Michigan online betting: $8.3B wagered and 171% spike in hotline calls

They’re on billboards, bus sides and radio stations along your commute. They often interrupt your favorite TV show and evening social media scrolling.

Advertisements for mobile sports betting and casinos are everywhere in states like Michigan where online wagering is available. They offer hundreds of free spins, no-risk first bets, and deposit matches worth hundreds to get new customers enrolled.

For recovering gamblers like Nicholas Tabarias, the ads bring back memories of the sights and sounds of the casino, and the dopamine rushes that kickstarted their addiction.

“It was very much a trigger for me,” said the 34-year-old musician from Shelby Township who recalled first seeing the influx of gaming ads. He lost thousands of dollars a few years back before cutting out gambling and seeking help.

“With smartphones, with a click of a button, you can download an app and place a bet, and that can lead to a lot of trouble. They’ve made it so easy for us compulsive gamblers to be able to place that bet.”

Super Bowl 2021 was the first major sporting event on which Michigan residents could lawfully wager. Two years later, the number of states with legalized online sports betting and gaming has climbed from 15 to 36, and calls to the Michigan’s Problem Gambling Hotline have increased drastically, as have referrals for gambling disorder treatment.

During fiscal year 2022, the helpline received 4,306 gambling-related calls, according to data from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. It’s an 18% increase from the fiscal year 2021, and up 171% from the fiscal year 2020, before mobile wagering was an option. Similarly, the last year saw more than 500 people referred to treatment for gambling-related problems – up from 398 referrals the year prior, and 294 in the 2020 fiscal year.

Michiganders wagered a total of $4.6 billion in 2022, up from $3.7 billion a year ago. The state’s commercial and tribal internet casino and internet sports betting operations reported $1.98 billion in total gross receipt, which was an increase of 41% from 2021.

“I get a call almost every day from a gambler somewhere in Michigan who is in trouble because of this,” said Michael Burke, president of the Michigan Association of Problem Gamblers. “In the old days, it might take a person two, four, six years to get addicted to gambling and it all had to do with proximity to a casino. The biggest change with all the new games and being online, it’s happening in a matter of months.”

Burke, 77, has made it his mission for the last 20 years to raise awareness and connect recovering gambling addicts with resources. But the gambling world is exploding, leaving him worried about the direction it’s heading.

“In the next five years there’s going to be a mess unlike anything we’ve ever seen with gambling in the past,” he said. “It’s happening in Europe now, people losing everything they own, and there aren’t enough treatment programs being made available for people.”

‘Living in darkness and secrecy’

For Tabarias, it started with trips to the casino with his aunt in 2014. He largely went to grab dinner and keep her company at the slot machines, but found he enjoyed card games like blackjack and poker. More specifically, he liked the rush that accompanied a big win.

The visits grew more frequent until it became a near nightly ritual.

“Like many others, I was doing the research on things like counting cards, trying to find ways to beat the system,” Tabarias said. “I was getting smalls wins here and there, but I did notice the losses were racking up.”

He gambled away his paychecks, then took out credit cards and payday loans and even pawned his musical instruments in an effort to win back the more than $15,000 he lost.

“I was living in darkness and secrecy,” he said. “There were countless times where I considered, you know, ramming my car into the median. I was just in a dark place.”

Can’t see the graph above? .

Tabarias credits the Michigan Problem Gambling Helpline, along with his counselor and recovery program, for saving his life. Through the hotline, he began attending sessions where he acknowledged his addiction and met others in similar circumstances. He was connected to resources to help consolidate his debt.

When a mobile poker app led him to relapse in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, it was those relationships from his recovery program that helped hold him accountable and get him back on track.

Since giving up gambling, Tabarias has paid off a majority of his debt. He purchased his guitars back from the pawn shop and has kept busy with his music and his day job in quality control for a manufacturing company.

“Since getting out of the program my life has definitely been a lot better,” he said.

Never enough

Tabarias’ story echoes the one at the heart of Burke’s awareness campaign: his own.

