Don't lose all of your bets

From smartphones and televisions, via computers and blaring from radios, pasted on billboards and popping up in every possible medium, New Yorkers are enticed to gamble. Easy wagering and winning are touted incessantly, while required warnings about the danger of an addictive habit and helpline numbers flash by in an instant.

This luring of the vulnerable isn't new. According to State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, New York spent just over $90 million to market its lottery products in the 2019-2020 fiscal year. That’s separate from what the state’s racetracks and casinos spent on promotion.

The return for all products that year was $3.7 billion in gambling revenue to state coffers, the highest in the nation. Meanwhile, state spending on prevention, treatment and recovery services related to problem gambling over that period totaled $5.7 million.

With the kickoff of legal mobile sports betting last weekend in New York, pleas to play are suddenly louder. Such wagers are legal in many states, and the partnerships gambling companies are inking with top leagues — like the NBA, NFL and MLB — make incessant in-game advertising for bookmakers a sure thing.

In the ads, as celebrities like Ben Affleck, Patton Oswalt and J.B. Smoove tout six-team parlays, no one points out that the reason the average such wager pays off at 47-1 is because the actual chances of hitting it are 63-1. No one invests in multibillion-dollar casinos or huge advertising buys to give money away. The bills are paid with bucks bettors lose.

And the promotions are often absorbed by some of the most obsessive sports fans around: minors with a still-developing understanding of consequences and often-limited impulse control.

Prudent gambling can be exciting fun. Addicted gambling is catastrophically destructive. There is, at least, a physical limit to how much drugs you can use. There is no such limit on how much money you can lose. And the brain’s reaction to gambling and the chemicals secreted, experts say, are in many ways identical to those triggered by crack cocaine.

But unlike wagering, it’s illegal to advertise crack cocaine — or cigarettes or hard liquor or marijuana — on television.

The state promises, as part of its gambling expansion, to also increase gambling education, and addiction prevention and treatment. That’s wise, but occasional messages of government caution aren’t going to drown out the bellows of for-profit gambling concerns. And a gambling addiction, once developed, is as difficult to treat as drug or alcohol dependency.

Be careful. Understand that regular or heavy betting is almost always a bad gamble. Watch your kids like hawks, along with their phones and finances and moods. And be conscious of your own behaviors, alert for changes in how you gamble, and how gambling feels.

Sports gambling in New York is now the rage. Moderating gambling in New York now must be treated as a serious responsibility, by both the state and its residents.