How did sports betting become legal in the US?
54 comments
·September 24, 2025stevage
slg
I think this is more a function of the internet than purely the legality. Legal gambling wouldn't be nearly as damaging if it was limited to sportsbooks that only allowed gambling on site similar to how some places handle gambling on horse racing for decades. The dangerous part is not simply the ability to bet on a sport, it's having a device in your pocket that allows you to gamble instantaneously at any time and any (almost) place.
I think the same thing applies to most vices. The friction that previous generations had in engaging in the vice was a moderating influence. You're more likely to get dangerously drunk while drinking at home than you are at a bar in which you have to order every drink from a bartender. It's likely more difficult to fall into a porn addiction if you need to look another human in the eyes when you rent that dirty VHS tape. It's easier to overeat if you're having the food delivered to your home than if you're order every item from a waiter in a restaurant. When we all know an activity should be done in moderation, making it as easy to engage in that behavior as possible is probably a bad idea.
beloch
Tobacco style anti-advertising laws for sports betting would reduce harm done to addicts and provide immense relief to everyone else.
rayiner
The idea of “consenting adults” is a libertarian fantasy unsupported by evidence. Between low IQ, impulsivity, addictive personalities, etc., a large fraction of the population needs guardrails imposed by society for the sake of both themselves and the people around them.
Sports betting has significant negative impacts. For every $1 a household spent on betting, it reduced savings by $2. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/online-spor.... This impacts not just individuals, but spouses and children who don’t “consent” to the negative impacts this has on their lives.
Cornbilly
I'm generally a libertarian-leaning person and I completely agree. Some things are just too destructive/addictive/etc to allow easy and free access to them.
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.
egypturnash
Ted Olson: who America listens to. Olson is a prominent constitutional lawyer who argued the case to repeal PASPA in the District Courts and Supreme Court. He was central to cases involving legalizing gay marriage, upholding the second amendment, and the landmark campaign financing ruling in Citizens United.
If we assume that these are all cases that he was on the winning side of, then good on him for the first one, but dude sure has a lot to answer for with the other ones and the case under discussion in this article.
tengbretson
> the amount wagered on sports bets has grown from $5 billion to $150 billion annually. 58% of college students have bet on sports. 50% of all men below 50 have an online sports betting account.
If I had my way, everyone who has ever made a "why make it illegal/regulate it? People will just do it anyway."-style argument would be forced under penalty of law to write the above quote 300 times on a chalkboard.
decimalenough
While I have no doubt sports betting is much more popular now, I presume the $5 billion figure does not capture the considerable amount of illegal betting that happened previously.
dastbe
I was interested in this, so perusing I found https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ngisc/reports/2.pdf which estimates in the late 90s
"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?
jgalt212
If you wanted to bet on sports when I was in college you needed a bookie. Now, you have access to all the legal bookies in the world in your pocket. It's hard to make an argument that something that is now legal and much easier than before is not much more popular than before.
coffeefirst
And the bookie was a guy you’d call up, shoot the shit, and he was basically everyone’s buddy. There were inherent constraints.
He could not advertise. He could not send you push notifications or run AB tests on millions of users.
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tdeck
I remember walking into Powell station in the mid 2010s and the whole thing was plastered top to bottom in DraftKings ads and wondering "why is this allowed". It was like a switch flipped and suddenly gambling was being advertised everywhere.
yieldcrv
> style argument would be forced under penalty of law to write the above quote 300 times on a chalkboard
as initiation to your startup accelerator?
giahug
Nguyen Quoc Dat
bdangubic
wait till people find out that if you are actually great at gambling you will 100% be banned from all of these platforms
defrost
All the downsides of a crack epidemic without having to source any drugs.
zoklet-enjoyer
Why make it illegal or regulate it? So what if half of men have gambled on sports? How many people throw away money on casino games, lotteries, raffles, loot boxes, et cetera? It's not my business how they throw away their money.
rayiner
It is, because we live in a society, have a social safety net that you and I pay for, and our kids go to school with their kids. It’s your responsibility as someone fortunate enough to be graced with intelligence and impulse control to help those who weren’t, and you’re not doing that by encouraging them to do whatever they want.
IG_Semmelweiss
Its for the same reason you don't give a license to someone with a DUI.
