When Ethan lost $11,000 on a single hockey game this past March, it was the last straw.
Ethan, who declined to share his last name out of fear of losing his job, bet “the spread’” on a Hurricanes-Flames hockey game. That means a team doesn’t just need to win – they must win by more than a certain number of points. The Hurricanes did come out on top – but by only one point, not the two-plus Ethan needed.
Ethan, 27, broke down and cried in front of his girlfriend. He couldn’t do it anymore.
What started as a casual hobby in college with his fraternity brothers had somehow escalated into a severe, years-long gambling addiction. And Ethan wanted out.
Although his story is extreme, Ethan is an example of an increasingly concerning trend.
A recent national survey of registered voters in the US conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University found a quarter of men under 30 bet on sports online — and 10% of men ages 18-30 have a gambling problem, compared to just 3% of the overall population.
In that survey, 68% of people who bet on sports online reported at least one gambling behavior that’s considered harmful, such as borrowing money to gamble or saying the gambling has caused financial or emotional problems.
Dr. Timothy Fong, a UCLA psychiatry professor who is board-certified in addiction psychiatry, told CNN’s Nick Watt young people are particularly vulnerable to sports betting because their frontal lobes cannot yet handle impulsivity and risk-taking. Watt explores further on “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper” airing at 10pm on Sunday, August 24.
“We know that the younger you start betting on sports, that leads to a higher likelihood of developing a gambling problem when they’re older,” Fong said.
That’s what happened to Ethan.
When Ethan was in college, sports gambling wasn’t yet legal, so he and his fraternity brothers used illegal sites to place bets.
In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that states should decide whether to legalize sports betting. That marked a turning point for the industry, and it’s now legal in 38 states and Washington, D.C.
Suddenly, Ethan and others like him had access to several legal apps. That quickly escalated his addiction: He quit his near-six-figure sales job last August, determined to make sports betting his full-time gig.
Last September, he was doing what he did every morning, drinking coffee with his girlfriend and reviewing daily game predictions. This time he came across a sports betting influencer who boasted about winning game after game – and though Ethan didn’t usually fall for this type of content, he was intrigued by what seemed like hard proof. The influencer advertised his picks for five games that day.
“I bet $2,000 on each game and I lost every single one,” Ethan tells CNN.
Ethan spiraled into an “anxious frenzy.” The next day he placed a risky $10,000 bet on a Chicago Bears game and tried to hide the paralyzing fear from his girlfriend. Ethan managed to win $20,000 and get out of the red. He was relieved—and back in the game. The next few months were a blur of ups and downs, wins and losses.
Slowly, he realized he couldn’t even enjoy the wins amid all the anxiety.
The $11,000 loss on the Hurricanes-Flames hockey game in March was the end. He chose to officially “self-exclude” — banning himself from all sports betting through the apps, meaning he wouldn’t be able to log back in.
Twenty years ago, the word “gambling” called to mind slot machines in Las Vegas and poker tables in Atlantic City: mostly older people, and maybe the occasional bachelorette party, playing in person.
Now, online gambling and sports betting have expanded that definition significantly. While casinos still represent most of the gambling industry’s profits, sports betting is exploding quickly: Revenue in that sector reached $13.7 billion in 2024, a 25% increase in just a year, according to the American Gaming Association.
Much of this activity happens on sports betting apps. FanDuel’s site says the app has 12 million registered users, while Draft Kings confirmed to CNN they have 10 million users.
Betting has also become deeply intertwined with the leagues themselves, with advertisements during games and sports announcers discussing different odds. Fanduel’s website boasts partnerships with most of the major American professional leagues and several teams.
The shift to app betting brings a shift toward younger bettors. FanDuel and DraftKings declined to share the age breakdown of their users, but several polls indicate a younger demographic of bettors.
The Fairleigh Dickinson study showed online sports betting is concentrated among young men: Only 10% of the voters they surveyed overall bet on sports or racing online in the last year. But for men under 45, that figure jumps to 26%.
For some of those young men, wider economic trends come into play.
Their betting spirals into an addiction in part because they feel they can’t buy homes or pay off student loans with their current salaries, says Jonathan D. Cohen, Ph.D, author of “Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling.”
“This is why you see all these people betting on these crazy (situations),” Cohen said. “They don’t care about having $10,000. They’d rather have a distant chance at $100,000.”
