Six minutes and 27 seconds.
From the time it took to click on my friend’s promo code, verify my ID and email, enter my credit card information and make a parlay, only six minutes and twenty seven seconds had passed.
Sports betting is now all too easy to access, and Gen Z is suffering because of it.
The day I turned eighteen, my friend texted me begging me to use his promo code. “It’s basically free money,” he said, and that’s what PrizePicks made it seem like too. “Check out PrizePicks.” The sentence glared at me. “Use my personal link to get a $50 bonus after playing your first lineup!”
I wasn’t immediately sold.
Sports betting is illegal, at least that’s what I thought when I first researched PrizePick’s legality. However, the federal government struck down a ban on sports betting in 2018, so gambling is not prohibited on the federal level. But, Texas state law has established that gambling, especially on sports events, is illegal. This confused me. The entire premise of PrizePicks is to put money into an account, bet on different things to occur in a sports game and profit. That sounds like gambling to me, yet nothing stopped me from placing a parlay.
So how do apps like PrizePicks and Underdog operate legally in states like Texas that ban sports betting?
It has to do with their legal status. PrizePicks classified themselves as daily fantasy sports, as opposed to the traditional sports book. They claim that they are based on games of skill, and that skilled players achieve significantly more success in PrizePicks supporting the idea that it is not a game of chance.
Analyzing player statistics, strategies and team matchups are considered factors that make choices in PrizePicks “skill-based.” In fact, PrizePicks’ website makes almost no references to the words “bet” or “gamble.” They even offer support to a hotline for a “gaming problem” and not the gambling addiction that so many people face. Legality aside, any 18 year old in Texas can still use PrizePicks and a various number of daily “fantasy sports” apps.
After realizing that I could use PrizePicks without a fear of the government tracking me down, I decided to click on the invite link my friend sent me.
I was hooked. I immediately made a $10 deposit with my credit card and made a $5 lineup for Patrick Mahomes to have a passing yard (a discount to celebrate the Super Bowl) and for Saquon Barkley to have over 113.5 rushing yards. $50 of promo money hit my account for making the line, and I felt like the richest man in the world. The entire week leading up to the Super Bowl was a rush of research, tips from friends, and simple intuition. I had $60 at stake with the potential of winning $288 dollars.
And then I lost it all.
The Eagles won Super Bowl LIX and my PrizePicks balance sat at $0, but to me it felt like I lost my entire bank account. Stupid Steve Spagnolia and his stupid rush defense. Nearly all of my lines had some form of either Saquon Barkley scoring at least one touchdown or hitting his goal of 113.5 rushing yards, and he came up with neither.
Fortunately, I had only lost $10, but the desire to make it back lingered in the back of my mind. I felt like Gollum sitting on my friend’s couch, eyes looking greedily at my phone. “I can make the ten dollars back easily,” I thought in my head. “It would be so easy to put even just five dollars down. The app already saved my card information.”
I must’ve been eyeing my phone a little too hard though because one of my friends noticed and stopped me. “Nah, dude, you’re done.” I was immediately annoyed with myself for trying to be a responsible gambler earlier. I had told my friends to close out my account and lock me out for six months if I made no money, and to my overall benefit they held me to it.
I don’t have a problem with anyone who uses apps like PrizePicks, but I think that the apps themselves are fairly predatory.
The accessibility of PrizePicks is something to be concerned about. I interviewed two seniors at Bellaire who are still active users of PrizePicks to discuss its pros and cons. They asked to be interviewed anonymously due to the sensitivity around the use of apps like PrizePicks but were comfortable with this information being disclosed.
“One of my friends told me to use his promo code. So I deposited money, and that’s when the addiction started,” Student 1 said. “But then I realized I had to control myself. So I deleted the app for some time, reflected on myself, and then when I came back, I could say I’m a more controlled individual.”
Both students claimed to not have a gambling addiction, noting that they could both easily go without PrizePicks or some other form of daily fantasy sports for the rest of their lives. Aside from actually placing lines and making bets, they also take the time to research player statistics and games even upwards of four hours a week, on top of the three hours a week spent looking at PrizePicks and available lines.
But does all the time spent researching hint at PrizePicks being composed of skill and not just luck like traditional gambling?
“It’s probably more luck than we know,” Student 2 said. “It’s more luck than skill. Realistically, everything’s 50/50 until you wait for a promo or like a free discounted line. So, I mean it’s really just chance. I can’t lie.”
Lines don’t exactly have 50/50 odds because various factors such as matchups, scoring trends and injuries affect the odds that actual events are happening. These factors can change betting odds from being 50/50 to favor the “under” or “over” but the variability still implies that PrizePicks is a game of chance. Echoing the nearly universal sentiment, Student 1 agreed.
“PrizePicks is 100% gambling,” Student 1 said.
Gambling and sports betting are not inherently a bad thing in my opinion, but they tend to bring out a degenerate side of people. For example, Student 1 at one point made lineups involving picks in the eSports games CS:GO2 and League of Legends and more niche sports like golf, which they admitted they had no knowledge of. This completely removed the skill aspect of PrizePicks and was essentially gambling.
“It gets you addicted sometimes,” Student 1 said. “If you don’t know what you’re doing then you would definitely get addicted putting in too much money. The reason why I took a long break was because I realized I was waking up at 5 a.m. just to check PrizePicks. It was affecting my mental health, and so that’s why I quit.”
On top of the compulsive need to check the app, both students agreed on the need for better restrictions to prevent underage gambling. They said that PrizePicks was legal and a possible way to make money, but they feared its accessibility to minors.
“I think they should be legal, just harder to access, because I feel like it’s really easy for someone underage or someone who shouldn’t be gambling to access it,” Student 2 said. “I also think the way that they advertise is really geared towards kids. A lot of teenagers watch sports, so it makes it really exciting when they have promos and stuff where you put five bucks and win 50.”
$50 is a lot of money for the average teenager to spend on something, but $5 seems like a more reasonable deal. Yet so many people will go on to spend way more than $50 on PrizePicks in an attempt to make profit. Even worse, there’s an ease of access with PrizePicks. Aside from the marketing to a seemingly young audience, the ID verification process is finicky.
Sports betting is not inherently wrong, I have no issue with anybody making a parlay or trying to make money from an app like PrizePicks, but it’s important to know your boundaries with the app. Within any type of gambling, you have to be comfortable with knowing that whatever money you’ve put in is already gone, so please have some form of income to support your gambling lifestyle.
If you’re 18 and want to engage in sports betting, feel free to. Know you might make a couple hundred dollars, but take some time to look at the bigger picture. Do you really think a billion-dollar glorified casino has your best interests at heart?
They don’t care how much money you lose at the end of the day, as long as it falls into their pockets.
