A Good Bet: Gambling Companies Should Pay You To Exercise

And now, a modest proposal: Online gambling companies should encourage people to get out and touch grass. I’m being literal. Put the phone down, stop betting on the Panthers to cover, stop playing Lucky Larry’s Lobstermania Slingo, get outside, and do … something.

Anything. Take a walk. Throw a Frisbee. Shoot some hoops.

Why would the gambling companies do this? What’s in it for them? 

Well, to that I say, more gambling. In fact — and here comes the Modest Proposal, which I hope to capitalize on, as this is just shy of selling babies for food — the gambling companies should give bonus money out for people who exercise. Team up with Google and Apple and whoever, connect the apps, and get 10 bonus spins for every 30 minutes of cardio you do. A $2 bonus bet for every 10,000 steps. You get the idea.

To be fair, I thought this idea was batshizz crazy when it popped into my head until three things happened in quick succession: a chat with Keith Whyte, discovering an academic paper that shows the problem is real, and the realization that I’m not the first person to come up with this type of idea.

Apparently, there was once a treadmill and bicycle slot machine. It is no more.

“There was an outcry,” Whyte, the founder of Safer Gambling Strategies, told me. “People thought it might literally kill someone.”

Let’s start there.

Run ‘n’ spin

Back in the ’90s, a Virginia woman named Kathy Harris had what she thought was a brilliant idea during a trip to Atlantic City. Her husband wanted to gamble. She wanted to exercise. And rather than compromising like a normal couple — you know, by having her completely win the argument — she decided to invent a way for them to do both at the same time.

The result was Fitness Gaming Corporation and two machines: the Pedal ‘N Play, a stationary bike welded to a 25-cent slot machine, and the Money Mill, a treadmill version. You couldn’t gamble unless you were pedaling, and you couldn’t pedal unless you were gambling. Stop moving for 20 seconds? The whole thing shut down.

Cruise ships bought some. The Tropicana installed them at their Atlantic City and Las Vegas properties. And people tried them.

The quotes from an AP story from some of the players who sampled the machines at the time? Hoo boy.

“This is for kids, I got news for you,” said unimpressed Rose Rappa after trying one. She quit after five minutes. “The exercise was good, my heart rate was good, but the machine’s a big loser.”

George Longauer gambled $10, won nothing, and called it “a good gimmick.” Then he added: “Just wait until somebody dies on it, though.”

George Mancuso, the then-vice president of slot operations for Tropicana, addressed that last point, the whole dying thing: “There are some concerns, but that company (Fitness Gaming) has insurance as well as we do,” Mancuso said. “Hopefully, people will use good common sense and get a reasonable amount of exercise.”

What happened to the machines? What happened to the company? Well, not much, apparently. I did track down a phone number for the Harris couple, but they didn’t call back. And a pretty deep internet dive yielded a heck of a lot of nothing, outside of the couple trying to sue the company that made Nordic Trak in 2011 for some kind of patent infringement.

But, yeah, I’m not the first with this idea, combining exercise with gambling.

Risks to not exercising, too

Whyte, who is about as level-headed as anyone in the entire gambling world, wasn’t 100% put off by my fresh spin (pun intended) on the idea.

“I think gamification in general, and bonusing and financial incentives are powerful tools, when used wisely by both operators and players,” he told me. “Obviously, there would be a need for lots of guardrails and limits.”

One of those guardrails is that pesky “exercise so much you die” issue.

“Imagine someone with a gambling addiction running till they have a heart attack to try to get the bonus,” he said. 

Well, to that end, I say this: What if gamblers are going to give themselves a heart attack because they’re not exercising?

Enter academia.

Betting your life

A new study from three economists at Hamilton College in New York looked at what happened to physical activity after states legalized sports betting. The researchers used data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System — a CDC survey that, among other things, asks people if they’ve exercised in the past month — and compared states before and after they legalized online sports betting between 2018 and 2019.

They found sports betting legalization decreased the likelihood that men aged 30 to 44 would exercise by roughly 2 to 4 percentage points.

During football season, the effect nearly doubled. 

Women? No effect. Men outside that 30-44 age range? Nothing. Just men in their 30s and early 40s — the exact demographic most likely to be betting on sports in the first place.

The study’s explanation: About 90% of sports bettors say gambling makes them more interested in watching sports live. Watching sports crowds out time that would otherwise be spent, say, playing sports. Or doing anything else. Also, gambling creates financial stress, and stress makes people less likely to exercise, which creates a fun little loop o’ doom.

The Kathy Harris treadmill-slot was designed to get people exercising while they gambled. But it turns out gambling itself is making people exercise less.

Which brings me back to my Modest Proposal.

Don’t bet on it

I reached out to three different gambling companies, and three different gambling company spokespeople politely declined to make anyone from their companies available for an interview. I gave up as it certainly seemed like no one was going to talk about this semi-ridiculous idea.

But you know what? I don’t think it’s that ridiculous. The tech exists to do something like this, and getting people to exercise would be some real white hat-style stuff from the gambling companies. Seems win-win to me.

To be clear, I’d even attempt to do a single pull-up in public for 10 free spins, so maybe I’m not the most objective person here. But hear me out: The gambling companies are going to keep making money either way. People are going to keep gambling either way. And if the data shows that gambling is making people less active — which it does — then maybe there’s a world where incentivizing exercise isn’t the worst idea.

Sure, there are concerns. Keith Whyte’s “running till you have a heart attack” scenario is real. You’d need those guardrails. Daily caps on exercise bonuses. Limits on what counts as activity. Some way to prevent people from strapping their phones to their dogs.

The treadmill-slot failed in the ’90s because it was clunky and weird and nobody wanted to sweat in a casino. But this? This could work. The tech is already in everyone’s pocket. The gambling apps are already there. The fitness trackers are already counting steps.

All that’s missing is someone willing to try it.