Sports betting is now legal in North Carolina. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, ponders the winners and losers.
It was Thursday night, about an hour before the Duke-NC State game in the ACC Tournament. I opened the BetMGM site to find out all the ways I could take the house’s money.
You can do that in North Carolina now. One week ago today, legal sports betting in the state officially went live. A slew of betting sites have opened up shop here, and state law also allows sports betting at Bank of America Stadium, the Spectrum Center, Quail Hollow Country Club and Charlotte Motor Speedway.
You probably don’t need to be told any of this, because the betting sites have carpet-bombed our state with ads for months, offering signing bonuses and nearly unlimited ways to bet on just about any sport you choose.
Take that Duke-NC State game, for example. I could’ve bet on the point spread — Duke was an 11 ½ point favorite. I could’ve bet the over-under — whether the teams would total more or less than 146 ½ points. I could’ve bet on which team would grab the most rebounds, which player would make the most three-pointers, which team would score 10 points first. And that doesn’t even begin to get into all the parlays, where you can group bets together for a potentially bigger payout.
You can make bets in similar microscopic detail for just about any game in any sport around the world, from the NBA to the Premier League, from snooker to badminton. The possibilities seem endless.
This is where I remind you that all these billion-dollar companies are built on the backs of losers. And you, dear listener, if you lay your money down, will almost surely be one of them.
This is all about money, of course. Tax dollars for the state. More revenue for the teams and leagues that participate. That money does not just appear by magic. It disappears from the pockets of gamblers.
I’m a bit of a hypocrite in this regard. If I’m in a town with a casino, I like to go play some low-stakes poker. This week I’ll donate 5 or 10 bucks to a couple of friends’ March Madness pools that I have never once won. But that’s as far as it goes. I’ve got some vices. Being a degenerate gambler is not one of them.
But online sports betting is a never-ending Pez dispenser for problem gamblers. You don’t have to go to a casino. You don’t even have to go to the convenience store, like you have to do with lottery tickets. The casino is in your pocket, 24 hours a day.
North Carolina became the 38th state to legalize sports betting since the Supreme Court allowed states to decide in 2018. Two things are bound to happen in the years to come.
One, the number of problem gamblers in our country is going to rise by a lot.
And two, there will be multiple and massive sports betting scandals in our near future. The bets are too easy, and the money too large, for it not to somehow trickle down to players or coaches or referees.
It might be true that it’s better for the state to collect its share of the sports betting business, because it’s going to happen whether it’s legal or not. But what North Carolina has done is give an incredibly addictive system its stamp of approval. We’re the drug dealers now.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
