“You’re putting money aside,” says Dr. Marc Potenza, a professor of psychiatry at Yale and director of the university’s addiction research division. “Some people, when they win that money, they put it back in.”
Dr. Potenza said research showed that men — who are traditionally more interested in strategic forms of gambling, such as sports betting — were more prone to developing gambling problems, but women who did develop them were more likely to develop problems, called a dynamic telescoping.
This moment of boom for the gambling industry, with few government restrictions on marketing promotions, has seen many ups and downs. At industry conferences my colleagues and I attended this year, some gambling company representatives urged regulators to trust them and provide flexibility, so as one Bet MGM responsible betting employee put it: “Learning and identify what is harmful, what is not harmful.”
While my patterns on the sites became intensely concentrated within a few days, sometimes well into the night, they all resulted in me generally making money off the platforms. The companies even offered me new offers, and especially when I delayed my bet or cashed out my winnings. Sometimes those offers were effective in drawing me back in.
“You cleaned us up for $1,442,” said Chris Jones, vice president of communications for FanDuel, referring to my first $900 bet with FanDuel, on the Orioles to beat the Red Sox. “For someone who doesn’t like it, you did pretty well,” he said, reminding me of the company’s tools for setting limits on your own bets.
By the end of the four days I had bet on that app, I had won $1,088.03.
“We obviously want our customers to be involved,” said Mr. Jones. “But we don’t want our customers to be on their phones all night.”
My favorite kind of bet, on which I placed hundreds on different platforms during the experiment, was a live bet on the total number of runs in baseball: while a game was in progress, I didn’t bet on winners and losers, just whether the combined score above or below a certain number.
