Mark Lebeau will be one of the tens of millions of people casting billions of dollars in bets this fall on football — a sport he wasn’t interested in before sports betting began sending a buzz around the Bay State after its legalization in Massachusetts in 2023.
“I don’t research it, I just go with my instinct,” Lebeau said, noting he spends about $2,000 a year on gambling, a “hobby” that he said gives an incentive to tune in on Sundays, and adds to enjoyment of his favorite sport, golf.
“And it has worked out for me the past two years,” he said. “I’m about even with the NFL, and I’m down in golf.”
Sipping a beer at JJ’s Tavern, the Leeds resident explained how he’s been tempted by the supposed promised land that gambling holds out. Unfortunately for Lebeau, pride went before the fall.
“So I bet big on football one day, (and) I won like $1,800. Then I told my girlfriend — hey, what am I going to work for if I can do this every day?” he said. “For the next three months I lost every bet. So don’t quit your day job.”
As a DJ at MGM casino in Springfield, Greg Hannum has had a close-up view of casino life in Massachusetts, where rooms full of people watch games and place their bets legally.
His take: Sports betting has the potential to be a good social outlet, but outside of that it’s sad to witness.
“At MGM, I’ve seen the downsides more than anything,” he said while on shift working at the UMass Amherst gym, where he is an athletic coordinator. “From the sports angle it’s more fun, but everything that is outside of that is a bit more depressing to see, because casinos are designed to make you stuck in a figure eight. There’s no windows, there’s the lighting.
“Like in Atlantic City, New Jersey, you see people slumped, mindless, looking at the slots kind of thing. That’s pushed me away from it, truthfully,” he said, adding that the highs and lows also impact drinking rates, which in turn spurs frustration or overconfidence.
“I think people get hooked on the highs and the lows, because the highs are very high and the lows are very low — and they’re always trying to hit that first slot again,” Hannum said.
More popular, more problems
There is no doubt that sports betting is rising in popularity since it was legalized in the early months of 2023.
Since legalization, the state has brought in $314 million from taxes on $16.6 billion in total sports bets since March 2023, according to Bet Massachusetts.
These proceeds from sports wagering are used for a variety of purposes. The largest portion, at 45%, goes to the general fund, but money also goes to a Gaming Local Aid Fund, Workforce Investment Aid Fund, public health and youth development.
With the rise in popularity comes a simultaneous increase in negative attitudes and behaviors, says a recent UMass study on the topic, part of an ongoing survey for more than a decade, beginning in April 2013 following the passing of the Expanded Gaming Act in 2011.
“The first thing that jumped out at us were the attitudes toward gambling,” said Rachel Volberg, who has been leading research on the topic of the Social and Economic Impacts of Gambling in Massachusetts (SEIGMA) alongside a research team at UMass Amherst.
The 2022-24 survey showed that over those years, more respondents were pessimistic and believed that harms associated with gambling outweigh the benefits.
In 2022, 48% of those surveyed said harms outweigh benefits. In 2023, that number rose 5 percentage points, to 53%, with another rise in the fall of 2024 to 56%.
There are also many more people giving sports betting a try since legalization. The proportion of monthly gamblers who responded “never” to betting on sports declined from 61.4% in 2022, when sports betting was still illegal, to 46.7% in the fall of 2024.
The study also found that among monthly gamblers, weekly and monthly sports betting rose from 18.9% and 12.8%, respectively, in 2022 to 26.3% and 19.2% in the fall of 2024.
With more trying out sports betting, more are also feeling its potential negative impacts.
Among monthly gamblers in the online surveys, those experiencing gambling problems jumped from 20.9% in 2022 to 25.6% in 2023 and to 28% in the fall of 2024. A similar rise in problem gambling among monthly gamblers was reported following the introduction of casinos.
For one, bank accounts are taking a hit.
In 2022, 18% of respondents said they had undergone financial harm due to gambling. That number rose to 25% by the fall of 2024.
And those undergoing family and relationship struggles have nearly doubled, rising from 13.9% in 2022 to 27.2%.
A few points of research that Hannum has picked up anecdotally at MGM have also come up in research, especially his experience with the ages of those who tend to be tempted to bet on sports, and the impacts of advertising.
