It’s sometime after midnight on a Monday morning when Zach unlocks his phone and starts scrolling for something to bet on. He’s 26, tucked into his childhood bed at his parents’ house in Washington, D.C. He moved back in after a stint in Las Vegas that didn’t go as planned. The NFL is done for the night. The NBA’s late games have wrapped. Mainstream sports are fast asleep.
In FanDuel’s live betting tab, he finds a women’s tennis tournament streaming from somewhere in Southeast Asia. Two unranked, unknown teenagers, one boasting a 0–1 career record. Empty arena, no ball boys. Between points, the players jog to the fence to retrieve the ball themselves.
He puts money on it.
“I wasn’t thinking what a normal person would think,” says Zach, who asked to be identified only by his first name. “I was on autopilot.”
Fourteen months earlier, in the fall of 2023, Zach downloaded FanDuel for the first time and went on the best run of his gambling life—eleven bets, eleven wins, a two-week stretch in which everything he touched turned to money. He won a couple of thousand dollars, he says. He was on a heater.
He spent the next year-plus chasing that same kind of luck, that same feeling.
He never found it.
Multiply Zach by twenty million, and you get a sense of what’s become a gambling epidemic. Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, Americans have legally wagered more than $650 billion on sports. Nearly half of American men between 18 and 49 now carry an active sportsbook account on their phone. The apps pump out bonuses to keep users betting. Promotional credits, “no sweat” bets refunded as credits if the “no sweat” bet is lost, and boosted odds on popular games. Ninety percent of legal sports bets in the U.S. are now placed on phones. More than half are live bets, placed while games are in progress. When a user goes quiet, they get a push notification; when they lose big, a reload bonus appears.
“They make you feel like you’re getting free money,” Zach says. “Then the free money’s gone, and you’re using your own. By then, you’re already hooked.”
The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates as many as 20 million Americans have a serious gambling problem or are at risk of developing one—a figure that has grown 30 percent since legalization.
What hasn’t grown is the number of options to help gambling addicts. The federal government spends $3.6 billion a year treating people struggling with alcohol and drugs, while those addicted to the 24-hour casino in their pocket are largely left to fend for themselves.
The desperation loop
Rick Benson has heard some version of Zach’s story hundreds of times.
Benson, 70, is the founder of Algamus Recovery Centers in Goodyear, Arizona—the oldest dedicated gambling addiction treatment program in the United States, and one of fewer than ten residential facilities in the country that treats gambling addiction exclusively. Benson was a gambling addict himself. He started betting on horses at 24 and progressed through what he has since identified as the three phases of gambling addiction: the winning phase, the losing phase, and finally, the chasing/desperation phase, which can turn a bad run into an endless loop.
Benson’s loop developed when he convinced himself he could be a professional blackjack player. He moved to Las Vegas and kept meticulous track of the mathematical edge he believed he had. As his losses piled up, his life collapsed around him.
What Benson eventually understood, and what brain research has since confirmed, is that gambling addiction isn’t a willpower problem. It’s a dopamine problem. When a gambler places a bet, the brain manufactures the same neurochemical reward triggered by cocaine, alcohol, or pornography. Brain scans of gamblers in action show the same neural sectors lighting up as in cocaine users.
The gambler’s drug, however, is money, which creates a trap that has no analog in substance addiction. No cocaine addict thinks the solution to their problem is more cocaine. But for a gambler on a bad run, the only way to turn it around—and this is the trap—is with another bet.
“I remember being in financially desperate shape and thinking: I can only see three alternatives,” Benson says. “Rob a bank, turn a drug deal, or go to the casino and win my money back. The casino was the only option where the consequences weren’t prohibitive.”
Biggest strength, greatest risk factor
Like Benson, Zach felt like he had an edge. He grew up a serious sports fan—a Wizards obsessive who read the box scores in the Washington Post every morning before school, who played travel basketball, soccer, and rugby, who understood sports deeply enough to genuinely believe that he saw things other people missed. That confidence was, in part, what made him vulnerable.
“A lot of people who end up gambling feel like they have the edge because they’ve followed sports their whole life,” he says. “That was me.”
