You know what to do.

[televisions scratching] [explosion] [lion roaring] Those ads are everywhere.

I frankly find it really annoying.

There is an obsession over the lines Who loves money?

than whats the best bet.

[yelling] Everybody take shelter, hide right now.

Oh my God!

No one could have imagined March of 2020.

That is good news for sports betting in Colorado which started up while casinos shut down.

Folks were glued to their screens more than ever before.

It really was Covid that lured me into the daily, sports gambling itself.

[neon buzzing] This is episode two of “Cash Out,” our four-part documentary series looking at Colorado's first five years of legalized sports betting.

In episode one, we examined what went into passing Proposition DD, the measure that made sports gambling legal in Colorado.

In this episode, we'll look into the reality of sports through the state's looser regulations, the influx of sportsbooks and promotions, the influx of sportsbooks and promotions, and the athlete harassment that followed.

and the athlete harassment that followed.

I made Gabby lose by heckling her, and it made my parlay win.

This is “Cash Out.” As soon as we get any kind of information, we will certainly pass it along.

The game tonight has been postponed.

You are all safe.

[yelling] [booing] When sports betting was legalized in Colorado, that coincided with the beginning of the pandemic.

So what was that like for you?

It was tough because there for quite some time there was nothing to bet on.

The Avalanche season is delayed... The NBA is now the first major... ...the virus delivering a hard hit to the NFL.... ...all operations indefinitely.

The sporting calendar had had the least amount going on that it has ever had.

And now it's happened, its like, bro this is crazy.

It was a very interesting experience to see how hard it hit and how quickly it spread in Colorado.

We had sports betting, and all the sports were not playing.

We looked at whether it would make sense to delay the start.

But because it was online, we were able to say, “You know what?

If you're ready to go, let's go.” We were able to pick up a few sports out there still playing.

The apps nowadays show everything.

It's an international platform, so then it turns into the ping-pongs, the overseas tennis, basketball... There was hockey being played in Belarus.

There was hockey being played in Belarus.

there was table tennis being played in Russia, the Ukraine, and as a marketer, you had to get creative.

You had to provide folks with more information.

Gold!

That did feel like a gift and a curse.

You're like, “Wow.

I can't believe that my focus at work this week is Im going to learn about the Belarusian Hockey League.

Basically was just trying to move money around fast as I could.

Id bet on the early slate.

Use the winnings to go on the later slate.

Then you start betting on table tennis to bridge that gap, because you just can't accept losing for the weekend.

...generated over $63 billion in bets last year.

...generated over $63 billion in bets last year.

That was the most available sport at the time.

That was the most available sport at the time.

You had competitions kicking off every five minutes every ten minutes or so.

No!

It still surprises me to this day to see how much people play on table tennis.

to see how much people play on table tennis.

Any given quarter, or any given month, Any given quarter, or any given month, Table tennis betting is usually the fourth or fifth most popular option amongst Colorado bettors.

In August of 2019, right after the legislation had passed, there were already 6 or 7 states that were live, so we could look at what the rules looked like in other the states.

From the regulatory side of things, how is Colorado different than other states that have legalized online sports betting?

I think in the, I think in the beginning, the barrier to entry was a little bit lower in Colorado.

Legalizing sports betting isnt quite as simple as going from a “no” to a “yes.” When the Supreme Court turned the decision over to the states, each state needed to establish its own rules and regulations.

This included questions about in-person vs.

online gambling, and how many sportsbooks were allowed to operate.

Nebraska and the Dakotas only allow in-person sports betting, while Tennessee and Vermont only allow online betting.

Pennsylvania requires sportsbooks to pay an initial fee of $10 million, and New York taxes sportsbook revenue at 51%.

Colorado is a bit more lenient.

Colorado's licensing system allows around 30 sportsbook operators, though that's a lot compared to other states.

And those operators pay a relatively low 10% tax on their gross gaming revenue.

This is partially why Colorado often ranks among the states with the greatest number of active sportsbooks.

Today, there are about 15 legal online and retail sportsbooks but this number varies as operators enter and exit the market.

it was very similar to New Jersey, and it was very similar to Indiana.

It was truly kind of open, competitive marketplace.

If you've got way too much tax, way too many regulations, things that stifle the industry, you're not able to bring the products that make it good for the player.

Probably in 2021, we were one of at least 30 different operators that were available.

If you, in an ideal world, could select certain states that you want to win in, Colorado was really, really high up on our list.

You have all of the major sports teams.

People really care about those sports.

But the more open the market is, if it's a market where there are 30+ books, you probably have to be a lot more aggresive on your new customer promotional offers.

[lion roaring] Oh, it's about to be a party in here.

Gamble.

Is sports betting so pervasive because it's being marketed so heavily, or is it being marketed so heavily because it's very popular?

I think it was always going to be this popular.

