Feeding into delusions
Sports bettors are even more delusional about the odds they're up against than one might suspect.
IS OPTIMISM AN ASSET? That question might sound ridiculous, but certainly there are times when being hopeful is a liability, like when a person overestimates their odds of being able to drink and drive without getting pulled over or smoke cigarettes without developing lung cancer. On a lighter note, we celebrate optimism in sports, but also roll our eyes at the golfer who swings all his might hoping to clear a lake, only to see the shot end with an inevitable splash.
It’s not always easy to pinpoint what separates a healthy dose of optimism from a dangerous delusion.
There’s a vast body of research on the subject. In 1980, health psychologist Neil Weinstein of Rutgers University drew a distinction between “a hopeful outlook on life” and “an error in judgment that can be labeled unrealistic optimism,” finding that college students often displayed the riskier version of risk-assessment. When asked to predict their odds of experiencing positive life events — owning a home, enjoying their job, reaching old age — and negative life events — getting divorced, suffering health problems, being the victim of a crime — the students consistently said their chances were more favorable than that of their peers.
Crucially, the students’ optimism didn’t just hinge on the belief that, with hard work, they could chart their own destiny. Some of their views (such as confidence they’d be able to conceive children or avoid being mugged) suggested something more like faith in their own good fortune.
You’d think there would be an evolutionary basis for our optimism bias, explaining why the prefrontal cortex of the brain gives more weight to positive possibilities than negative ones; maybe we’d be miserable, paralyzed by fear and uncertainty, without it. But that bias can also be extremely self-defeating, so much so that in 1993, the social psychologist Scott Plous concluded, “No problem in judgment and decision making is more prevalent and more potentially catastrophic than overconfidence.”
I’ve been thinking about this while trying to make sense of why sports bettors are so bad at understanding their odds, and, more importantly — and more bafflingly — why they so often lose track of how much they’ve lost. It’s one thing to walk into a casino with $200 expecting to win. It’s quite another for that person to then walk out with $20 insisting they made money.
Yet this kind of faulty accounting is rampant. In response to a 2024 survey by Siena College and St. Bonaventure University, 69 percent of online sports bettors said they either win more than they lose or break even. That same year, three researchers tracked about 700,000 online sports bettors and observed less than 5 percent of them withdrawing profits. People in the industry tell me that over the long haul, the sliver of winning bettors is even smaller: maybe 1 in 100 ultimately comes out ahead.
Last month, American University undergrads in a course taught by the Washington Post reporter Robert Klemko asked peers about their sports betting habits. (That such a project is even possible is a sign of the times; I’d bet that a decade ago, most AU students weren’t gambling on sports.) Of the 50 students queried, 33 claimed to be profitable. That’s like two-thirds of intramural basketball players saying they have a good shot of making the NBA. With gambling, such delusion would be laughable if the broader trend weren’t so alarming; some estimate that 20 percent of college students dip into their tuition funds in order to have money to wager on sports.
Two reporters at the AU Eagle, Charlie Wentworth and Joey Malaczewski, wrote a great article following up on the survey from Klemko’s class, shedding light on the mentality of campus gamblers:
One such student is Spencer Rosen, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. Before our conversation, he closed his DraftKings app and made a quip about having to “get one more in.” Rosen has placed over 50 bets on sporting events since the start of 2025 and has been gambling since tenth grade. When asked if he was addicted to sports betting, he replied defiantly, with just two short words: “Hell no.” …
At American, just 10 percent of students surveyed viewed themselves as addicted, while many bet upwards of three times per week. The average highest wager of respondents who said that they were addicted is $333, which is nearly five times higher than those who said they were not addicted, whose highest wager averaged at $66. The more AU students bet, the more they seem to spend, and in turn, engage in risky gambling behaviors.
It’s well established that sports bettors overestimate their ability to beat the house, just as a majority of motorists think they’re above-average drivers. But you’d think clicking “deposit” again and again would hammer home the reality that betting is, for almost everyone, a losing venture. So why do people still fundamentally misunderstand their odds?
I posed that question on X and got some interesting responses. Isaac Rose-Berman, a professional gambler and author of an insightful newsletter, theorized that most bettors probably know deep down that they’re in the red. “Many are delusional,” he wrote, “many more are saving face [when responding to surveys] because they don’t want to be seen as dumb/losers.”
Another pro bettor, Matt Buchalter, replied, “Like a drug that is engineered to fit into a certain receptor, gambling targets evolutionary weaknesses in the reasoning capabilities of the human brain. Our own intuition lies to us. That’s what’s so dangerous about all of this.”
There’s no doubt, as Isaac and Matt alluded to, that irrational confidence and a selective memory are inherent to gambling. But it also seems as if industry practices exploit those weaknesses. For example:
Gamblers may have a tendency to remember their wins and block out their losses, but sportsbooks seem to go out of their way to reinforce that. A weekly “progress report” for DraftKings customers, for instance, highlights each person’s biggest win, most profitable day, and most profitable sport, but makes no mention of how they did on the whole. (Of course, their biggest loss is also omitted.)
