Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling

Inside America's preventable sports-gambling debacle In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so. The result is the explosive growth of an industry dominated by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. One out of every five American adults gambled on sports in 2023, amounting to $121 billion, more than they spent on movies and video games combined. The rise of online sports gambling--the immediacy of betting with your phone, the ability of the companies to target users, the dynamic pricing and offers based on how good or bad of a gambler you are--has produced a public health crisis marked by addiction and far too many people, particularly young men, gambling more than they can afford to lose. Under intense lobbying from the gaming industry, states have created a system built around profit for sportsbooks, not the well-being of players. In Losing Big, historian Jonathan D. Cohen lays out the astonishing emergence of online sports gambling, from sportsbook executives drafting legislation to an addicted gambler confessing their $300,000 losses. Sports gambling is here to stay, and the stakes could not be higher. Losing Big explains how this brewing crisis came to be, and how it can be addressed before new generations get hooked. "Losing Big demonstrates how legalized sports betting became a gigantic business, a ceaselessly annoying marketing presence, and a genuine danger to hundreds of thousands of people." --Daniel Okrent, author and inventor of Rotisserie League Baseball

About the Author :
Jonathan D. Cohen is the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Senior Program Officer for American Institutions, Society, and the Public Good at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is the author of For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America as well as the co-editor of Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen, and All In: The Spread of Gambling in Twentieth-Century United States. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many other outlets. He lives in New Haven, CT.

Review :
"A brisk, informative, often sad, and occasionally amusing read." --Semafor "Fascinating and alarming reading.... If the next government is serious about gambling reform, then it should heed Cohen's advice." --Inside Story "Losing Big demonstrates how legalized sports betting became a gigantic business, a ceaselessly annoying marketing presence, and a genuine danger to thousands of people. But, even more importantly, it shows how its menacing presence in our lives is the product of the consciously dishonest manipulations of mendacious entrepreneurs and their sanctimonious and cynical partners, the professional sports leagues. It's a revealing book, and one can only hope it's not too late." --Daniel Okrent, author and inventor of Rotisserie League Baseball "Before I was a journalist, I was the Executive Director of the first government Off Track Betting Corporation in the U.S. It was sold as virtuous. Millions would be earmarked for education. We would weaken illegal bookmakers and numbers runners. I woke up when I realized how a government entity was enslaving citizens to an addiction. In his powerful, carefully reported book on the spread of sports betting to 38 states, Jonathan Cohen introduces us to gambling addicts and demonstrates that legal gambling creates a public health crisis I only glimpsed in the seventies. Cohen would not ban sports gambling, though he shows how the fervid race by professional sports teams to grow its audience can compromise the games. He offers clear-eyed ideas to build guardrails to better police what he accurately describes as a health crisis." --Ken Auletta, author and staff writer for the New Yorker "A timely account of the aggressive rise of online sports betting in the United States and the considerable human consequences of its predatory marketing and addictive app interfaces." --Natasha Schull, author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas