Americans are expected to legally wager more money on Sunday’s Super Bowl than any game in U.S. history — $1.8 billion, the American Gaming Association predicts.
Considering sports gambling’s phenomenal, unrelenting growth (New Yorkers wagered $545 million over a recent week, setting a revenue record for a state that legalized bookmaking four years ago) and the fact that more states continue to come on board (as Missouri did in December), odds are every Super Bowl will set a gambling record for the foreseeable future.
But from a betting perspective, what’s most remarkable about the Super Bowl is how unremarkable it’s become. An alarming share of Americans now bet on every game like it’s The Big Game. It would be as though fans started buying six-foot subs, seven-layer dips, and 30-packs of beer every time they watched sports.
Many psychologists and gambling counselors believe this level of year-round binge betting is a recipe for trouble. As I report in my new book, “Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling,” some current and former sportsbook employees share that fear.
The way sportsbooks coax customers into placing so many bad bets is like “leading sheep to slaughter,” said Matthew Davidow, a former executive at Huddle, which provides betting odds to sportsbooks. (I once visited his home office in Denver, where Davidow had the weighty responsibility of updating Huddle’s Super Bowl odds in real time while watching the game.)
“The current situation is terrible for society,” he added. “My issue isn’t that people are allowed to bet. It’s that the odds are terrible, so people’s chance to lose is way higher than it should be.”
The Super Bowl used to be noteworthy for allowing fans to wager on a wide variety of propositions, or “props,” within the game. This originated in 1986, when the sportsbook manager at Caesars Palace, Art Manteris, decided to spice things up ahead of a lopsided Super Bowl matchup between the Chicago Bears and New England Patriots by taking bets on whether Bears defensive lineman William “Refrigerator” Perry would plow the ball in for a touchdown, as the 330-pounder sometimes did.
Over time, sportsbooks began offering just about every Super Bowl prop imaginable — whether a certain receiver will have more than 17 yards in the second half, which team will punt more and so on — but the rest of the year, props remained a sideshow, not the main draw.
There is momentum to rein in prop betting, though mainly because player-specific props are ripe for corruption.
That has changed now that roughly 95% of bets are placed online, allowing sportsbooks to offer thousands of props for every NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL matchup, and about two dozen states allow a similar level of prop betting on college sports. One of the most popular ways to bet now involves stacking combinations of props together to form “same-game parlays,” which pay more if all components of the bet are successful, but result in a loss if even one leg of the bet goes wrong.
Traditionally, sportsbooks made about $5 for every $100 wagered. But the house edge is greater for props and considerably greater for parlays. “Not to be condescending,” Nik Bonaddio, a former head of product at FanDuel, told me, “but I think maybe 5% of people understand that.” Most customers assume winning one parlay will make up for all their losers, except sportsbooks are collecting as much as $30 for every $100 wagered on parlays.
For Bonaddio, the biggest moneymaker for FanDuel and its competitors brought to mind a job he once had as a software engineer for a military subcontractor. He was cryptic about the details, but basically he was helping make warships more lethal. “I had ambivalence about that,” he recalled, because he wanted U.S. troops to be safe and victorious, but he also had reservations about helping them crush the enemy.
Annihilating customers with parlays felt similar.
For the Super Bowl, unsophisticated bettors tend to get carried away betting on props to go “over,” since it’s easier, and more fun, to imagine players succeeding than failing. As a result, sportsbooks often give the house a steeper edge on “overs,” assuming these casual customers won’t even notice that the payouts are skimpier.
That same bias is exploited year-round when sportsbooks set odds for so-called microbets, a growing segment of the business that allows customers to bet on the outcome of each play or possession, such as whether a football drive will end in a score or punt.
I discussed this in 2024 with Mark Nerenberg, then the chief operating officer of the microbetting vendor Simplebet. Shortly after we spoke, his company was acquired by DraftKings for an undisclosed sum.
Sportsbooks “shade” the odds, he explained, so bets on positive outcomes pay out less. As he put it, “You’re kind of taxing the casuals.”
I noted that someone willing to bet, say, $50 before the game might bet $10 10 times if given the chance to bet on so many props throughout the game.
“That’s the goal,” Nerenberg said.
I also raised this with Dr. Joshua Grubbs, a clinical psychologist at the University of New Mexico who had been studying the behaviors of sports bettors. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I don’t think that prop bets and in-play betting should be allowed at all. I understand that’s often the most exciting and fun bet for some people. It’s also got the highest risk. We don’t sell 200-proof pure ethanol to people so they can get drunk faster. There’s lots of things that are quote-unquote ‘more fun’ that we regulate because the dangers are too high.”
Projected Super Bowl wagering this year is even higher than $1.8 billion after accounting for prediction markets.
There is momentum to rein in prop betting, though mainly because player-specific props are ripe for corruption. NCAA President Charlie Baker supports a ban on all player props involving college athletes. Baker signed a bill legalizing bookmaking as one of his final acts as governor of Massachusetts, but has since said he wishes “sports betting had just stayed in Las Vegas.”
After two pitchers on the Cleveland Guardians were arrested last summer for allegedly fixing microbets, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said, “The prop betting experiment in this country has failed badly.” More recently, citing evidence that bettors, especially young men, are “spending money that they do not have,” the Republican said signing a sports betting bill was his biggest mistake in office.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, recently said he would propose a bill to “heavily regulate” prop betting. The gambling industry says restricting props would drive more customers to bet through the black market.
In addition to street bookies and offshore websites taking Americans’ bets without a license, prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket exploded last year, mainly by letting people bet on sports even where bookmaking is illegal, since these platforms claim they are allowing investors to trade on event contracts, rather than gamble, even if the user experience is almost indistinguishable. FanDuel and DraftKings have also launched prediction markets, which reportedly plan to offer “combos” on the Super Bowl — that sounds an awful lot like parlays.
Projected Super Bowl wagering this year is even higher than $1.8 billion after accounting for prediction markets. Peak season in the American sports gambling calendar has typically stretched from the NFL playoffs through college basketball’s March Madness. Now, DraftKings says its average customer bets roughly $1,000 every month. Gamblers may be prone to irrational spending, but as they risk so much, so often, on bets that give the house such a massive edge, there’s a growing sense that eventually customers will either wise up or go bust.
“At some point, you break your customers by beating them too fast, and the next thing you know, the experience is not fun,” said Alfonso Straffon, a longtime gambling industry analyst. “It’s not entertainment if you’re beating people to a pulp.”
