Childhood memories, presented by DraftKings

Analyzing sports betting in problem gambling forums

I remember sitting in our living room with my dad when I was 8, hanging on every word of the Cincinnati Reds broadcast on AM radio. Through the 162 game season my mood would mirror the announcer’s excitement or disgust at the end of the game. Each season there were only about 20 commercials that aired on the channel, so we got to know those well too. One in particular was for Kahn’s hot dogs, which the voiceover praised as “lightly spiced, so you can taste the meat!” My dad and I got a kick out of that one, and I can still hear the jingle 25 years later.

Now as a 33 year old, I don’t follow the Reds so closely but I often listen to sports podcasts as I’m walking or falling asleep. Even though I am much less focused on it today than I was as a child, it’s impossible not to notice that sports betting now entirely underwrites the sports media ecosystem. If you turn on a sports podcast or ESPN you’ll almost certainly come across ads for FanDuel or DraftKings and hear the on-air personalities discuss betting lines and odds.

It makes sense: in 2018 the US Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting, and since then states have been opening up to sports betting. There’s good money in being a legal bookie; FanDuel parent company Flutter is approaching a $50B market cap:

I don’t find myself drawn to it, but at least half of my male¹ friends regularly bet on games. Not just the outcome but more exotic bets like over/unders on points, individual player performance, and of course parlays, which combine several different events into one low-probability, high-payoff bet, which is more dramatic for the bettor and more profitable for the sportsbook:

WSJ article on the rise of parlays, January 25th, 2025

The universal sentiment from my friends is that gambling makes watching sports more fun — it ratchets up the intensity so that it is exciting to watch an unremarkable midseason NBA game on a Tuesday night. This makes sense to me; I often have sports on in the background but find myself drawn away by the more dopaminergic activity of scrolling through my phone, a viewership experience that is not very satisfying. It would be fun to have something that made me more focused on games. And to my knowledge none of my friends gamble in a way that is problematic for them; betting on sports just seems like another entertainment line item, like paying for HBO.

But, as I skip through another DraftKings ad, I can’t help but think of 8 year old Joe, whose life revolved around baseball and who consumed any media about the Reds he could get his hands on. It feels off to me, to have this vice so tightly integrated with sports which are so many kids’ first obsessions.

Analyzing Reddit Problem Gambling Forum Posts

I wanted to try to understand a bit about the downsides of the massive growth of sports betting, so I analyzed ~60 thousand posts from the 3 biggest subreddit forums related to the topic: r/problemgambling, r/GamblingAddiction, and r/GamblingRecovery. It was heartbreaking to read some of these accounts, and I think it’s important to recognize the cost of enabling gambling at such a large scale.

I’ll preface this by noting that this is a much heavier topic than I usually cover on this generally whimsical data newsletter², and I feel underqualified to write about it in depth — if you’re a researcher or journalist who is interested in this data please reach out. These were my impressions from analyzing the data at a high level.

Mostly Men and Mostly Young

Often people will start a reddit post with their age and gender — for example, “I (19m) have hit rock bottom. For the last year or I have been gambling, usually starting with 20 dollar bets, then losing, then chasing my losses…”

The people who reported their gender were 80% male (and many of the posts I saw from people identifying as female were asking for help with a significant other’s gambling problem).

It’s startling to me to see how many of these posts are from college-aged kids. The forums are international, but the legal age to gamble in casinos or on sportsbook apps in US states tends to be 18 or 21 and many of the posters are clustered around these ages:

I’m sure this largely reflects the demographics of Reddit, but it is really awful to see 19 year old kids who are devastated by this stuff.

Sports are a significant and growing topic in these subreddits

Below are counts of posts with some common terms in these subreddits, to try to understand a rough relative frequency of different topics. Sports comes up frequently in these posts; I was surprised to see it at double the frequency of blackjack.

It seems like the frequency of people posting about sports and associated terms grew until 2023 and was relatively steady in 2024. It is tough to say for sure but I think 2023 was the first year that advertisements for sportsbooks were entirely pervasive on the podcasts I listen to.

DraftKings and FanDuel are mentioned in fewer than 1% of posts but have grown substantially and the magnitude is still hundreds of people explicitly posting about them in these forums alone. I think I feel particularly gross about these companies because they are tech companies, run by smart, well-to-do people who employ all the same growth tactics that the big social media companies do.

This is an example of a post about these sportsbooks opening up in Maryland. It seems to me like the marketing and ease of use of these platforms brings in a lot of people who would otherwise never have gambled, and then some small percentage of these people end up having problems with gambling:

I’m a 26yo female. Engaged with 2 kids. Well I was engaged. I started online gambling about 1-2 years ago. It started when FanDuel and DraftKings became legal in Maryland. Started placing bets multiple times a day. I then started to get into online casinos like pulsz and chumba. Spending hundreds and even thousands a day. I feel like I’m so far gone I don’t know what to do.

- Post in r/problemgambling

I guess the societal question is “how much misery are we willing to accept in exchange for a lot of people getting to have fun betting on sports and a few people getting rich off the platforms they do it on?” This is the same question we have to ask ourselves about alcohol and drugs and any other thing with mixed outcomes, and I don’t know what the answer is.

But I know that I am glad that when I was 8 and listening to the Reds I couldn’t have told you what a parlay was.

Again, if you’re a journalist or researcher interested in this topic please reach out to me, I think it’s important. There’s a lot more that was interesting to me, especially crypto’s pervasiveness as a means of accessing online casinos and as a way to gamble in the markets. Or if you or someone you know are struggling with this, I’m pulling for you; maybe these resources are a good starting point.

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If you could use something happy now and you like beautiful swings or father-son relationships, I encourage you to watch this clip of Ken Griffey Jr. hitting his 500th home run and celebrating with his family:

In other news, there was raucous (borderline rabid) excitement to my soft launch of “Read with Joe” last week (real name to be determined) — so if you’re looking for a book, I am re-reading Brave New World, which I enjoyed in high school and seems useful to revisit as a model for post-AI society. I had forgotten that the supreme leader in the book is Ford, which is a little on the nose as a parallel to today. If you’re in New York and reading it we can get coffee and discuss!

1. It’s clear in advertising that sportsbooks are working hard to expand their market beyond men; will be interesting to see how effective that is.

2. These are entirely my views and not those of my employer