Sportsbooks increasingly look like slot machines, DK Replay edition

26 Mar, 2026

Back in November, I did an extended Substack post with my thoughts on sports betting. One of my points was that sports betting is increasingly looking like slot machines, and that’s Not Good:

There is a version of sports betting that’s actually a really great and positive form of gambling. It’s the one done by a massive number of Americans every week in the fall: office NFL pick’em pools. Like the one my mother-in-law did for years in the faculty lounge at the high school she taught at. It scores really well on my framework—somewhere between a 4 and 5 depending on if you think it’s skilled (more on this in a moment). Ditto with March Madness college basketball brackets. And ditto with betting your buddy $20 on the outcome of the Giants-Redskins game, because you each like one of the teams.

But modern sports-betting is trending in exactly the opposite direction. There has always been a pretty big illegal market for serious sports betting against a house, that’s not new. But the legalized version has at least three new features. The first, of course, is that it’s legal. Illegal bookmakers certainly have/had profit motives in the past, but they didn’t have the ability to advertise endlessly during NFL broadcasts. Or directly sign partnerships with the sports leagues themselves.

Second, again obviously, is the internet. Putting the sportsbook in everyone’s pocket dramatically reduces the friction to place a bet, and also makes it easier to make a negative EV bet against a house than to make a neutral EV bet against your friends. I don’t think it was particularly hard to find a bookie in 1994, but it still took some effort, some risk, and some trust. Now the human interaction is completely gone. Just you and the machine.

Third, and related, is that the internet unlocks the full potential of continuous betting. Once upon a time, a sports bet was a slow wager. The fastest wager you might be able to make, pre-internet, was something like a bet on the first quarter of an NFL game. Now you can literally find bets on the outcome of the next play. The lines on games are constantly updated, minute-by-minute, meaning there are dozens of betting opportunities, constantly, during an NFL game.

Now today comes the news that Draft Kings will literally sell slot machine play as sports betting. It’s reminiscent of the historical horse racing game that was used in many places to try to circumvent gambling restrictions in places that allowed horse wagering but not slot machines. Draft Kings will use real historical anonymized data on the results of individual pitches, and you can bet on the outcome. And if you think that sounds like a slot machine, well yes, it’s a slot machine:

Note that the hold on this particular bet in the picture is 3.57%, and you can “spin” roughly every 5-10 seconds.

This is a slot machine, and it should be regulated as such by states. And, in my view, slot machines should probably be banned, especially online.