Rob Minnick grew up in South Jersey near Philadelphia—where people care a lot about their sports teams, he says. In high school, his get-togethers often centered around a sporting event like watching the Philadelphia 76ers. So, once he and his friends found out about daily fantasy sports, it became a natural addition.

“It was: ‘Hey, let’s put all the money that we have from working our high school jobs and let’s go and gamble on sports,’” Minnick remembers.

He wasn’t exactly new to fantasy sports, since he had played since he was 13, but back then a game took 17 weeks rather than just the few hours it does now. “It was a much, much quicker timeline,” he says.

Soon, Minnick’s sports betting started to diverge from that of his friends. While they would place their bets for the 7 p.m. game and then go home to bed after the results came in around 10 p.m., Minnick continued to place bets on the later games played on the West Coast and then would stay up very late awaiting the results, even though he knew little about those teams and cared even less about them. 

When he moved to college in 2017, things got worse. He had started using Bovada, an offshore gambling app that operated in a legal gray zone at the time. An online bookie extended Minnick a line of credit and would track his wins and losses, sending him a Venmo payment or request for funds depending on the situation. Eventually Minnick placed a large bet on a March Madness game and he lost.

He spent the next couple of weeks trying to extend his credit line and gambling more to recoup his losses. His efforts failed. 

He says he prefers not to say exactly how much he lost, but admitted it took three months of working part-time on campus and then working full-time at home to eventually recoup it.

At the time, “I had to tell my family, like, ‘hey, I lost all this money gambling,” Minnick says.

Sports betting legalization spurs massive growth

Minnick began betting on sports before it was legalized and took effect in New Jersey in 2018. In recent years, there has been a massive growth in legalized sports betting.

It became far more ubiquitous after the 2018 Supreme Court decision deeming the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act unconstitutional. Sports betting is now legal in 39 states and Washington, D.C. It is currently operational in all but one of those states, according to industry group the American Gaming Association.

“It was going on to some extent, but now it’s being institutionalized and professionalized,” Senator Dick Durbin said during a recent hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Lots of gambling was happening, but it wasn’t in this much more formal way that they can do it quickly from their phone,” says Michelle L. Malkin, director of The Gambling Research & Policy Initiative at East Carolina University. “Literally people could be wagering every single minute of a game in some sort of way.”

Sports betting companies “nudge” college students, says Alison Wood, youth prevention coordinator for the North Carolina Problem Gambling Program. A college student may see sports betting, then sign up for an app and then they start to get push notifications and promotions where, “’Hey, we are going to give you X amount of money up front for you to come and gamble with us for free,’ and they [gambling operators] use these promotions as a way to keep people engaged and moving forward with the sports betting,” Wood says.

A 2023 survey of 3,527 18 to 22-year-olds, with about half studying at institutions, by the National Collegiate Athletics Association found that sports wagering is widespread in this population. Fifty-eight percent noted they had participated in at least one sports betting activity with 4% of them betting daily. About six percent of those participating in sports betting reported losing more than $500 in a single day. Additionally, 27.5% of students have bet using a mobile app or website.

Part of the risk to college students and emerging adults is the ability to bet on amateur sports, says Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. “In America, so much of our sports is college.” 

A survey by the group found that “one of the biggest predictive factors for betting on sports is your involvement in higher education,” Whyte says. “It’s so granular that graduate students spend more than undergrads and undergrads on campus bet sports more than folks who commute to school.” 

This generation is “being bombarded by increased advertising” about sports betting—including by celebrities such as Jamie Foxx—but they don’t necessarily have the tools to understand the risks and rewards of gambling in a balanced way, Whyte says. 

Malkin agreed that 18 to 24-year-olds are the most at risk right now “because there’s just been no outreach and education” to them. 

There is no federal funding for research on problem gambling and colleges are not doing enough, Whyte says. “By and large, government and specifically state government is kind of turning a blind eye.”

Gambling provides a source of revenue for state governments. There was $1.08 billion in state gaming tax revenue generated across the nation for the first 10 months of 2024, says Dara Cohen, senior director of media relations at the American Gaming Association. The state gaming tax revenue goes back into programs like education, conservation and community efforts, she says.

However, Whyte argues that states have been unable to sufficiently fund programs to address problem gambling, prevention, treatment and research on their own and need federal support. Also, regulation on gambling at the state level is pretty minimal, he says.