I do think the advertising contributed to accelerating the knowledge and especially becasue theres so many applications and different companies.

And its not just advertising, its deposit $5 and you get $100 in free bets.

If you watch sports, or drive down the highway, or scroll on social media, you've likely seen ads like these.

With DraftKings, new customers bet five bucks to get 200 instantly in Bonus Bets... Bonus bets, also called “no sweat bets,” are sportsbook promotions in which an operator refunds a bettors wager if they lose, essentially letting the player bet with no risk.

If you win, you get your money.

And if you lose, you get your money back, though most often it's in the form of credits or tokens that can be used toward future bets in the app.

Bonus bets!

You can think of these like first-visit discounts at a new store or loyalty reward points that come with a new credit card.

The sportsbooks figure that once they've got you betting in their app, you'll come back for more.

...thats a thousand dollars worth of bonus bets.

You've just made $700.

As an increasing number of sportsbooks activated in the early days of legal Colorado sports betting, promos like bonus bets offered an effective means of convincing bettors to use one app over the dozens of others.

In total, I made about 25,000 over two seasons.

I hadn't done any sports betting at all until I learned that it was legal in Colorado.

I started doing the match betting kind of at the prime time of all of these sportsbooks coming and really trying to hook us.

Join today, and get your first bet risk free up to $500.

Head to the DraftKings sportsbook app to claim your free bet.

Sign up now and get five second-chance bets up to $100 each.

Some savvy players like Maribeth Oscamou capitalized on this promo palooza using one of the worlds most-feared and most-powerful tools: Math.

I'm Maribeth Oscamou.

I am an associate teaching professor in the Department of Computer Science here at CU Boulder.

When I first started this, the promos they were offering were amazing, because they really were just trying to get market share.

I joined all of the ones that were available in Colorado.

At the time, there were probably around 20.

Theres a variety of different ways you can do what are called mathematically advantageous bets.

One of the first ones is just called “match betting,” where you just bet on all possible outcomes of a given game.

So you pick different sportsbooks and maybe bet that and maybe bet that team Team A wins on this one, and Team B wins on this one for the same game.

Just doing that straight up is not going to be advantageous to you, you're going to lose money because you're basically going to be paying them a little fee to bet everytime youre doing it.

But what I learned was when they're trying to get you to join a sportsbook, they'll usually offer you a promotion.

And if you use that promotion to then set bets that are matched, you can guarantee a profit using that promotion bet.

The biggest takeaway I kept telling my students when we talked about probability in games of chance is like, these are designed to take your money, And it feels fun because there's this variance in it, but if you look mathematically how they designed this over time, it is for you to lose.

Sports betting is just rooted in such great data.

We had PointsBet traders actually in the office alongside us.

They're all math people.

One of the sportsbooks, they were very interested in potentially working with me.

They were like, “Great!

We could bring you in on our side to help write our algorithms or update our odds.

There's a rhyme and reason to everything you see in a sports betting app.

All of that is rooted into algorithms and factual math that is backing how those lines are set and how they move accordingly.

You work a university with college students, can you tell me a little bit about what you've seen among your students?

Around late 2020, early 2021, especially that first NFL season, you really saw more conversation online.

When the first few students were in the Zoom class, theyd be talking about, “What are your favorite teams for the weekend coming up?” Athletes are they may say, “Hey, we don't care about parlays.

We don't...” but they care about it because it affects them.

Tthey, you know, mentally, it affects them.

I'm of the mind that a lot of states have not done enough to protect the actual athletes and protect the gamblers themselves.

Don't choke, Gabby, like you did yesterday, Gabby!

We're not only seeing online harassment, we're seeing people showing up to games we're seeing people showing up to games to heckle athletes.

You never really thought it would get to, you know, the 18-year-olds and the 20-year-olds of the world.

Unfortunately, you know, it has.

Travis Hunter is the 2024 Heisman Trophy winner.

Travis is incredible.

But also This one right here is easy money to me.

you see these conversations around him and it almost reduces him to something thats almost like a non-playable character in a game where it's just like, “Oh, you're just this conduit to gamble on.” Lose one game, two games and next thing you know, your DM is crazy.

Especially on a college campus when they're also a junior and they're also taking similar classes and they're going to the same stuff, and they're going to the same stuff, it might be a little bit of a reminder of that human aspect of this sports gambling.

[ticking] Males between the ages of around 24 to 34 is really the age group at the highest risk.

There is not that time to even think about it.

Phones and scrolling have an addictive quality to them, so it's kind of like a double-whammy.

And that's what the research showed to.

You have to basically live a lie telling everybody that it's okay, when in reality could not be more opposite.

And you hide it from everybody so much that it now becomes a completely hidden addiction.

Nobody knows what you're doing, when you're doing it, you live two separate lives.

[neon buzzing] If you or someone you know is experiencing problem gambling, you can call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit the Problem Gambling Coalition of Colorado website