The Legalized Gambling Free-for-All
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In high school, he and his friends used to gamble on Tunk, a card game. New York legalized sports gambling last month. He spent his 20s playing poker. He wrote an essay about it in 2010. It was bad. The essay is titled "Gambling hollows you out and melts down all your ambitions and plans." It's possible that some of his New Yorkers friends will get addicted to gambling.
There is a significant increase in young pathological gamblers since the legalization of online gambling. Sports gambling is ubiquitously popular even before the apps. Billions of dollars are bet on the Super Bowl every year. ESPN estimates that under-the-table bets on N.F.L. and college football games alone exceed $95 billion per year, but only a portion of those bets were taken in Las Vegas before broad legalization.
There is an increase in gambling content on social media. People have collected sports cards, traded volatile stocks and bet on the N.F.L. for generations. Today, the pretense of responsible gambling or investment has been dropped. The past five years have seen an explosion in sports-betting content. It has coincided with an increased interest in cryptocurrencies, sports memorabilia and trading cards market and the advent of Robinhood. There is almost no federal oversight of any of these ads. In the past week, a bettor turned $20 into over half a million when he bet the exact final scores of the championship games.
