Pat Hickey: Risking serious money on sports gambling is a sucker's bet
Betting on sports events can be fun.
I have a friend who’s a Boston fan and we have a running $10 bet on the outcome of each Canadiens-Bruins game.
Last season, the Bruins had a 3-0 edge in the season series and I lost $30, but I came out ahead because he bought the beers when we met to settle the account.
And when the National Football League begins play next weekend, I’ll go to my local watering hole and plop down $10 to pick the winners of the weekend games. It gives me a reason to care about the outcome of the Arizona Cardinals-Washington Commanders game. For the record, I’ll be giving six points to back the team formerly known as the Redskins as the favourite at home.
But any temptation to wager serious money — the money I can’t afford to lose — ended more than 50 years ago. A colleague at the Montreal Star thought he knew everything about sports and decided to cash in on that knowledge.
He won a few bets, but lost a lot more. When he lost, he made the common mistake of doubling down in an attempt to recoup his losses. He cleaned out the joint savings account he and his wife established to buy a home. He racked up $22,000 in debt.
His annual salary was $18,000.
In those days, you had to find a bookie to place a wager, but sports betting has gone mainstream since Canada legalized single-game betting two years ago. Ontario took the lead, licensing multinational companies like industry leader FanDuel, Bet 99 and Bet MGM. Other provinces decided to keep the business in house, with Mise-O-Jeu handling the action in Quebec.
The one thing they have in common is the adage “never give a sucker an even break.”
They would have you believe otherwise. The headline on Loto-Québec’s annual report reads: All of Quebec wins!
But the numbers contained in the report say otherwise.
It notes that 84 new millionaires have been created through Lotto 6/49 and Lotto Max and the winners of all the various products received $1.502 billion while the lone shareholder in Loto-Québec — the provincial government — received $1.596 billion in profit.
That might seem like almost an even split, but that profit came after this billion-dollar corporation spent more than $1.5 billion on goods and services, salaries, commissions, taxes and sponsorships that allow Mise-o-jeu to serve as the official betting partner of the Canadiens and the Alouettes.
There is $33.6 million devoted to problem gambling prevention, but if they were really serious about helping the suckers, they would tell them that for every dollar spent on lotteries and other forms of gambling, less than 50 per cent comes back to the player.
It’s impossible to watch sports on television today without being inundated with ads promoting sports betting sites in Ontario. Analysts who were once forbidden to suggest people might be betting on games have become touts and the game coverage often includes on-screen reminders of the latest odds and the opportunity to place an in-game bet.
Current and former athletes like Wayne Gretzky, Connor McDavid, Auston Matthews, Charles Barkley, sprinter Andre De Grasse and MMA legend Georges St-Pierre are featured in ads for gambling sites. This week, the Ontario government passed legislations that ban athletes and celebrities from appearing in such ads, but the prohibition doesn’t come into effect until next March.
The ads encourage parlay betting and, if you’re wondering why, all you have to do is read this excerpt from oddsshark.com’s informative primer on NFL betting:
“Parlay bets are very popular because of their often eye-popping payouts. Parlays are bets which combine two or more outcomes and every outcome needs to win in order to win your wager. If it does win, then the payout is a lot more than if you’d bet the games individually and they all won. However, the obvious downside is that the bet is less likely to win because you need multiple things to happen. Parlays are known for being highly profitable for sportsbooks.”