Zach’s gambling history predates FanDuel. As a kid, he watched his father play online poker every night. His father was good, too, consistently ranking in the top 100 players online. Once, at around nine years old, Zach logged on to play. He meant to log into his father’s play-money account, but accidentally opened the real one. He burned through $400 before his father noticed. In college, studying abroad in Switzerland, he went to the casinos after class and came home some days with more than $1,000 in his pocket. He knew even then that he enjoyed it a little too much.
By 2021, he was 23, fresh off a successful e-commerce venture, with real money in the bank for the first time. He put nearly all of it—a six-figure sum—into a cryptocurrency called Chainlink. Within a few months, he’d lost 80 percent of it. He considered chasing that loss by purchasing other digital coins. The problem was that he didn’t know cryptocurrency. He had no proprietary knowledge. No edge.
But he knew sports. He moved to Las Vegas, got a job, and put his paycheck every Friday into the Caesars Sportsbook. The app made it easy to forget he was spending real money.
“Five hundred dollars feels the same as a hundred,” he says. “It’s literally just a thumbpad.”
For nearly two years, the loop played out the same way for Zach. Get paid. Gamble. Lose. Crash for a few days. Re-motivate. Repeat. “It’s like climbing an avalanche,” he says. “You just can’t make any progress.”
The target kept moving. First, he was chasing the crypto losses. Then the sports betting losses stacked on top of them. Then just the previous week’s deficit. He bet on the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL. When the American slate ended, he found European hockey. When that ended, Japanese baseball. And then, at 1 a.m., amateur women’s tennis in Southeast Asia.
A few weeks after that night, after a bad beat on a Mets game, Zach bottomed out. He went downstairs to his mother, sobbing—something she hadn’t seen him do since he was a child.
The next morning, his parents started making calls, trying to find help for their son.
Nowhere to turn
There are thousands of residential facilities in the United States dedicated to treating alcohol and drug addiction. There are fewer than ten that focus on gambling.
Benson opened Algamus in 1992 because when he needed residential treatment himself, it didn’t exist. He knew from experience why gambling-specific care mattered. Sit a gambling addict next to a heroin addict with track marks on his arms and a meth addict with rotted teeth, he says, and the gambler’s first thought is that he doesn’t belong there. “Even though emotionally he’s just as devastated,” Benson says, “he doesn’t see himself as the same.”
Algamus is deliberately boutique—a residential home that houses a handful of clients at a time, never more than a dozen. That intimacy is the point, and part of the problem. Facilities this small and this specialized are forced to survive on margins that leave almost no room to scale and little incentive for new treatment centers to enter the space.
Insurance coverage for addiction treatment is inconsistent and often inadequate. For a gambling disorder, it’s even worse. Roughly 15 percent of the insurance verifications Algamus processes come back with gambling disorder written out of the policy entirely. The program charges $26,000 for its five-week residential stay and cannot accept Medicare or Medicaid. The administrative burden of Medicare certification—compliance audits, specialized billing systems, dedicated staff—costs more than a facility this size could recoup from reimbursement rates that rarely cover the actual cost of care.
Medicaid has become the single largest source of funding for substance use disorder care in the United States, sustaining thousands of residential facilities and covering millions of patients annually. Gambling disorder receives no equivalent federal support. That leaves treatment providers to survive on a patchwork of state allocations, private insurance, and out-of-pocket payments, while older patients have no option but to self-pay.
“I have a 66-year-old man,” Benson says, “and his only alternative is $26,000 out of pocket, on a fixed income. It’s a very sad situation.”
Research consistently shows that intensive, in-person therapy produces meaningful reductions in gambling disorder severity, with face-to-face treatment outperforming remote or self-guided alternatives. But sustained recovery often requires ongoing support long after discharge. Across multiple studies, long-term relapse rates for gambling disorder run as high as 75 percent.
Money, by its very nature, complicates the recovery equation. Unlike alcohol and drug treatment, which are built almost universally around total abstinence, the gambling recovery world is more divided. Gamblers Anonymous follows the abstinence model, but many researchers now recognize controlled gambling as a viable goal for some patients, simply because a recovering addict can avoid a substance entirely. For a recovering gambler, using money is unavoidable.