The ‘science’ behind sports betting

One of the risks for developing a gambling problem is thinking that you know the game better than others, “believing that your skill is going to allow you to triumph over logic and luck,” Whyte says. 

“There’s a science behind sports gambling, in terms of the strategy and why certain strategies are chosen because it’s a way to make money,” says Wood, from the North Carolina Problem Gambling Program.

For example, the way some skill-based games operate creates “skill-based confusion,” she says. The way the games are designed and the way they’re marketed “increases people’s perception that they have control.”

Signs of problem gambling, according to National Council on Problem Gambling, are: 

• Thinking often about gambling. 

• Feeling that you must bet more money more often.

• “Chasing losses” by trying to win back money lost. 

• Feeling out of control. 

In addition to financial harms, there are also emotional harms including depression, stress and anxiety, says NCPG’s Whyte. Anxiety may stem from a feeling of having to win the next bet or not knowing how you’ll cover what you lost, Whyte says. 

“There’s a tangled cluster of co-existing disorders,” he explains. For example, anxiety, stress and depression can either be symptoms or causes of a gambling disorder.

Alcohol use and abuse and substance use and abuse are also “heavily correlated or co-occurring” with gambling addiction, Whyte says. We need to be looking at this as a mental health problem, Wood says.

People who engage at dangerous levels experience deeper levels of stress and isolation, Wood says. 

Is sports betting that leads to problematic behaviors increasing on college campuses? We don’t know, although anecdotally it appears it is, Whyte says.

But one of the biggest “surprises” in all of this is that most states that have legalized sports betting are not surveying the public or surveying college students about it, Whyte says.

The NCAA and the National Council on Problem Gambling have done surveys, but the federal government does not provide any funding for surveys and research, Whyte says. We tend to talk about the risk of problem gambling—not the rate—because nobody—not the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—is tracking the rate, Whyte says.

Building awareness at college

While colleges are doing some education about sports betting for athletes, most colleges offer no outreach to students about gambling. They don’t screen students the way they do around drugs and alcohol, Malkin says. Very few colleges can treat a student for gambling disorder either, she added.  

Malkin, who researches gambling behavior risk, gambling-related harms and gambling disorder, is developing a college student curriculum on responsible gambling and problem gambling and is piloting it at two schools in North Carolina. She hopes to make it more widely available next summer. 

Her curriculum—delivered by peer educators—includes several modules on: How to gamble in a healthy way by ensuring you’re only gambling with money you can afford to lose, not “chasing losses,” setting time limits and never gambling alone; fitting gambling into a budget; and how to recognize the signs of problem gambling either for oneself or someone you care about. 

One of the biggest things students need education about is budgeting, Malkin says, so they can identify how much money they should use to gamble. Hint: Malkin says it’s about the cost of a movie out.

“What we see with young people is they’ll take the money their parents gave them for their meals, and they’ll gamble that away,” she says.

To pay his parents back the money they loaned him to pay off his gambling debt, Minnick worked two jobs over eight months. But he didn’t exactly come to terms with the fact that sports betting and gambling was impacting him in a negative way. So, he kept doing it.

“In the mind of a problem gambler is like, everything’s fine. I’ll take care of this. This is just a bad string of luck, right?”

He decided to do a semester abroad in Australia. After landing in Sydney, he went straight to a nearby casino. He gambled there often. When Covid hit, he had to return home where he received government stimulus checks which he used for betting, he says. 

“It was just win loss, win loss, ending up in debt, borrowing, lying about why I’m borrowing—just the same cycle,” he says. He went into debt again and worked a second job. 

Finally, when he was 21, he was able to fully recognize that he had a problem and decided to seek help through Gamblers Anonymous, he says.

These days Minnick, 25, spends his time creating content on his YouTube channel and his other social media. Originally, he hoped to share his personal experience along with resources and information about gambling disorder with others who may be at risk of developing a problem. The groups that are working to provide outreach to problem gamblers don’t see social media as a “viable means of outreach yet,” he says, which he is working to change.

But he soon realized that most of his audience is not yet ready to quit gambling. He hopes the content he creates will at least help them to see they’re not the only person with this problem and possibly create some motivation to change, he says.

