The House Always Wins: How America Built a Generation of Gamblers, Wired the Thrill of Sport to the Logic of Addiction
U.S. News ı By Rochdi Rais
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After Murphy, companies like DraftKings and FanDuel poured hundreds of millions of dollars into marketing. They signed celebrities — comedian Kevin Hart, former Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski — for campaigns that made betting feel like something the cool and the athletic did casually, between games, as a form of enhanced spectatorship. "There was just this blitz of advertisements that particularly appealed to younger people," Nower told reporters in late 2025. The sign-up bonuses were generous. The interfaces were sleek. The language of risk was carefully managed: it was not "gambling" but "gaming," not "losing" but "coming up short."
Multiple lawsuits filed against DraftKings and FanDuel in 2024 and 2025 allege that both platforms used personalized algorithms to identify users showing signs of addiction — and then, rather than intervening, sent them targeted promotions, gambling credits, and assigned "VIP Managers" who offered tailored incentives to continue betting. Users who demonstrated control or consistent success, according to the legal complaints, were often deprioritized from these programs.
The complaint language is clinical but the implication is stark: the platforms appear to have been designed, at some level of organizational intent, to identify their most vulnerable users and apply pressure at the exact moment of maximum fragility.
The lawsuit filed in 2025 by the City of Baltimore against DraftKings and FanDuel accused both companies of violating the city's Consumer Protection Ordinance by "exploiting vulnerable users who they knew were showing signs of gambling addiction." Since Maryland legalized mobile sports betting in 2021, the complaint noted, the state had seen an explosion in online wagering — particularly in urban centers like Baltimore. In fiscal year 2024 alone, Maryland residents wagered over five billion dollars on sportsbooks.
What made the apps particularly effective — and particularly dangerous — was a feature called the parlay bet. A parlay requires a bettor to correctly predict the outcomes of multiple games simultaneously; the odds are longer, the potential payout higher, and the house edge dramatically steeper. In 2018, seventeen percent of sports bettors placed parlay wagers. By 2024, that figure had nearly doubled, to thirty percent. Sports bettors who favor parlays are, the research suggests, among the most likely to develop disordered gambling behavior. They are also, from the industry's perspective, among its most lucrative customers.
"What I was doing was checking scores and putting in more bets, things of that sort. I would be up at all hours of the night — betting on this sport, that sport, sports in other countries that I knew nothing about."— Adam, 26, as reported by NHPR, December 2025
The apps introduced another significant innovation: live, in-play betting. Rather than placing a wager before a game begins, a bettor could now bet on what would happen in the next minute, the next drive, the next at-bat. Research has consistently found that in-play betting correlates strongly with gambling severity and impulsivity — it compresses the feedback loop between stimulus and response in ways that more closely resemble a slot machine than a sports bet. The industry knew this. It sold it as a feature.
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