Zach flew into Phoenix on July 26, 2025, was picked up by a staff member named Doug—a recovering gambler himself—and driven to Algamus’s residential home in Goodyear. The program ran Monday through Saturday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and included group therapy, individual sessions with a master’s-level therapist, yoga, gym visits, and Gamblers Anonymous meetings in the surrounding community. They let residents watch sports. The philosophy was that the NFL isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the temptation to bet on it. You have to learn to live alongside it, not wall yourself off from it.
His parents helped with the cost. He knows that makes him one of the lucky ones.
“What would I have done if I didn’t have them?” he says. “I think I might still be gambling today.”
A $25 solution to a $14 billion problem?
Elliott Rapaport watched a close friend spend months navigating the search for gambling addiction treatment—calling hotlines that led nowhere, finding therapists untrained in the disorder, discovering his insurance covered almost nothing. In 2023, Rapaport founded Birches Health to try to close the gap.
The model is telehealth: therapy delivered remotely, covered by insurance, available nationwide. Birches now works with more than 100 insurance plans across all 50 states. According to Rapaport, 94 percent of patients pay less than $25 per session out of pocket—a number that looks very affordable next to Algamus’s $26,000 residential price tag.
The question Rapaport raises, without prompting, is whether it actually works.
The honest answer is that the evidence is real, but still building. A 2024 randomized trial published in JAMA Network Open and a large Swedish cohort study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research both found meaningful reductions in gambling behavior through internet-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy, especially when paired with a trained therapist rather than fully self-guided. Birches’ own data shows 85 percent of patients reporting improved symptoms after nine sessions.
Benson is supportive of telehealth, in principle, yet skeptical that it can replicate what five weeks in residency can provide.
“The stressors are still there,” he says. “The phone is still there.”
Rapaport doesn’t entirely disagree. He frames Birches not as a replacement for residential care but more for “month four through year 40″—a sustained recovery infrastructure that follows a crisis, or that serves the many people for whom a $26,000 residential stay is simply not an option.
“There is no cure,” he says. “Gamblers Anonymous has known this for 50 years. People go to meetings for the rest of their lives. We want to build the modern version of that.”
The patient population that needs Rapaport’s version is growing fast. Young men between 18 and 35 are the most vulnerable. For them, sports betting arrived already gamified and social.
“Their friends think it’s hilarious when they lose money,” Rapaport says, “until it’s obviously not funny anymore.”
More than one in three boys between 11 and 17 has gambled in the past year, according to one survey. On college campuses, students have been found logging into accounts under a parent’s name or funneling bets through older classmates. In Massachusetts—where online gambling is legal—school counselors have identified gambling as the fastest-growing behavioral concern among middle schoolers.
Both Benson and Rapaport agree that the current system is nowhere near adequate to handle a generation that grew up with a casino in their pocket.
Everyone wins, except the user
In March, a landmark product liability lawsuit compared DraftKings and FanDuel directly to tobacco, cocaine, and heroin—products engineered, the filing argues, to addict their users by design. The suit is led by Richard Daynard, the attorney who secured the $206 billion settlement from the tobacco industry. DraftKings says it intends to “vigorously defend” the suit. FanDuel declined to comment.
The federal government has no spending allocated toward gambling addiction research or treatment. The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates the total economic cost of the crisis at $14 billion a year, largely absorbed by employers, healthcare systems, and the criminal justice system. Only about eight percent of people with a gambling problem ever seek help. Those who do often opt for outpatient therapy because it’s cheaper, logistically simpler, and easier to hide from a spouse. Benson understands the reasoning, but doesn’t endorse the math.
“If I do two hours of outpatient therapy a week,” he says, “for the other 166 hours in the week, I still have my gambling device in my pocket, and all the stressors in my life are still there.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has spent two years trying to redirect money the federal government is already collecting from the industry toward the people the industry is leaving behind. His GRIT Act would direct 50 percent of the existing federal excise tax on sports wagers—more than $300 million annually—toward gambling addiction treatment and research without imposing any new taxes. His SAFE Bet Act would go further, restricting sports betting ads to certain hours, banning the AI-driven targeting the industry uses to find and re-engage vulnerable users, limiting deposits to five per customer per day, and creating a national self-exclusion registry so problem gamblers don’t have to file paperwork in every state where they might place a bet.
The AI targeting is the newest threat, according to Blumenthal, who compares it to “a cocaine seller having the technology to pick potential victims of addiction.”