“Sports gambling, it’s been around, but the commercialized version is very new. So it has caught people by storm around our age, like 21 to 35,” Hannum said, which is in line with findings in previous years, according to Volberg.
She attributes the rise in negative attitudes to the intense media coverage and marketing push that began in 2022, a year before legal sports betting in Massachusetts took effect. Commercialism also targets young sports lovers, feeding them advertisements for online books like DraftKings, FanDuel and more.
“My sense is that, as we saw with the introduction of casinos, the hype in the media seems to drive people’s attitudes quite a bit,” Volberg said.
The most recent report concludes that harm-reduction strategies targeting sports bettors are needed, as is an expansion of responsible gambling tools to support individuals reporting financial, family, or relationship harms.
“These indicators from the monthly gamblers in the online panels are not going in the right direction, which is definitely a concern when considering the impacts of legalized sports betting on the population at large,” Volberg said.
Word on the street
Among the general population, not everyone feels the concern, although many non-gamblers call gambling more generally a waste, or said they steered clear because they were trying to save money.
But for enthusiasts, while sports betting doesn’t seem to be a pastime that makes anyone much money, for many people it has in fact been a community builder and a way to intensify the experience of sporting events.
Take Colin Hughes, general manager at The Spoke in Amherst. He’s always been a sports fan, and has engaged in fantasy football in the past, but hasn’t ever been much of a gambler or a casinogoer.
“I actually enjoy watching. I don’t enjoy sitting at slot machines pissing money away,” he said, adding that placing a sports bet adds to the “excitement” of experiencing a match.
He places relatively small bets five to ten times from Thursday through Sunday, and his track record to date is breaking even.
“I’m big on never put in more money than you can stand to lose, or even enough that it would really bother you to lose,” he said.
“I definitely bet the most on football, then probably baseball would be second,” Hughes said. “Football is more out of enjoyment because I am already watching it, and baseball feels like one of the easier ones, actually, to bet on.”
His advice: no parlays. He doesn’t usually, but when he does he knows he is swimming at his own risk.
A parlay is a single bet that links together two or more individual wagers, also known as “legs.” The key characteristic of a parlay is that all of the individual wagers, or legs, must win for the entire parlay bet to be successful and for the bettor to receive a payout.
“I still do parlays, but I think the best advice is don’t do parlays … you’re letting Vegas handicap you,” Hughes said.
He also said those who enjoy the hobby often have their signature rituals and niches.
“One of the bouncers here is significantly more into it than I am, and he will find something to bet on at any point” — like Russian pingpong matches, for example. “We’ll be closing at 2 a.m. … and he has a multi-hundred-dollar Russian pingpong match going on, and he actually puts a lot of research in,” said Hughes.
“And then on the other end of the spectrum, one of the other bartenders here, he’s super old school, Knights of Columbus about it … and he hand-writes all his bets. So he will put them on DraftKings, but he has a yellow note sheet that he pulls out every day, and he’ll check off the bets that hit — he’s very manual about it.
“It’s funny to see this guy is deep into Russian pingpong and the other guy is straight-up old school. I’m kind of in the middle of the spectrum,” Hughes said.
Adam Lima, a UMass student, was getting a workout in on campus on a recent evening this summer. He said he gambles $10 a month only on UFC fights. He knows some friends who have gambled a little too much but “no one has gone to rehab or anything.”
While the study saw an uptick in those who think that gambling is too accessible, Jay Hebert is not one of those people.
He thinks there’s not enough in-person access.
There are currently three brick-and-mortar casinos in Massachusetts where you can place in-person sports bets: MGM in Springfield, and two casinos just north and south of Boston.
There are also seven online sportsbook apps that are legally available, with up to 15 licenses allowed by the state. Massachusetts is one of 38 states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, to have legal sports betting.
“It could have been better to allow sports betting in establishments that already have Keno,” the Holyoke resident said, sipping on a water and waiting for a pizza at Stoney’s in South Hadley.
“Could there have been 3,000 locations in the state instead of three? It could help the bars out, and as I said, I’m not going to Springfield to sit there and play sports betting,” Hebert said.
Those struggling with a gambling addiction or suffering from gambling related issues can receive help through a 24-hour hotline, 1-800-GAMBLER, or 1-800-522-4700.