Same-game parlays are sportsbooks’ most profitable product, largely because many customers fail to understand how the odds work. When I’ve asked gamblers why they tolerate losing one parlay after another, so many of them say they’re willing to lose $10 or $20 again and again because they’re holding out for a big win that will make up for all those losses and then some. But that’s simply not how things average out. Over time, the house margin is four or five times greater for SGPs than it is for traditional “straight” bets.
Sportsbooks take advantage of fans’ optimism. Knowing that casual bettors tend to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes, bookmakers “shade” the odds so that customers win less by betting on, say, a football team to score on a given possession versus wagering that the drive will end in a turnover or punt.
Last but certainly not least, sportsbook ads often convey that bettors should expect to win money.
All this can lead people, especially young people, to mistake sports gambling for a profitable side hustle. I was invited to discuss this on the latest episode of the NPR podcast “It’s Been a Minute”:
As Americans acclimate to legal sports betting, one might hope that they’ll develop a firmer grasp of the basics with time. Yet Massachusetts has had a state lottery for more than 50 years, and people there still fail to understand Gambling 101. A 2021 study found that most Bay State gamblers had medium or low “gambling literacy,” defined as understanding basic concepts like “Gambling is not a good way to make money” and “My chances of winning do not get better after I have lost.”
I discussed this concept recently with a professor researching the mindsets of online sports bettors. His findings are preliminary and unpublished, so I won’t say too much about them, but they support this counterintuitive, discouraging theory that generally, people don’t become more competent the more they gamble.
To make up for widespread gambling illiteracy, maybe Americans will need targeted curriculum. Some think kids should be learning about the risks involved in gambling as early as elementary school. That might sound incredibly premature, but nowadays kids are inundated with gambling ads by then, inspiring some of them to find ways, legal or not, to wager.
Others suggest requiring sportsbooks to disclose the expected house edge for every bet. So, before placing a long-shot same-game parlay, a customer would learn that the house expects to profit $25 for every $100 they wager. At the moment, I don’t believe any sportsbook does anything like that. Were such disclosures to become the norm, plenty of overconfident bettors would carry on undeterred, but at least some of them, I think, would be motivated to think twice.
Dr. Weinstein continued to do influential research on optimism after his landmark 1980 study. He’s now a distinguished professor emeritus at Rutgers. I emailed him the other day, wondering if he’s optimistic that Americans will make safe decisions when confronted with so many new temptations to gamble.
He replied: “In general, the more controllable the risk, the great the tendency of people to see themselves as having the insight/talents/actions to minimize the risk, and to conclude that their own risk is less than that of others. This is particularly clear with respect to the dangers of smoking. Smokers come up with a range of creative but questionable reasons to conclude that the risks are less for them than for other smokers.
“I strongly believe,” Dr. Weinstein continued, “that most gamblers have the same tendency.” He noted that he hasn’t done research to back that up, but to me at least, it seems like the supporting data are all around us.
IT CAN BE KIND OF AGONIZING to talk about all this without sharing some of the shocking things I learned while reporting my book on sports betting legalization, which will be available for preorder in the near future. I think it will be worth the wait.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share some of the kooky gambling trivia I stumbled upon while researching the book. In the archives of The New York Times, I came across a bizarre challenge that transfixed sports fans for decades: Could a ballplayer catch a baseball dropped from the observation window of the Washington Monument, 550 feet above ground?
It was, for a while, the tallest man-made structure in the world. Weeks after it opened in 1884, P.H. McLaughlin, who oversaw the monument’s construction, bet a pro catcher from Virginia, Paul Hines, that he couldn’t achieve the feat. Hines failed, and a series of high-profile attempts followed. It wasn’t until August 21, 1908, that Charles “Gabby” Street, the Washington Nationals catcher, made the historic grab. As Scott Allen of The Washington Post recounted a couple of years ago, this particular try was the result of a $500 wager between a D.C. socialite and a local Nationals fan. A city official allowed the experiment, and a crowd was there to see the ball land in Street’s mitt, reportedly making a sound like a pistol firing. Had he not been used to catching fastballs from Walter Johnson, The Post noted at the time, the stunt might have broken his arm.
The newspaper had sent a photographer.
The Times reported the next day:
Though the ball was allowed to fall the full height of the monument with only the impetus of its own weight, by the time it came within reach of Street's mitt it is probable that it had attained the greatest speed of any ball ever caught by a player. It is estimated that the ball was going slightly over 140 feet a second when Street met it, while a breeze strong enough to give the ball a slight twist added to the difficulty.
If the ball was, indeed, traveling 140 feet per second when caught, that’s about 95 miles per hour. It’s unlikely that the highest popup in MLB history would have even reached halfway up the Washington Monument. That said, pitches nowadays regularly exceed 100 mph. The league also measures the “exit velocity” of batted balls, and the record is 122 mph. So, today’s players sometimes encounter balls going faster than the one Street caught in 1908, though none of them are plummeting straight down, which certainly adds an intimidating dimension.
Street rubbed his hands upon making the catch, then was behind the plate that afternoon when Johnson threw a complete game. Washington won, 3-1.
Thank you all for your patience as I paused my reporting to attend to other things. Wynnie has been remarkably welcoming to the young man who moved in three months ago.
Great write, Danny. Whilst not being able to understand it, it's always interesting reading about the betting nature of "normal" punters
Another winner, Danny. No delusions. J