“They need that early seed planted that this could become a problem,” he says. When betting started to feel like a problem for him, he didn’t know where to go to get any help until it became really bad. He hopes his outreach can serve as an “early intervention.” 

He doesn’t like to share how much debt he ultimately fell into but admitted in a YouTube video that his net losses were in the range of five to six years of a U.S. salary and that he felt behind his peers financially.

What happens when you talk about the dollar amounts you’ve lost, “someone like that’s 20-years-old right now hears that I lost X amount of money, they’ll say: ‘Oh, he lost more than me, so he’s addicted and I’m not.’”

Starting young

There should be a gambling curriculum for younger students too, Malkin says. There is an older curriculum, Stacked Deck, for middle schoolers and some high school students that needs to be updated, she says, but that focuses on gambling education. However, few schools use it.

According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, children and teens are at higher risk than adults for developing a gambling problem. Also, those who start gambling at younger ages are more likely to develop a gambling problem later.

A lot of young people, especially males, are already gambling with their family members on sports, Malkin says, and sports betting apps often resemble gaming apps. Sometimes a parent will ask their young child, who has experience gaming, to help them gamble on an app.

If the parent then wins, it can lead a child to think it’s a great way to make money and that they are good at it, Malkin says. Then that young person may start to experience gambling-related harms at younger ages, she says.

There’s also a close correlation between video gaming and gambling behaviors, Malkin says. For example, young people who play video games can buy a loot box or video box in hopes of getting something helpful in the game.

Wood points to a “blurring” of gambling and gaming. “Sports betting has been gamified to create that enjoyment and desire to continue,” she says. Some people have even become confused by what gambling is especially with skill-based gambling, she says, that makes you feel like you’re playing a game. 

It is important to teach young people about media literacy—the ability to critically analyze media messages, she says. Social media is a place where kids are learning about sports betting and are getting reached, Wood says.

It’s also about “grooming kids. It’s about, accessibility. It’s about the way that it’s marketed,” she adds.

The American Gaming Association has two codes of conduct that it requires its members, which include most major sports betting companies, to honor. One of them, AGA Responsible Marketing Code for Sports Wagering, promises to adhere to the legal age of sports betting in the state, limit advertising on university and college campuses and support responsible gaming practices for example eliminating the phrase “risk free” in messages about sports wagering and offering no messages that entice underage individuals to participate in sports betting.

AGA has many guidelines in place to avoid marketing to underage children, Cohen says.

“If anyone underage is using legal apps in the legal, regulated market, they are proxy betting using a parent’s account or that of another older family member or friend.  That is illegal,” Cohen says. She also says that the “claim that problem gambling is increasing or ‘soaring’ is not supported by comprehensive evidence.” 

The Responsible Online Gaming Association, an independent trade association founded by some of the industry’s legal online gaming companies, recently announced the creation of a national college responsible gaming education campaign. 

The curriculum is still being finalized, but the association’s executive director, Jennifer Shatley, says in a statement: “Responsible gaming principles can help this age group set realistic expectations and see gaming as a form of entertainment not a way to make money.” Her statement also says the program will address myths and misperceptions around gaming and the “illusion of control.” 

The efforts sports betting and gambling operators are making in this area—such as encouraging customers to set limits and promoting problem gambling helplines—are good, Whyte says. Anyone who runs a gambling business has an obligation to minimize harms. “Could they do more? Of course,” he says.

But what he really wants to see happen is the passage of the Gambling Addiction, Recovery, Investment, and Treatment Act which would require the federal government to support state health efforts on gambling in the same way it supports state health efforts on alcohol, tobacco and other diseases and disorders. If passed, it would take half of the tax on every sports bet and put it back to a fund at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services which would then spread the funds out to federal agencies that would provide grant funds to states, colleges and tribes.

There’s a precedent for the legislation, Whyte says, because a “good chunk” of alcohol and tobacco excise taxes go back into prevention, treatment and research.

“They have to start putting some of that money back into gambling addiction, prevention, treatment and research,” Whyte says of the government. 

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Today Minnick is in recovery. He placed his last sports bet in Nov. 2022, he says.

In a YouTube video he described how he is focusing on delaying gratification and being productive, and that he is becoming happy with what he has.

“At this point, any temptation to go and gamble, it just feels like I could find a better alternative,” he says.