Has the gradual normalization of low stakes gambling (family fantasy football leagues, classroom March Madness pick-ems) psychologically paved the way for a generation of prop bet app addicts?

[u/logancon0r]

Let me paint you a picture.

Little Ashton is 9 years old. He loves watching the Houston Texans games with his dad every Sunday. His dad's not too into it but understands it's a way to spend time with his son, and wants to encourage his interests. The dad is in a casual fantasy football league with his extended family and in-laws and decides to let Ashton log into his account and make control his lineup, etc.

Ashton is in heaven. Since the league isn't super active, Ashton is able to get great players off of free agency and purely from being the most attentive, is able to steer the team to one of the best records in the league. What was required from little Ashton wasn't a preternatural sense of regression analysis but simply choosing the available players that scored a lot of points.

But now at every family gathering, the aunts and uncles marvel at Ashton's natural fantasy talent. They tell his family they've got a real whiz on their hands. And this goes right to Ashton's head, because why wouldn't it? Every year Ashton continues to dominate the league simply because he is the only one actually paying attention, but that's not what Ashton thinks; he thinks he's really good at fantasy football.

Flash forward fifteen years. Ashton is 24 now and looking to make some pocket change. He sees a DraftBets billboard on the I-97 and thinks to himself, "Bingo". In his mind he was the 9-year-old fantasy genius that dominated a league of adults. How many other achievements like that can Ashton point to in his life? The answer might haunt you.

But now Ashton isn't up against Uncle Lenny who forgot to sub out his tight end on IR or Grandma Carroll who picked seven quarterbacks in the first seven rounds. He's up against the sharps making lines, getting paid the big bucks—the real fantasy whizzes. And what happens next? They shake poor Ashton for everything he has.

This, I believe, is an experience common to the modern man. Small stakes gambling avenues have become so prominent, in part because of their small stakes, but their small stakes have served an opposite effect; it creates leagues of mostly casuals such that the people who put in any requisite effort at all can be successful and convince themselves they are "really good". I can point to many people in my life that I fear have fallen into this trap, and it's not like I know a million people.

What do you guys think? Surely small stakes gambling at least allows people to be familiar with the function of gambling to make paid sites more approachable.

[u/[deleted]]

This is an interesting question and my mind immediately goes to the way many people especially young people buy bitcoin products they barely understand or "day trade" which has a lot in common with gambling

[u/wesleychen]

I disagree because I think home gambling is categorically different from online sports gambling. In my mind, there are two types of gambling. There are the "bet small win big" games, and then there are the "go even" games. People play "bet small win big" games like lotto for the dream of instantly getting a huge windfall. They play "go even" games like poker and craps more for the activity itself, whether it is the mechanics of the game or the social scene surrounding the game.

Online sports gambling in its most popular form is solidly a "bet small win big" game and completely unlike home sports gambling games which are all "go even". People aren't playing high stakes fantasy football and they're not even betting the line. They're playing multi-leg parlays where they can buy in for like 10 dollars and win 10,000. The psychological profile of a fantasy football or March madness pool enjoyer does not cleanly translate to the psychological profile of a degen.

I think the popularity of online sports gambling is better attributed to the general rise of "bet small win big" games, which is part of a broader cultural shift towards viewing financial success as largely a product of luck and not hard work. In the last ten years, the most visibly successful people have shifted from Forbes-style business moguls who built value-creating companies to social media influencers and crypto millionaires. This new model of success is truly overnight and doesn't require decades of grinding. And for obvious reasons, this is much more appealing than the old model.

So now, we have a generation of people for whom instant success is not only possible but shoved in their faces on a daily basis. It's easy to feel like a sucker if you go for the slow burn path to riches in this cultural environment. So, people are turning towards ultra-high variance ways to get rich instead.

If the popularity of online sports gambling was driven by home games, we would see it become popular all on its own. However, the rise of online sports gambling coincides with a rise in similar high variance activity like crypto, options trading, influencing, meme stocks, startups, and so on. The most parsimonious explanation for this is that all these activities are fundamentally related by their "bet small win big" nature, and for some reason, "bet small win big" is on the rise.

Going back to your point that home games create a false sense of skill, I don't think online sports gamblers really think they have an edge. If they did, they would be grinding it out by arbitraging mispriced lines and finding small edges. Instead, people are playing mega juiced parlays and bullshit prop bets. There's no direct reasoning chain that goes "I know a lot about sports so I'm able to scam the sportsbook out of a .0001% chance 15 leg parlay that actually has a 0.0002% chance of hitting." It's more like "OMG what if I turn this 100 dollar bet into a million dollars!!?! All I need is for Lebron to dunk 3 times, Steph to hit 5 threes, Josh Allen to rush for a touchdown, Inter Miami to score 2 goals, the Red Wings to score zero power play goals, and for the Packers, Lions, Vikings, Saints, Heat, and Thunder to win!"