A 10-Year Gambling Study? Awesome, Just Ask The Right Questions

I know a guy who routinely has 10% of his gambling bankroll in play on daily fantasy sports. While that’s going on, he can, and often does, take a nap.

I know another guy who plays 20-cent spins on Lucky Larry’s Lobstermania Slingo on a free $10 deposit bonus and his heart starts racing and he feels much the same way he does when he scrolls through TikTok or snorts cocaine. (He hasn’t snorted cocaine in 35 years, but you get the idea.)

So who’s the problem gambler? The guy willing to blow through $1,000 in DFS in an afternoon and hardly blink, or the guy playing with $10 but with every dopamine receptor in overdrive?

What if I told you they were the same person? (It was like one time with the coke, sorry Mom.)

That’s the kind of nuance I want out of New York’s new 10-year study of gambling behavior, and it’s the kind of nuance that “problem gambling,” as a catch-all term, has never been able to capture.

Which is why I’m willing to do something I almost never do: bless a government with an “attaboy.” And as a lifelong New Jerseyan, giving any props to New York stings a bit. But this is objectively good.

In short, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced last week the 10-year (!) study to assess gambling behavior in the Empire State, with the goal of seeing where “additional problem gambling-related services and supports may be needed,” per the press release. Details on the how and what and why of this 3,650-day effort are scarce at the moment, bordering on nonexistent. But again: Huzzah.

To be fair, New York isn’t the first state to realize it might be smart to actually study gambling before everyone starts running around with their hair on fire. Massachusetts has been the gold-standard example here, with its long-running SEIGMA research program and the MAGIC cohort study tracking gambling behavior over time. Maryland has done repeated statewide prevalence surveys, New Jersey has leaned on Rutgers for recurring problem gambling and online wagering research, and Connecticut recently commissioned a broad gambling impact study of its own.

So, no, New York did not invent the idea of measuring gambling harm. But a 10-year, statewide, public-health-style effort is still a big deal, and the kind of thing more states should have started doing before every couch in America was turned into a sportsbook and casino.

Enter the casino

And the study could get really interesting if iCasino enters the picture. New York is not one of the eight states that have legalized online casino, but I’m pretty confident they will get around to it now that the downstate casino license battle is over. State Sen. Joseph P. Addabbo Jr., chair of the Senate Racing, Gaming and Wagering Committee, keeps putting online casino legislation into the hopper, only to see it roll right back down the hill. He’s like Sisyphus, but replace the boulder with a roulette ball.

There’s too much money on the table for it not to happen, and operators will pay any tax to offer it.

If iCasino gets legalized during the study window (and it gets folded into the research), we potentially stand to learn a tremendous amount about how product type drives behavior.

“It’s hard to say more before seeing the details and the rollout,” said Isaac Rose-Berman, a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men focused on gambling research and policy. “It’s important to get the data, and to have it over time to see how behaviors/activity is changing. And also how that’s being impacted by the types of products currently available.”

That last bit is the whole story. Once/if online casino is on the table, behavior and activity change. And if this study is really good, it will show how the DFS napper and the Slingo dopamine fool can be the same person, in the same chair, with the same bankroll, having two completely different relationships with the product in front of him.

We’ve spent too long looking at gambling as a binary issue — either it’s the worst thing ever, or we should let everyone do whatever they want. The truth, as with most things, lives in the middle. Some people can’t handle gambling. Some can. Most fall somewhere in between, depending on the day, the product, and what’s going on in their lives.

I really, truly hope this study digs into that. I really, truly hope iCasino gets legalized so it can become part of it. And I really, truly hope it produces something more useful than another “3.7% of New Yorkers sometimes chase their losses” headline, because the guy chasing his losses on DFS and the guy chasing his dopamine on a $10 deposit bonus are not dealing with the same problem, even when they’re the same guy.

Until we can tell the difference, we can’t actually help anyone. And that’s what a 10-year study should be for.

Ask me in 10 years if it worked.