A Modest Proposal to Rein in Sports Gambling 

It’s no secret that online sports gambling is a serious problem, draining the coffers and harming the prospects of young men. It’s also no secret that politicians are disinclined to crack down on it. No one wants to be a Puritan killjoy, and politicians are wary of antagonizing the millions of voters who engage in sports gambling. The result is a paralyzing stasis: the industry gets bigger and more harmful while our elected leaders seem helpless to do anything about it. 

But what if there was a popular, populist, light-touch solution to this problem—a solution that reined in sports gambling while also striking a note of freedom and non-discrimination? As it turns out, there is. The solution is this: Congress should mandate that sportsbooks not discriminate and treat all customers on equal terms. The dirty little secret of sportsbooks is that they radically limit bets from those whom they know to be savvy gamblers, because savvy gamblers can spot inefficient betting lines and take the sportsbooks for big money over time.  

The statistician Nate Silver, for example, has written about how he can’t place anywhere near as large a bet as the average Joe because the sportsbooks know that they could easily lose money to someone of his caliber. If Congress required sportsbooks to treat all customers equally, the sportsbooks would probably scale back or close shop entirely because they couldn’t afford a world where they suffer heavy losses from savvy gamblers like Silver. This could be an effective and politically feasible way to rein in sports gambling, because it would not rely on perceived nanny-state regulation, but rather, on a more crowd-pleasing view that customers should be treated equally.    

The Disturbing Rise of Online Sports Gambling 

The rise of online sports gambling is a familiar story. In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a 1992 federal law that banned sports gambling in most states. In a world of ubiquitous smartphones, the Supreme Court’s decision set off a gold rush of online sports gambling. Online platforms like DraftKings and FanDuel became household names, offering a bewildering array of sports bets to consumers nationwide.  

As Charles Fain Lehman wrote for the Institute for Family Studies, the result has been a social “disaster.” Online sports gambling is estimated to increase the risk of bankruptcy by 25 to 30 percent. For downscale Americans in particular, it increases credit card debt by 8 percent, increases the risk of bank overdrafts by 24 percent, and reduces household investment tremendously—every dollar spent on sports gambling reduces household investment by two dollars. One study even found that legalizing online sports gambling led to a nine percent increase in domestic violence. And sports gambling is disproportionately concentrated among young men, who are already falling behind young women in terms of education, income, and independence. For those concerned about family formation, the financial and social drag of sports gambling does not bode well for marriage rates or the number of marriageable men. 

Even for Americans who are successfully married with children, online sports gambling can have insidious effects. In a recent tragicomic article for The Atlantic titled “Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Gambler,” McKay Coppins details a year he spent engaging in online sports gambling as a social experiment. As he wrote, the casino-in-his-pocket was so alluring and addictive that it crowded out time with family: 

Point spreads and moneylines ran constantly through my head, mingling with the omnipresent Christmas carols to create a strange backbeat to the holiday season. Every festive family outing became an opportunity for me to gamble. While my wife and kids ice-skated, I sat in the minivan, our toddler napping in his car seat, as I put together a six-game parlay (lost $80). While my daughter practiced for a Christmas choir performance, I stayed outside the church, chewing my fingernails as I watched a Chiefs-Chargers game on my phone (lost $400). 

It’s possible that Coppins was exaggerating his level of distraction for the sake of good copy, but it’s also possible (even likely) that he was faithfully recording the effect of online sports gambling. And if a religious, highly educated father of four like Coppins can be driven to distraction by sports gambling, then what chance does a vulnerable downscale young man have? 

Finally, online sports gambling tarnishes sports themselves. In a memorable New York Times article in 2024, the journalist Dana O’Neil chronicled the story of Carson Barrett, a benchwarmer at Purdue University who was able to get onto the court at the very end of the Boilermakers’ first round NCAA Tournament game and drain a three-pointer in garbage time. In a non-gambling world, it would have been a feel-good, Rudy-like story of a struggling athlete’s fleeting moment of success. But Barrett’s three-pointer allowed the Boilermakers to cover their 26.5-point spread for the game, thus costing money for anyone who bet against Purdue. The result was that Barrett was flooded with a torrent of online insults and even calls for physical violence by disgruntled bettors. As the article explains, these sorts of threats have become commonplace. 

Yet despite all these negative effects of online sports gambling, political leaders have done little or nothing to rein it in. As the family scholar Brad Wilcox recently noted, Republicans have gone all-in on the “vice economy,” catering to libertine young men who enjoy their drugs, porn, crypto speculation, and sports gambling. And Democrats, stung by their losses among young men in the 2024 election, don’t seem enthusiastic about cracking down on vice either. These political calculations are perfectly understandable, but they create a situation where online sports gambling goes more or less unchecked. 

Reining in Sports Gambling through Non-Discrimination Law 

If heavy-handed bans and regulations are a political non-starter, then it’s time to consider more creative solutions to online sports gambling. And as previewed above, one of the most attractive solutions would be simply to require that sportsbooks treat all customers alike. Instead of drastically limiting bets from savvy sports bettors, sportsbooks would need to accept the same size and type of bets from all comers. (I’m not the first to propose this solution. The socially conservative economist Lyman Stone floated it in a Substack post last year.)  

Requiring sportsbooks to treat all customers alike could lead to one of three outcomes. First, sportsbooks might simply close shop, unable to absorb a steady stream of losses from savvy gamblers. This would be a social win. Second, sportsbooks might scale back their operations, limiting all customers the way they currently limit savvy gamblers. This would also be a social win. Third, sportsbooks might be able to absorb losses from savvy gamblers without substantially changing their business model. This would be the least appealing of the three outcomes, but it would still be a mild social win. It would take some of the profits away from the sportsbooks, thus limiting their ability to grow and expand. 

And because this legislative proposal traffics in fairness and equality instead of nanny-state regulation, it may be politically feasible in ways that other regulations aren’t. Everyone likes the idea that customers should be treated equally. For example, after the stock-trading platform Robinhood curtailed trading by retail investors in an effort to blunt big price swings, Senator Josh Hawley made political hay out of Robinhood’s perceived discrimination. As Hawley put it, savvy retail investors should be able to make money by exploiting price swings, even if it hurts major Wall Street players. Sound familiar? The same populist logic says that savvy sports bettors should be allowed to make money off sportsbooks, and it’s unfair for the sportsbooks to block this competition.  

The fairness rationale becomes even more compelling given The New York Times’ September 2026 article about how online sportsbooks are using data science to specifically target losing gamblers, plying them with targeted promotions to increase their losses. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the sportsbooks are acting like classic bullies, picking on the weak and vulnerable while avoiding the stronger gamblers who could pose a real threat. Again, a politically pleasing solution is requiring the sportsbooks to accept a fair fight from stronger gamblers. And if this causes the sportsbooks to shrink or die off—well, that’s the free market at work. 

In many social areas, there’s a tension between social conservatives who wish to promote the common good and social liberals who wish to maximize freedom. Untrammeled freedom and stifling regulation both have their downsides, and walking the line between the two can be hard. But every so often, you come across an issue where the social conservative impulse and the liberal impulse are aligned. And so it is with sports gambling and my proposed solution. Requiring sportsbooks to treat all customers alike would satisfy liberal values of nondiscrimination and freedom while satisfying the socially conservative impulse to rein in a destructive industry.   

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