U of A political scientist Fiona Nicoll says she has never seen anything like the viral spread of sports betting online.

“I feel like we’re looking down the barrel of an enormous wave (like a surfer),” says Nicoll, who is a former Research Chair in Gambling Policy and local research coordinator for the Alberta Gambling Research Institute, a consortium of the University of Calgary, the University of Alberta and the University of Lethbridge.

“The more educated we are about these new forms of gambling, the better we will be as a society, but also as individuals, to manage it.”

In the U.S., the statistics on sports gambling are staggering. Before 2018, sports betting was prohibited almost everywhere in the U.S. Since it was legalized, it’s been thriving in 38 states and the District of Columbia. In 2023 alone, total sports bets reached more than US $120 billion, with the industry taking in about $11 billion.

While sports gambling may be wildly successful commercially, two recent studies suggest legalization in the U.S. has turned out largely to be a failed social experiment.

“The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households,” writes Charles Fain Lehman in a recent article in The Atlantic. “The evidence is convincing: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake.”

Some of the demonstrated harmful consequences include diminished household and retirement savings for those who can least afford it, driving up credit card debt and overdraft frequency, not to mention bankruptcy, marital breakdown, suicide and increased use of alcohol and other substances.

As wealth management consultant Preet Banerjee writes in the Globe and Mail, those American studies provide a “crystal ball” of sorts for anticipating the trend’s impact in Canada, which followed the U.S. three years later, in 2021, in legal.

Nicoll has witnessed a similar explosion of sports gambling over the past fifteen years in her home country of Australia before arriving at the U of A, and she’s now “watching the whole thing unfold again.”

The growth has been particularly explosive in Ontario, she says, which is expected to become the biggest market for online betting in North America. The province has seen a 70 per cent growth since just last year. 

Sports gambling hasn’t caught fire in Alberta to the same extent it has so far in Ontario and Quebec, but Nicoll says it’s likely coming our way. She has spent the past five years contributing to Canada’s first National Gambling Study, which examined various forms of gambling and problem gambling trends both nationally and regionally. Featuring robust evidence from Statistics Canada and provincial surveys and data from casino patron surveys, the study sheds light on treatment and recovery, gambling fallacies and the demographics of gaming involvement.

Nicoll is now at work disseminating those findings, partly through a new three-day Gambling and Gaming Microcredential course at the U of A. Open to the public, the interdisciplinary course brings together students, faculty, teachers and others to review the research and discuss how best to limit its harm in Alberta, given that banning it outright is highly unlikely.

It’s crucial to understand, for example, that the advent of online gaming constitutes a seismic shift in the essential nature of gambling, says Nicoll. Historically it was confined to specific places and times, separated from everyday life, which imposed an inherent form of regulation.

Online betting, sometimes called IGaming, is available anywhere, to anyone, at any time, meaning the responsibility for regulation is now downloaded to the player, she says.

One of the most addictive new forms of betting, for example, is called “in-play,” where viewers place bets throughout a game as the odds change rather than just before it starts. Or “micro-bets,” which are placed on individual turns within a sporting event, such as whether the next shot in a basketball game will be a two or three pointer. Both are designed to mimic the “sticky” appeal of slot machines or VLTs, says Nicoll.

“They use what’s called intermittent reinforcement schedules, balancing the experiences of winning and losing in such a way that people enter what’s called ‘the zone,’” manipulating the gambler to remain engaged.

Gaming companies now offer forms of self-regulation for players to limit their liability, such as tools that allow them to set deposit limits or time limits prior to gambling so they don’t get carried away. In an exception to new rules restricting gambling advertising in Ontario, Edmonton Oilers captain Connor McDavid recently signed on with the online sports betting platform BetMGM to advocate for such tools.

Perhaps the best form of harm reduction is education, says Nicoll, whether through public awareness campaigns or in schools, especially since underage gambling is on the rise.

“Based on anecdotal evidence, we are aware of a significant problem of people gambling underage,” says Nicoll. “The longer you do it, the more it’s normalized, and the more it infuses the idea of recreation and entertainment.”

For now, in addition to releasing the findings of the Alberta Gambling Research Institute’s national study, Nicoll is focused on spreading awareness of problem gambling and how to mitigate it through her Gambling and Gaming Microcredential course, which she calls a 360-degree understanding of gambling and gaming today. Now open for enrolment, it launches next week.