This World Cup will be the largest gambling event in US history. According to a PwC survey, 58% of Americans who plan to watch the World Cup will also plan to place a bet on a game.
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re considering one yourself.
An expanded field of 48 teams means more matches than ever, creating more opportunities to wager as sports-gambling fever is in full force across the US, one of the host nations.
Amid the constant stream of ads promoting bookmakers and prediction markets on TV and online, it can be easy to forget that gambling your savings can also be devastating. Gambling is a booming industry, after all, because it makes billions of dollars of revenue from bettors losing.
We spoke to three behavioral experts to better understand how to gamble responsibly and whether “gamble responsibly” is even the right terminology. Their main advice was to see betting as entertainment, not a way to make money.
Here are four suggested safeguards worth adopting to make sure your World Cup wagers don’t turn into a life-altering binge.
Keep a budget
If there’s one “golden rule” in gambling, it’s setting a budget, Mark Griffiths, who has studied gambling addiction for four decades, told Business Insider.
“You have a budget, and you stick to that budget,” Griffiths, distinguished professor of behavioral addiction at Nottingham Trent University, said. “It’s all about not spending more than you can afford to lose.”‘
While that might sound simple, in the era of smartphones where everyone is “carrying around a licensed bookmaker in their pocket,” it’s much harder, said Griffiths.
Add to that this year’s record tournament size, and anyone who says “I only gamble when the World Cup comes around,” will have nearly six weeks, instead of four, to keep within their budgets, Griffiths said.
“When you gamble, you’re buying entertainment,” Griffiths said. “You should expect to lose, and any winning is a bonus.”
Gambling is an expense line, not an income line, on your budget, said Alex De Marco, who runs a program to provide free financial counseling to problem gamblers called GameFin.
Both agreed that it becomes a problem when you start borrowing, whether it be from a family member or friend, taking out a bank loan, or borrowing from your rent or grocery budget.
“My suggestion is, if you win, send that gambling money right back to your grocery fund or wherever you took it from, so you’re playing with the house’s money,” De Marco.
If not, it’s possible to fall into a “vicious circle” of borrowing more to pay off what you owe, which “can become quite problematic very quickly if you’re not careful,” said De Marco.
Avoid emotion
Griffiths regularly bets against England, his national team, which he described as the emotional form of hedging. If England wins, he’s happy, and if they lose, he gets some money back.
“I have to be honest, I’ve won more money than I’ve lost,” Griffiths said.
The constant deluge of prop bets — wagers on specific outcomes that aren’t tied to the game’s actual outcome — or in-play bets, which are placed during the game, has supercharged the neurochemical pitfalls of gambling, said De Marco.
“When you’re betting on every moment, that dopamine hit you’re getting is rewiring your brain and how you engage with the actual sporting event itself,” De Marco said. Sports betting, once a simple bet on the outcome of the match, is now more like “one of, if not the, most addictive gambling experience there is,” he said: a slot machine with the ability to constantly place wagers.
Daniel Crosby, chief behavioral officer at private wealth tech firm Orion Advisor Solutions, said that “overconfidence” is one of the big emotional mistakes people make.
“The illusion of control can make purely random outcomes feel predictable, especially when a payout just misses,” Crosby said. Conversely, there’s the “gambler’s fallacy,” or the “belief that after a string of losses, a win is somehow ‘due,'” Crosby said.
“Of course, random events don’t have a memory, but our brains are wired to look for patterns whether they’re there or not,” Crosby said.
The house always wins
For those who choose to gamble, it’s best if they understand what they’re buying. Promotions, such as $10 free bets or deposit-matching, can be “good value” for people who were already planning to bet and are willing to shop around between different providers, Griffiths said. But gambling companies offer those deals for a reason, thinking of them as “acquisitional factors to get you to gamble in the first place.”
Accumulators, also known as parlays, which require correctly predicting multiple outcomes and can offer massive but unlikely payouts, are heavily promoted.
“You have to realize that you have a better chance of Elvis landing on the moon than of winning a six or seven bet accumulator,” Griffiths said.
Anything that draws people to bet by focusing on something other than probability is likely to lead to big wins for the house.
“Probability is what I would consider the basic structural characteristic of gambling, which is why I personally would never, ever gamble on the lottery,” Griffiths said, though he said he doesn’t stand in the way of his wife’s love for the lottery.
It’s not just up to you
Neither Griffiths nor De Marco is a prohibitionist. Both said they occasionally gamble.
“If there were no bookmakers, then we’d be doing it ourselves, or we’d go underground,” Griffiths said.
But that doesn’t mean America’s system is working perfectly. For people with gambling issues, avoiding betting can be difficult when it’s constantly advertised.
American advertising rules may be characteristically laissez-faire, but other countries, like England, strictly regulate when and how gambling can be advertised. In contrast, others, like Italy and the Netherlands, have near-total bans on gambling ads.
The expansion of legal gambling in the US has also led to expanded public health programs, such as those De Marco provides. However, much of the burden still falls on personal responsibility.
“Responsible gambling is not my favorite term,” De Marco said. “It puts the onus on the responsibility of the end user even as technology is advancing marketing tactics with bonuses and VIP programs to make the product even more engaging and habit-forming.”
De Marco still uses the phrase because it’s the industry’s language, but he prefers another lens.
“Consumer protection is another way to look at it,” he said.