Formerly a Howell-based attorney, he was overtaken by an uncontrollable urge to gamble. He stole upwards of $1.6 million from clients in an effort to recoup his losses and wound-up spending three years in a Jackson prison on embezzlement charges.

“Two out of three gamblers will commit an illegal act to get money to gamble to take care of problems created by their gambling,” he said. “When I was practicing, I had more money than I could ever spend … It wasn’t the money; it was the high you get being involved in it.”

Since his release, he wrote a book titled “Never Enough: One Lawyer’s True Story of How He Gambled His Career Away.” It was published by the American Bar Association, with all royalties going to his victims.

Burke has shared his story and conducted seminars on behalf of the American and Michigan bar associations and the National Association of Social Workers. He plans to spend the rest of his life volunteering with recovering addicts and pushing for more resources.

Among the areas Burke said needs improvement in Michigan is advertising. He’d like to see more regulation either from the industry itself or the legislature. They’re not doing enough, he said.

“These ads where they talk about risk-free bets and all that, that’s the part that bothers me most today,” he said. “We’re going to give you free money. The majority of people I know would be able to figure out that’s probably not true ... but that’s what they’re selling.

“They’re hoping you hit a big enough jackpot that will have you hooked for life.”

Michigan has a few dozen counseling agencies that offer treatment opportunities, including three Detroit-area facilities providing in-patient residential treatment as part of a pilot program that began in FY2021, according to the state health department. Helpline staff are trained to assess needed care levels and make appropriate referrals for treatment.

But Burke would like to see more resources to meet the growing demand for treatment, including more in-patient treatment centers.

“The state of Michigan knew before the first casino was built, they knew what would happen,” Burke said, citing a study commissioned by then-governor John Engler in the late 1990s to assess the impacts of casinos opening in Detroit. “They saw it coming and to this point, they have failed to address sufficiently the problems that are here and the problems that are coming in the future.”

‘Who’s it really helping?’

Sam Waalkes, 28, knows his story isn’t the norm. A former Grand Rapids-area Spanish teacher, he left his full-time job within the last two years to focus solely on his wagers.

According to his betting records, which he logs in a private Discord channel for his more than 1,600 paying subscribers, he turned a profit every month in 2022, and again in January. His self-reported win rate for those logged bets was almost 40%.

Waalkes said he spends several hours each day comparing betting lines across the various gambling platforms and taking advantage of books that haven’t caught up to the market. He offers those selections to his Discord subscribers, as well as some to his more than 23,000 Twitter followers.

“I’m betting on teams I’ve never heard of, where I don’t know a single player on the team,” he said. “You kind of become a robot and it’s like, this is what the numbers say, one of them is an outlier, so we hammer the outlier, and we do that over a huge sample size, like we have 5,000 bets a year.”

He says he’s never felt like he was flirting with addiction, but he knows some of his followers likely can’t say the same. He has received direct messages from bettors who note they’re down on their luck after a bad month and are in search of picks to turn things around. He said it’s tough to relate to those users because he’s not viewing his next bet as a bailout or “get out of jail free card.”

“There’s kind of like a little moral problem there,” he said. “At the same time, I feel like I’m more of an educator in the sense that I’m telling people how to bet, what to bet. I’m pretty strongly outspoken about bankroll management and how you have to be able to afford this.”

Additionally, he recognizes there “are several, maybe even the majority of people, who do kind of have a problem with this,” adding that it’s up to state leaders who legalized it to put resources in place to help people.

“It’s become my job full-time of course, but at the same time I think it’s pretty reasonable to say like, we probably shouldn’t have a blackjack table in our pocket. Who’s it really helping besides like a very small subset of people like myself who are like, very, very serious about it?”

If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, contact the Michigan Problem Gambling Helpline at 1-800-270-7117. The helpline is confidential and offers trained counselors available 24-7 to provide immediate help, including screening services and referrals to treatment or support groups.