What are sports betting apps doing to help problem gamblers?

In 2018, the Supreme Court opened the door for states to legalize sports betting. Since then, Americans have wagered more than $600 billion on sports bets. It's now legal in 39 states and Washington, D.C.

But this skyrocketing popularity has come with concerns. A recent UCLA study finds that easier access to sports betting harms consumer health by increasing debt levels. So what are sportsbooks doing in response?

The nonprofit newsroom ProPublica gave one of its reporters a budget to bet on sports, so they could see what guardrails might exist on these betting apps.

That reporter, Jake Pearson, wrote about his experience in a new story, "I Deliberately Bet Like a Problem Gambler. DraftKings Made Me a VIP."

He spoke about it with “Marketplace Morning Report” host Kimberly Adams. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kimberly Adams: How much were you betting? And I guess, more importantly, how much were you losing?

Jake Pearson: I'll give you all the figures. So net loss to the company was $10,700. I had $22,000 at my disposal for this experiment, and there were upswings and downswings.

But something I learned over the course of doing this reporting, from my experts — it's not just about the net loss; it's the pattern of the bets. So, for example, I would often do what's called “loss chasing.” So, when I would lose on a game, I would chase that loss with more bets of bigger amounts at longer odds to try and sort of recuperate what I just sunk. I would do other things. There's something called “microbetting,” which is just placing a distinct, discrete wager on an event in a game. So, like, what's the next pitch at a baseball game going to be? Who's going to win the next point in a tennis match? And that is really fast action. And one of my experts likened it to the nearest thing in sports betting, online sports betting, to a slot machine. It is that quick, and slots are obviously widely known to be one of the most addictive forms of gambling.

Adams: And I have to imagine if your experts know that these are signs of problematic gambling, so do these sportsbooks.

Pearson: Yeah, so there's this inherent tension in the business, right? Because the sportsbooks — DraftKings, FanDuel — they all have what's called a responsible gaming program. They're a series of tools that they can offer bettors to make sure that they're not spiraling out of control. And they also will, from time to time, sort of prompt you with pop-ups in the app if they're noticing certain behaviors. I would purposefully be doing things to see if those warnings would pop up — and then also how easy they were to dismiss — but sometimes the next day, or even hours later, I would get a promotion to do microbetting and be eligible for a boost. So at the same time that the algorithm seems to be flagging correctly that something's not right about my behavior, the company is incentivizing me to keep doing the very thing that prompted the alert.

Adams: What did these sportsbooks have to say when you brought them your reporting and raised the concerns that came up?

Pearson: DraftKings put their chief responsible gaming officer, Lori Kalani, on the phone. And we had a — I thought — very productive interview. And her response was that I was in the system over the course of my betting — by their count, I got 32 different responsible gaming notices, either by email or in my app. I counted 14 sort of in-app pop-ups over the course of my 70-plus days betting.

Her position was that those were appropriate for the behaviors that I was demonstrating.

Here's the other thing: I mean, I asked them, "Do you ever cut somebody off?” And she said, "We do it all the time.” And then I asked how often, and she said, "We do it all the time.” And then I asked a third time. I sort of pressed again, and a spokesperson said they'd see whether or not they could provide me those numbers, and followed up to say that they don't disclose that. And my takeaway was that the responsible gaming prompts that I got were no match for the promotions and the design, the user design, that was urging me to keep going all the time.