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.
azemetre
Could you explain more what you mean? Like after 20% of someone's W2, the gambling house pays out 95/100 times? Trying to understand how this regulation works, I'm intrigued by the idea of progressive levels of taxation against industries but I don't know if this is what you're arguing.
droopyEyelids
Vices like gambling are not about one person’s money— they create addiction, crime, and family harm that spill over into society at large.
aprilthird2021
All of those should be banned. It IS OUR BUSINESS how shitty we allow society to be.
mc3301
It's kinda bad for society if a bunch of, let's say, middle class men become economically lower-class men while the upper-class owners of such gambling establishments rake it in.
We as a society should get to decide what "freedoms" and what "constraints" make for a better society as a whole, don't we?
mapt
The problem is the intersection of two things that have questionable social merit and you could easily see a society making illegal.
One of them is gambling.
The other is modern marketing.
Combined, they represent a substantial harm.
With nearly all of our social agency - which in our society means money - already in the possession of a tiny fraction of the country, with the bottom half of the country having approximately zero savings and spending at least as much as they have income? Any revenue gleaned from their dysfunctional attitude becomes a collective hardship, money that needs to be replaced by some form of subsidy to maintain our quality of life and avoid spillover problems like property crime.
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Note that the article uses an outdated name for the Supreme Court case: Christie was replaced as governor while it was ongoing and the final name was Murphy v NCAA. That will make it easier to search for later coverage of the result instead of just early blog posts from when it was brought to court.
specialp
And if you are consistently winning they will ban you! They can legally back off (reduce max bet to a tiny amount) or straight up ban people who bet smart.
These books also market what are the hardest to understand and worst bets to consumers. Think 4 way parlays. Like all 4 legs seem reasonable. They probably on their own each have a 70 pct probability. But that means a 24 pct of hitting. Of course they are all over props because people love to bet over. They are taking advantage of the fact that most people don't understand expected value or odds of multiple independent things happening
throwawayq3423
I won't bother asking how this is legal because it's clear there are no rules to any of this stuff right now. But it's absolutely insane that as a business you can just take your 20 most unprofitable customers and then just ban them.
sbxfree
Any modicum of research will show how dangerous this is. Despite warning against addiction, sports betting websites engage in dark patterns because whales are where the money is at. Your local bookie isn't engaging in AB testing to see how long before sending you free credit promotions will bring you back to their platform.
dastbe
My cheeky answer to "how should this be regulated?" is that sports betting isn't materially different from other high-risk private investments, so it should only be available to accredited investors. Imagine if fanduels/draftkings had to verify assets and income before taking a single bet?!
gchamonlive
I think betting needs to work like credit cards. When you get a credit card the bank does a risk assessment to evaluate your line of credit and you won't be able to spend over that limit.
Well, sports betting could have the same mechanism, where you are only allowed to bet an amount proportional to your line of credit.
If the banks don't trust you to spend over that limit and honour your debt, why should betting houses be any different?
khuey
The problem is that the incentives are exactly reversed. Banks limit your credit because they don't want to lose their money. Sports betting/casinos/etc want you to place bigger bets because they want you to lose your money.
gchamonlive
[delayed]
mc3301
No. Don't make it different per person. Make it a blanket "maximum." Sure, one could just have multiple apps or accounts with multiple companies... Either way would be hard to regulate.
If we truly believe that sports betting (at this scale, at our fingertips on our phones, unlimited) is bad... trying to band-aid it won't work.
gchamonlive
I do believe the more money you have the more money you should be allowed to throw away irresponsibly. I mean, that's true for all other products...
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cortesoft
It all comes down to: there was a ton of money to be made.
firejake308
But wasn't that also true in 1979 when the ban was first put in place? Obviously, yes, money is the main force driving this country toward sports betting, but I argue that there used to be a counteracting force called morals, and the loss of that counter-force is what led us to where we are now.
wincy
My grandpa, a World War II Veteran, lived in Kansas City his whole adult life. He saw ballot measures come up over and over to legalize river boat gambling, and it failed for decades. Another initiative would always crop up a few years later.
In 1992, when the innocuously named “Proposition A” finally passed, these monstrous “riverboat casinos” were built all along the Missouri riverfront.
He said before he died, “it’s funny, once it passed, there weren’t any more votes on it”.
And that’s how this stuff becomes legal.
Sports betting is one of those things that sounds kind of harmless in the abstract, and like something that consenting adults should be allowed to do. But in practice, it causes enormous harm, both by draining the meagre resources of the people who get addicted to it, and by changing the nature of the sports in ways that make them less enjoyable for everyone who isn't betting.