of people turning tens of dollars into hundreds of thousands. An anonymous Michigan student who is a frequent online gambler says, “It is difficult to quit because you are always chasing that big win. Especially when you see people winning massive amounts of money on social media all of the time.”

It is not breaking news nor a secret that gambling is addictive, and predatory on the risk/reward functionality of your brain. When you combine the highly addictive nature of gambling with the recent development of easy access, you have a cash cow. While some may see it as predatory, others will see it is free will. State governments, however, will see it as a massive tax revenue influx. 

Falling into the trap 

Promotions. Casinos understand that their business model works much like a trap, with customer acquisition costs being massive overhead. Promotions such as “No sweat first bet,” offer new customers a chance to get their first bet free, win or lose. The fact this is a profitable move for a casino shows their confidence in you losing money in the long run.  It is not gambling if you assume no risk, right? Well, DraftKings, who churned out $417 million in 2021, does not seem to be worried about assuming this initial “free risk” for you. These offers are extremely appealing but the old adage rings true; “nothing is ever free.” 

Keeping you hooked

For those who have managed to restrain themselves from the allure that is online gambling it is easy to ask, why don’t they just quit?.”  When you have no stake, no emotions, and can evaluate a situation objectively then this ideology makes sense. However, evaluating others’ decision-making in this way is much different than evaluating your own. Gamblers fall victim to cognitive bias when making decisions. “The illusion of control” is a belief that you possess the ability to change the outcome of random gaming events, according to the National Library of Medicine. An anonymous student from the University of Michigan inadvertently described this bias in his recollection of a roller coaster of an online blackjack session. “I played blackjack in DraftKings online casino. I started with like $100 bucks and at some point I had turned it into $5,000. I thought I had figured out the table and how to control my bets in order to win. I ended up losing all $5,000 by the end of the night.” This illusion of control can be magnified by confirmation bias as gamblers will start to cement their belief in their control with subsequent small wins.

The “Gambler’s Fallacy” is the expectation that something will happen less in the future because it happened too frequently in the past. Consider a bad team with a chance of winning any game at 35%. Let’s say this “bad team” loses 3 games in a row. Before the next game, a gambler sees this and thinks “they are due for a win.” In reality, this team has the same 35% chance of winning as they did before every game as each result is independent of itself. Toxic biases such as this plague the gambling community and justify bad decisions and illogical, emotional thinking. Worse even, this lends to sustained gambling as users will believe that “they are due for a win.” 

High rollers on college campuses

Online casinos have absolutely taken over college campuses. This has given rise to a subculture of gambling where people discuss betting lines, share tough losses, share their “expert” picks and form an overall culture. “Locks” are picks that people share with their friends, followers or anybody that will listen. The idea is that the bet is a ‘lock to hit’. Another increasingly popular medium are parlays. Parlays are a collection of picks that are all tied into one, meaning each individual bet must hit in order for the user to win. With each additional pick strung to the group the payouts multiply exponentially. This appeals massively to college-aged students who are prone to risky decision making and love the idea of turning $10 into $1,000. An anonymous student from the University of Michigan says, “I make a couple parlays every week and some of them I get from TikTok gambling influencers. I know probability is not on my side but the testimonials of people making tens of thousands off of small bets is too tempting.” The influence of the media is undeniable and when you combine that with young people with undeveloped prefrontal cortexes, the results are unsurprising. 

Looking ahead, it will be interesting to see if the massive rise in popularity of online gambling on college campuses will lead to clubs and student organizations formed around the practice. With the existence of poker clubs on the University of Michigan’s campus, the precedent has been established to allow for digital gambling clubs.

Future impacts

Online casinos will only become more prevalent as state legislatures continue to legalize them. The online culture built around them will continue to grow. Negative side effects are more than purely speculative as gambling hotlines and support groups already exist. These groups growing in size along with the casinos is certainly not a bad bet, maybe even a lock. 

Photo by Keenan Constance via Unsplash