In 1987, a pubescent boy named Joel Soper rode his bicycle to the Cloverlanes Bowling Alley in Livonia, Michigan. After parking the bike, he walked down the street and snuck into the now-defunct Detroit Race Course to bet on a horse named Bring on the Rain.
“I bet my bet, and it was actually raining out,” recalled Soper. “He won by four lengths and I won like $150. And that was it – I was hooked.”
Over the course of the next 35 years, Soper would earn millions of dollars as a successful landscape entrepreneur – and proceed to gamble away every penny of it, mostly on sports bets.
Soper, who recently published a book, Never Enough Zeroes, about the lessons that can be learned from his epic losing streak, has not gambled in over six months. So what finally made him stop?
“Live betting ruined my life,” he said.
Specifically, push came to shove when, about nine months ago, Soper's wagering consisted exclusively of live – or in-game – bets.
“I'm betting Russian ping-pong, tennis, live betting as the over/under moves, 38 plays in the same f**king game,” explained Soper, who will be profiled next week on Sports Handle's sister site, MI Bets.
Of course, bettors like Soper represent one extreme of the sports wagering spectrum. At the other are recreational bettors who just like to get a little action down to make their sports consumption more interesting.
But could the proliferation of in-game wagering (bets placed on a sporting event after it's begun) and its subset, micro-betting (wagering on individual occurrences within a sporting event, like the result of the next point in tennis), in the United States bridge the gap?
The problem with Paul
A recent peer review published in the Journal of Gambling Issues cited a 2019 Australian study that stated, “Among those who bet on micro events, 78% were considered problem gamblers and only 5% as non-problem gamblers. Among non-micro-bettors, the problem gambling rate was 29%. Micro-bettors were found to be younger, well-educated, and single – and to participate in multiple types of gambling.”
“The research and anecdotal experience confirms there’s a higher risk,” said Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. “You can place more bets more quickly – that is a risk factor for any type of gambling. But I think one of the things that’s a little deeper, not necessarily backed by research but from anecdotal experience, is that many sports bettors see it as a game of skill. A lot like some poker players, folks spend an enormous amount of time researching statistics and probability. But most in-play bets remove a lot of that skill and strategy.”
Enter America's reigning doofus du jour, social media maniac/boxer Jake Paul, who recently announced that he'd be teaming up with Simplebet co-founder Joey Levy to launch a micro-betting app called Betr.
From a business standpoint, their timing couldn't be, uh, better. In a recent earnings call, Sportradar CEO Carsten Koerl called in-game betting “unstoppable,” adding, “Undoubtedly, once it starts, you can't reverse it.” And as Sports Handle's Matt Rybaltowski recently reported, DraftKings just rolled out a new micro-betting market for Major League Baseball pitch speeds, while BetMGM noted in May that its in-game handle had risen 160% on a year-over-year basis.
All told, you can hardly swing a dead cat – presumably one strapped to a bottle rocket and used as a prop in one of Paul's YouTube videos – these days without hearing the words “in-game,” “in-play,” or “micro-betting.”
In a just-published interview with New York'magazine, Paul talked about the “TikTokification” of sports betting and how he and his friends will gamble on just about anything, all the time.
“When we're all in a house together, there's got to be at least two bets going every hour,” he boasted.
In New York's piece, Lisa Power, director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers, is quoted as saying, “By mentioning TikTok, they're basically saying, 'We're pitching this to really young people.' What we know is that the younger people start gambling, the more likely they are to develop a problem down the road.”
In response, Levy said the only way for Betr to become something “that's going to endure for the next 20 to 30 years” is by “really championing responsible gambling and being incredibly focused on that.”
By way of reminder, Levy's business partner in this venture is Paul, an individual not widely recognized for practicing or promoting restraint in, well, anything.
Our first ever episode of BS w/ Jake Paul is now live!