Sports betting has been able to creep in because fantasy sports sweepstakes are a game of skill, and then it expanded to fantasy sports for money, and then it expanded to betting on how many times a QB will pick his nose.
As others have mentioned there's an increasing amount of betting on random outcomes other than the game (called proposition bets, or "prop bets"), but these sites also use dirty tactics to lure in potential addicts and keep them coming back. Lots of sports betting sites will give you $x in free bets to start so you get in the betting cycle, and even if they lose on plenty of people, the potential addicts they find end up recouping all the losses. Also once a gambling addict tries to quit something like fanduel, the site will do an absurd amount of targeted advertising and free bet offers to get them to come back. Trueanon has a great episode about sports betting.
Unrelated to this, but there's a new trend that my brother is into where instead of actively making trades and "playing fantasy football," he picks his players at the beginning of the season with an initial bet and then waits to see if he won or not. He'll draft 5 teams at $50 a piece just to have them sit there. Even better, now he actively places prop bets on individual games while his rosters just float.
Unless it's sports betting.
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Sports betters bet on random things as well such as how many dances a QB will do in a game or whether the coin flip is heads or tails.
I imagine it's a little less bad, though I'm sure the brokers do as much as they can to make it bad.
But it's still definitionally gambling and therefore creates and takes advantage of gambling addictions.
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Sports betting has been able to creep in because fantasy sports sweepstakes are a game of skill, and then it expanded to fantasy sports for money, and then it expanded to betting on how many times a QB will pick his nose.
As others have mentioned there's an increasing amount of betting on random outcomes other than the game (called proposition bets, or "prop bets"), but these sites also use dirty tactics to lure in potential addicts and keep them coming back. Lots of sports betting sites will give you $x in free bets to start so you get in the betting cycle, and even if they lose on plenty of people, the potential addicts they find end up recouping all the losses. Also once a gambling addict tries to quit something like fanduel, the site will do an absurd amount of targeted advertising and free bet offers to get them to come back. Trueanon has a great episode about sports betting.
Unrelated to this, but there's a new trend that my brother is into where instead of actively making trades and "playing fantasy football," he picks his players at the beginning of the season with an initial bet and then waits to see if he won or not. He'll draft 5 teams at $50 a piece just to have them sit there. Even better, now he actively places prop bets on individual games while his rosters just float.