It’s not clear whether sports betting has infected a new generation with a gambling problem, as the data available typically come from self-reported surveys like FDU’s. Gamblers Anonymous also doesn’t track members’ information for privacy reasons, but the group says it has seen an increase in younger addicts.
“We saw a big push. A lot of young people come in… it’s a much higher number than in the past,” according to the public relations chair of Gamblers Anonymous, who prefers not to use their name as the group’s leadership is made up of members.
One method of measuring addiction is data on self-exclusion: how many people ban themselves from gambling, like Ethan. In Pennsylvania, one of the few states to keep public comprehensive data on the program, only 6% of the people who self-excluded from all gambling in 2015 were ages 21-34 — a decade later, that figure is now 28%.
Joe Maloney, a spokesperson for the American Gaming Association, doesn’t believe self-exclusion necessarily indicates addiction. It may simply mean a bettor wants to take a break.
He also cited a recent survey from the National Council on Problem Gambling that showed problematic gambling hasn’t increased much since the Supreme Court decision, and that the number of people betting on sports also remained similar, regardless of its legal status.
Kevin Vo, now 25, had never gambled before placing his first bet on basketball games through FanDuel three years ago. He had just secured his first job, in finance, and he had some money to play with.
“I honestly fell into the peer pressure of my friends: like, literally all of them posting their parlays (on social media),” Vo said.
A parlay combines two or more individual bets into one, and all conditions must be met for the bettor to win money — a high-risk, high-reward strategy Vo found compelling.
Like Ethan, he watched games with friends who had all bet on the outcome and participated in group chats dedicated solely to the bets of the day. Vo’s casual pastime escalated in a matter of months.
“Every single day I would have a parlay,” Vo tells CNN.
Vo originally bet only on sports he knew well, but as he got deeper into the betting apps, he began putting money on options he knew nothing about. At one point he dove into Polish basketball, betting on games he couldn’t even watch.
“I was down a couple grand at one point. I was able to make it back. And then that all kind of fell down,” Vo said.
Vo spent months up and down with his wins and losses – and finally walked away when he was down only a few thousand and had just moved into his own apartment.
In an email to CNN, FanDuel outlined several ways it acts to prevent harmful gambling: the ability to set deposit limits and alerts, sending users a monthly statement with their financial status in the app, a review system triggered by activity like too many hours spent on the site or attempting to come back from big losses, and self-exclusion programs that include the offer of a free mental health assessment.
“We work to identify signs of harm and engage with the user to prevent that harm from happening,” said Cory Fox, FanDuel’s Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Sustainability.
DraftKings has similar safety measures in place, and it invites users to set limits with a pop-up page immediately when creating an account.
“These resources are introduced at sign-up and reinforced throughout the customer journey,” Lori Kalani, DraftKings Chief Responsible Gaming Officer, said in an email to CNN. “It’s more fun when it’s for fun—and that’s the experience we aim to deliver.”
FanDuel, too, told CNN it views sports betting as a form of entertainment.
“We want our customers to think of their time and budgets on our platform the same way they might think about going to see a movie,” said Fox at FanDuel.
But at least some bettors try to leverage it into income — like Colby Aaron Wells, now 33, who began sports betting in Tennessee nearly a decade ago to make extra money. (The state legalized certain daily fantasy sports contests on apps in 2016.)
He said he was “working his butt off” at a landscaping job at the time, and he thought he could make a little extra money to pay the bills.
In Wells’ years of app betting, including after sports betting was legalized more widely, there were months when he did win thousands of dollars. Twice, the app company BetMGM even comped him free rooms in Las Vegas for betting so much.
But there were also many losses. Wells says he could have bought and paid off a house in Tennessee with the amount of money he lost, and he has since quit playing altogether. BetMGM declined CNN’s request for comment.
All three young men interviewed for this story believed they had a competitive edge because of their knowledge of different sports, viewing it differently from a slot machine or lottery ticket.
And though they’ve stopped gambling, they say the incessant advertising for sports betting is difficult to avoid. They see promotions like “bet $5 and get $150,” and they know just how easy it is to get sucked in.
“The amount of advertisements and commercials you see everywhere,” said Vo, “it’s literally plastered in your face.”
