Fanatics Sportsbook at Total Mortgage Arena, in Bridgeport, Conn. April 10, 2026.
Ned Gerard/Hearst Connecticut Media
Fanatics Sportsbook at Total Mortgage Arena, in Bridgeport, Conn. April 10, 2026.
Ned Gerard/Hearst Connecticut Media
Total Mortgage Arena, in Bridgeport, Conn. April 10, 2026.
Ned Gerard/Hearst Connecticut Media
The Fanatics Sportsbook at Winners in Norwalk in Jan. 2025.
H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, left, discussed sports betting with students, including Xzavian Rios and Shanlay Claude, pictured here, at the Sport and Medical Sciences Academy in Hartford during a roundtable on April 8, 2025.
Alex Putterman/Hearst Connecticut Media
In 2021, Rep. Maria Horn helped shepherd sports betting legalization through the Connecticut legislature, defending the measure on the House of Representatives floor and urging her colleagues to support it as well.
Yes, she recognized the risk of increased problem gambling, but the bill presented a revenue opportunity for the state, and she figured Connecticut was better off legalizing betting than letting it continue underground and unregulated.
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Five years later, though, amid increased gambling addiction, a series of betting scandals in pro sports and the recent rise of lightly regulated “prediction markets,” she’s not so sure.
“I am concerned,” Horn, D-Salisbury, said this week. “I’m concerned about what it’s doing to sports, I’m concerned about young people betting, I’m concerned about the increasing blurring between this and prediction markets.”
As she read a recent viral Atlantic article in which the author described wagering on sports as an experiment before betting gradually took over his life, Horn couldn’t help wonder whether Connecticut and other states were right to legalize this form of gambling.
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“I think a lot of people felt like, ‘Oh, this is just a fun thing we’re going to do here,'” she said. “And I don’t think we fully realized what we were getting ourselves into.”
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In certain ways, sports betting has been a clear success for Connecticut. It has drawn ample participation, driving a steady increase of revenue to the state. State data shows revenue for both sports betting and online casino gaming, also legalized in 2021, has increased steadily over the past five years, with sports betting alone earning the state about $29.4 million last year.
It has also offered another profit stream for the state’s two major casinos and allowed people seeking to bet to do so without crossing state lines or engaging an illegal bookie.
“Sports wagering, anecdotally in-district, a lot of people love it,” said Rep. Greg Howard, a Stonington Republican whose district borders Foxwoods Resort Casino. “They’re grateful to have it on a platform that’s controlled, where they don’t have to do things illegally. And certainly it’s been revenue for the state.”
In other ways, though, legalized sports betting has validated skeptics’ worst fears. The Connecticut Council on Problem Gaming, which takes no official position on whether betting should be legal, says calls from people seeking help have increased 46% since 2021, while chats have risen 41%. And though Connecticut hasn’t experienced a major betting scandal, professional baseball and basketball, among other sports, have seen players allegedly manipulate their own stats on behalf of bettors.
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“There’s no question that there was a foresight failure, and people didn’t see the evils all around the country,” U.S. Sen Richard Blumenthal said following a recent roundtable on youth sports betting he held in Hartford. “It’s not just Connecticut. This problem is a national public health crisis.”
At least in Connecticut, sports betting turns out to be the rare issue where opinions don’t fall along party lines. CT Insider spoke with both Republicans and Democrats who remain enthusiastic about the expansion of legalized gambling, as well as both Republicans and Democrats who are skeptical of it.
This legislative session, lawmakers are weighing several bills aimed at further regulating sports betting, including one that would require state-run colleges and universities offer programs to combat problem gambling and another that would restrict betting advertisements and limit the use of artificial intelligence on gambling platforms.
Both those bills have passed out of their respective legislative committees and appear to have a chance at becoming law. Even with increased regulation, though, top officials say there’s no turning back anytime soon. Sports betting in Connecticut, for better or worse, is here to stay.
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“It’s here with us. It’s like gravity,” Gov. Ned Lamont said in a recent interview. “You just can’t avoid it.”
Concerns grow in some corners
Rep. Dave Rutigliano, R-Trumbull, was one of relatively few Connecticut lawmakers five years ago to vote against legalizing sports betting and online casino gaming, which passed 122-21 in the State House of Representatives and 28-6 in the State Senate.
Today, Rutigliano says his opinion seems more popular. One 2025 survey found 43% of Americans considered legal sports betting “a bad thing” for society, compared to only 7% who saw it as “a good thing.” Approval of sports betting has declined in recent years as legal gambling has become more prevalent, the poll found.
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“I do think the vibe has switched,” Rutigliano said. “They’ve seen what is happening, especially to young boys, young men. What we’ve done to young men, it hasn’t been good for society.”
Rutigliano said he’s alarmed how sports betting apps tempt users with generous introductory deals, appear to target people who are losing money and sometimes seek to cancel bets from those who have won large sums. His young-adult sons and their friends bet on sports rampantly, he said, sometimes wagering more than they can afford to lose.
“I don’t think we regulated the industry enough,” he said.
Rutigliano, a proud conservative, aligns in this area with Rep. Anne Hughes, D-Easton, one of the legislature’s most staunch progressives. Hughes, who also voted against gambling expansion in 2021, said this week she considers sports betting in Connecticut “a disaster.”
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“The entire industry is based on the brain science of addiction,” Hughes said. “It’s not designed for just safe gambling, it’s designed to hook you in.”
Since Connecticut legalized sports betting and online casino gaming, the demographic of person seeking help for gambling addiction has changed dramatically, says Diana Goode, executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling. Today, she said, about half of people looking for services are young men, typically in their 20s.