The industry’s public position is that it takes responsible gaming seriously. FanDuel and DraftKings both point to spending dashboards, deposit limits, and self-exclusion tools as evidence.
Lori Kalani, DraftKings’ Chief Responsible Gaming Officer, grew up in Las Vegas, the daughter of gambling addicted parents. “They left me on the street when I was 15,” she says. “Back in those days, responsible gaming was a placard on an ATM machine in a casino.” Kalani leads a team of 50 people whose sole responsibility is monitoring DraftKings platforms for problem behavior. Last year, they conducted 92,000 manual reviews of user accounts flagged for risky behavior by the company’s automated monitoring system.
DraftKings reported 4.8 million average monthly unique paying customers in 2024 across its platforms, meaning those 92,000 reviews covered less than two percent of its active base.
According to Kalani, the industry is also building a shared self-exclusion database through the Responsible Online Gaming Association that would prevent a self-excluded user on one platform from opening an account on any member platform. But self-exclusion requires a gambler to first identify themselves as having a problem—something most problem gamblers never do. The tools that exist are largely built for the people who come forward. For everyone else, the industry has few answers.
What the industry has invested in is keeping regulators at bay. A watchdog report from the Campaign for Accountability found that major gambling companies have simultaneously lobbied to kill consumer protections, including a proposed ban on in-game betting in Minnesota and cooling-off prompt requirements in Virginia.
In 2025, FanDuel spent $1.1 million on federal lobbying—seven times what it spent the year prior—largely to fight the SAFE Bet Act. DraftKings spent $900,000, more than double the previous year. Over the decade prior, FanDuel and DraftKings, which together control around 80% of the online sports betting market, spent more than $20 million fighting regulations in at least 20 states. When the two companies—along with Fanatics—launched prediction market apps in late 2025, they stripped out addiction hotline information and session time tracking that their own sportsbook apps had featured. After the lapse was reported in the media, both added the tools.
Prediction market apps let users bet on virtually any outcome—sports, politics, entertainment, financial events—and operate in states where sports betting remains illegal, exposing millions of new users to the same addictive mechanics as sportsbooks, but with fewer consumer protections.
According to the most recent data, states allocated approximately $134 million to problem gambling treatment and prevention in 2023, drawn almost entirely from state tax revenues rather than the companies themselves, and roughly one-tenth of what addiction experts say is needed. Kalani says that since 2022, DraftKings has contributed $15,000 annually to each of 35 state problem gambling councils—roughly $525,000 a year, about $2.5 million in total since 2022. FanDuel, in a statement to Fast Company in response to inquiries, said it invests more than $130 million annually in responsible gaming alongside its parent company, Flutter. The company did not specify how much of that total goes directly to treatment as opposed to tools, research, and education.
By contrast, in 2024, the gambling industry as a whole increased spending across all advertising channels by 15 percent to approximately $2 billion. Traditional sports betting accounted for 61 percent of that overall spend.
“What [these companies] are devoting to problem gambling is a pittance,” Blumenthal says. “It hardly deserves the name of support for treatment or research.”
FanDuel did not respond to questions about whether it believes the current treatment infrastructure is adequate, how it defines problem gambling on its platform, or the specific provisions of the SAFE Bet Act it opposed in its 2025 lobbying effort.
Both of Blumenthal’s proposed bills remain stalled at the committee level.
Early recovery
Zach returned home from Algamus in September 2025, just as the NFL season kicked off. Within days, he was bombarded by gambling ads on pregame shows, broadcast tickers, and in his Instagram feed. He deleted apps from his phone, but as a sports fan, he acknowledges that he can never escape the ads.
Today, he can watch a Wizards game without running betting lines in his head—something that for years, he was unable to do. He has a good job, a girlfriend, and hasn’t gambled in more than eight months.
He says he often thinks about the people who don’t have what he had: a supportive family, finances to cover a five-week residential program, and the luck of finding one of the handful of places in the country equipped to help. He thinks about how there are so few options for treatment, while the platforms that kept him up until 1 a.m., betting on nonsense, are valued in the tens of billions and continue to grow. By 2029, analysts project Americans will lose nearly $24 billion annually to online sports betting.
“There’s no separation anymore,” Zach says. “Gambling is sports, and sports is gambling. Everyone seems to be financially benefiting from it. The only person that’s not benefiting is the user.”
