How did sports betting turn into retirement funding?

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All together now — your 12-leg parlay, your fantasy football team, your Stanley Cup prop bets, or any game of chance that involves paying for a ticket, repeat these words: this is not a retirement plan.

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You — yes, you reading this right now, according to our platform’s demographics — need to start listening to the Wealthy Barber and not Tiki Barber breaking down his top fantasy picks.

Five years ago, a study in the U.S. found that more than two thirds of Millennials (and 39 per cent of Americans overall) thought that winning the lottery was a reasonable way to plan for retirement, and more than a quarter of the avocado toast generation (and 18 per cent overall) were basing their retirement on this inevitable windfall — damn those odds! By contrast, a third of the U.S. populace don’t put money in stocks or other investments because, well, it’s “too risky.” Perfectly logical thinking.

Five years on, not much has changed.

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In fact, since the federal legalization of gambling in the U.S. in 2018, it may have  got worse.

The average American household now spends more money on sports betting than it does on investing, according to two recent studies, which have yet to be peer-review. They state that for every dollar spent on sports betting, there’s a corresponding two-dollar drop in investments.

More concerning is the data collected that shows it’s financially distressed households more likely to be among those numbers, and that those states that have legalized the online sports gambling have seen higher rates of credit card debt, a 14 per cent shrinkage in long-term investments, plummeting credit scores and a jump in lottery ticket purchases.

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“Sports betting, as with all forms of gambling, is a commercial enterprise, and it’s associated with long term financial losses to people who are engaged in this,” said Dr. Luke Clark, professor in UBC’s Department of Psychology and Director of the Centre for Gambling Research.

“So with high levels of gambling, we see various financial repercussions.

In Canada, sports betting was legal, but the 2021 passing of bill C-218 — the Safe and Regulated Sports Betting Act — legalized a new segment of gambling: the single-event sports betting. This allowed same-game betting, prop bets and future bets, like Vancouver Province deputy editor Paul Chapman’s annual donation to his bookie’s coffer on the Cincinnati Bengals winning the Super Bowl.

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“That kind of faster, continuous style of in-play betting is a lot riskier,” Clark said, citing studies done in Australia and the U.K., where that has been legal for years.

“It allows gamblers to chase their losses, which is a key sign of gambling problems.”

Myriad tentacles of the coronavirus pandemic slithered into surprising areas, including the gambling arena. When B.C. casinos shut down for more than a year, Clark said there was a drop in gambling activity, but the part of the population that was gambling before migrated online, and in a big way.

“There’s, there’s a vulnerable sector, people who were already gambling quite a lot before the pandemic. Their gambling risk seemed to increase, and their gambling involvement increased,” he said. “They moved online, and that itself increases the risks in various ways as the online space is there 24/7 and there’s no monitoring for alcohol use or intoxication or whatever.”

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Bill C-218 left it up to the provinces as to how to handle their betting.

Nine provinces opted to keep the single-event betting under Crown corporations, like B.C., which operates PlayNow.com under the B.C. Lottery Corporation umbrella.

Combined with physical facilities like retail and hospitality, the BCLC said the past three years have seen revenue of $37 million (2023-24), $29 million (2022-23) and $31 million (2021-22).

The age range is between 25 and 55, mostly men, with the NFL topping the leagues bet on, followed by the NHL, NBA and MLB. And the most active single betting event currently is the 2024 U.S. presidential election, with $4.5 million wagered as of this month.

Ontario opted to open up its market to privately owned companies, and as of December 2023, there were 72 different gambling websites operated by 49 different companies.

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“And with that many operators all entering the market at once … we see this huge surge in TV ads, on social media, pitch side, during the commentary. Many different forms of marketing and advertising,” said Clark.

Since being legalized in 38 states in 2018, there’s been more than $120 billion laid in wagers; that translates to $11 billion in revenue for the companies — just in 2023.

All the major sports leagues in North America have cozied up to these sports betting giants, like DraftKings, FanDuel, Bet365 and BetMGM. Stadiums and arenas are festooned with banners and ads, and the digital realm is chock-a-block with celebrities hawking their preferred sites.

Last week, PlayNowSports was named the CFL’s official betting partner for November’s Grey Cup.

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“There’s a lot more visibility that, in itself, raises a lot of concerns about youth exposure, about normalization of gambling in sport, the idea that betting on sport is just a sort of normal part of being a fan, which is something I find very worrying,” said Clark, who recently gave the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction feedback on their report, Gambling Availability and Advertising in Canada: A Call To Action.

“And so a lot has happened in a short space of time, and we don’t have a lot of data yet on the kind of fall out of all of that.”

The indefinite suspension and punishment of Montreal Alouettes defensive lineman Shawn Lemon for wagering on two games three years ago, including one he played in, highlights one segment Clark says is at particular peril.

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“The risk demographics that are well described in the research definitely skews toward men and skews toward younger men … particularly young men who follow a sport. This includes athletes themselves,” he said. “There’s a close link between athletes, from high school sports through to the professional leagues, where we see high rates of gambling problems.

“It’s a sense that the mindset here is that betting on sports is an easy way to make money, because ‘I know about this sport.’ And that’s a very risky mindset. It’s extremely difficult to make money, to make a long term profit from sports betting.

“It’s what we’d call, in gambling, an ‘illusion of control.’ That belief that they can turn this around could really get them into a lot of difficulty.”

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NFLer turned TSN analyst Luke Willson can attest to that, having started his NFL fantasy season off 0-2 in one league, 1-1 in another. His career with the Seattle Seahawks and Detroit Lions didn’t translate into instant cash.  

But, then again, he’s not using it as a retirement plan. 

Growing up in Windsor, Ont., home of the massive Caesars Windsor casino, he remembered something his dad told him.

“One of the sayings my pops always said to me: ‘You know why casinos are so big and so nice? …. It’s from 19-year-olds coming in and (the casinos) taking all their money gambling. There’s a reason these places are (opulent) like that.”

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