A 2025 study from the University of Connecticut found that 72% of Connecticut undergraduates reported gambling in the past year, with 8.3% of respondents meeting the definition of “serious problem gambling.”
While it may be true that some people would bet on sports whether or not it were legal, Goode said, others are almost certainly drawn in by the convenience of gambling apps and the rampant advertising that promotes them.
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“We used to say, before all of this, that if you lived within 40 miles of a casino the odds doubled that you’d be a problem gambler,” Goode said. “Now you have a casino in your house, so it makes sense that it’s an exponentially bigger problem.”
Goode said she particularly worries how gambling companies advertise themselves, often offering “risk-free” bets and other promotions she considers designed to mislead customers. Protections against false advertising built into Connecticut law haven’t worked exactly how she envisioned, she said.
“All of the ads needed to have our phone number on them,” Goode said, “but I didn’t realize that there was such a tiny, tiny font that was discovered somewhere, and boy, that’s what they used.”
Sports gambling companies, in response to to these concerns, tout their efforts to curb problem gambling, including deposit limits, self-exclusion options and manual reviews of accounts whose activity suggests possible problems. Lori Kalani, chief responsible gaming officer for DraftKings, said the company has more than 50 people whose full-time jobs center on responsible gaming, which she called a “companywide pillar.”
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“We don’t want people who have a gambling problem to be on our app,” she said.
A FanDuel spokesperson, in a statement, said the company invests heavily in research and education around responsible gaming and is “guided by the belief that the long-term health of our industry depends on customers having safe, sustainable experiences with our products.”
Still, Horn said she hasn’t been impressed with these companies’ approach to customer safety. Whereas Connecticut lawmakers have long worked productively with the state’s Native American tribes to regulate casino gaming, she said, this feels like something different.
“I found (the tribes) to be responsible partners,” Horn said. “I do not think that is true of FanDuel or DraftKings.”
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Others defend sports betting
Other lawmakers from both major parties say sports betting in Connecticut is going more or less exactly as planned. Lamont, for one, says he considers sports betting legalization a success, adding that, “I don’t really think we had a choice.”
“Prediction markets and sports betting, they’re happening everywhere with legal permission or not,” said the governor, a Democrat. “We might as well regulate it, see if we can keep young people away from it, get a little bit of the action, like we did.”
Lamont said he supports certain tweaks to gambling regulation, such as attempts to protect young people, but that generally, “I kind of like where we are.”
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Speaker of the House Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, offered a similar assessment, pointing to the large number of people who bet on sports legally in the state.
“It’s very popular, and the numbers indicate that,” Ritter said. “I understand there are problem gamblers, but there are problem gamblers at casinos, there’s problem smokers, there’s problem drinkers.”
As Ritter sees it, lawmakers must balance public health considerations against freedom for residents to spend their money as they choose.
“It’s always a difficult place to regulate some of these things as a state,” he said. “There is this notion in America that people have the freedom to make choices, and then there’s also this notion of trying to regulate it and be careful so that people don’t get into too much trouble.”
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One 2024 report commissioned by the the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services found only 1.8% of people in the state were problem gamblers, which the authors described as a “fairly low rate” of addiction.
Howard, the Stonington Republican, vocally supported sports betting legalization in 2021 and remains a staunch proponent five years later. He said he knows some people will develop addictions but doesn’t see that as a reason to restrict a form of entertainment many people safely enjoy.
“Everything is about balance,” he said. “Just because some people are going to become addicted to gambling, we shouldn’t outlaw it for everybody.”
During football season, Howard said, he’ll sometimes place a bet, then sit with his kids cheering on that outcome. If he wins, he might buy them dinner to celebrate.
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“That’s wholesome family fun time for us,” Howard said. “I’m not teaching my boys to be gamblers, necessarily, but everybody gets excited that if Dad wins his $100 we get Chinese (food) today.”
Potential for reform
Even Goode, whose job centers on problem gambling, says she couldn’t have predicted five years ago everything that has happened since.
“I didn’t really know what to expect at all,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think anybody did, and I think that was part of the problem.”
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Blumenthal, today one of Washington’s strongest proponents of stricter betting regulation, says legalization has gone “much, much worse” than he expected back then, as technology has enabled gambling companies to target users in ways that would have once been impossible.
“Five years ago, if people had been perhaps more prescient or more insightful, they would have seen the potential explosion of downsides and dangers,” Blumenthal said.
Even if there’s likely no reversing legalization anytime soon, some lawmakers are looking for ways to mitigate sports betting’s risks. Blumenthal, a Democrat, has proposed federal legislation he calls the SAFE Bet Act that would limit gambling advertisements during sporting events, ban prop bets on college sports, restrict gambling companies’ AI usage and require “affordability checks” on users who bet large amounts.
At the state level, several bills currently under consideration would introduce new regulations. Legislation requiring problem gaming services on college campuses passed out of the Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee by a 17-1 vote, while a bill proposing various new consumer protections cleared the Committee on General Law 18-2, despite opposition from many of the state’s gambling operators.
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The legislature now has until May 6, when its current session ends, to pass the measures into law.
Goode said she’s been encouraged by some of these recent proposals but also frustrated by lawmakers’ reluctance to think bigger.
“The state’s making a lot of money off of this,” Goode said. “So that’s one of the things that we run into trouble with: It’s a money-maker for them.”
Opinions vary on what Connecticut should do next. Hughes says the state should create much stricter safeguards and allocate far more funding for services for problem gamblers. Howard said he doesn’t think much needs to change at all. Lamont was somewhere in between, endorsing measures to protect young people but not any sort of overhaul.
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Horn, the sports betting proponent-turned-skeptic, said one way or another she’s ready for some kind of action to rein in sports betting.
“I’m short on what we do about it,” she said, “but I’m sure that we should try.”