roughly $30 billion to be wagered<\/a> on the NFL in the upcoming football season.<\/p>\nPro football has become the king of sports betting, which is now legal in 38 states and the District of Columbia. Even with only 272 regular-season games and 13 postseason games, it draws in far more than sports with far longer seasons.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not anti-gambling. I\u2019m pro-making sure people understand that it\u2019s very hard to turn a long-term profit. And that it\u2019s very easy to develop an addiction that can ruin lives.<\/p>\n
My dad was a compulsive gambler who eventually realized the only way to make consistent money was to become a bookie. He told me at a very young age, \u201cYou can\u2019t win.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the old days, you needed to find a bookie. Nowadays, young men celebrate their 21st birthdays not by buying a beer in a bar (they all have fake IDs) but by downloading an app and chasing easy money.<\/p>\n
The only easy money is the money they\u2019re all pumping into the coffers of the sportsbooks.<\/p>\n
I was 20 the first time I walked into a Nevada casino. I looked around. I saw how nice it was. How expensive everything seemed to be. How they were giving away free drinks. I immediately knew who had paid for all of that, and who would keep on paying for it.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s nothing wrong with people understanding this. If you have the money and if you don\u2019t believe you\u2019re going to get rich through sports betting, it can enhance your enjoyment of the game \u2014 if enjoyment of the game for what it is isn\u2019t enough for you.<\/p>\n
So be smart. Be careful. The sportsbooks aren\u2019t going broke. The major operations are now multi-multi-billion-dollar companies.<\/p>\n
Who do you think paid for all of that? Who do you think will keep paying for it?<\/p>\n
Just be aware of this before you start turning your own hard-earned cash into easy money. For them, not for you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While tailgating in advance of Saturday\u2019s home opener for West Virginia against football powerhouse Robert Morris (hey, there\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123185,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-123184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}