LEXINGTON, Ky. — For Creig Ewing, a former sports editor in Kentucky, “the anticipation of getting the bet in” became a draw he couldn’t resist.

“For me, it was mostly horse racing,” he said in a recent interview.

Ewing said his gambling problem developed on TwinSpires Betting, a website and app for betting on horse racing. He rationalized that he needed access to the information for his job as a sports editor at the Courier Journal in Louisville.

“I was just placing bets every day, and it got to be a problem,” said Ewing, who has been in recovery for a decade. “Gambling is a progressive disease. If you start off betting $2 to win ... you’re eventually spending a lot more money than that.”

As the Kentucky Derby — Kentucky’s most celebrated day of betting — approaches, many people will be thinking about putting a little down on their favorite horse.

But since Kentucky legalized sports betting in 2023, every day can be like Derby Day if one has a mind to bet.

And industry experts say it’s presenting a problem for many Kentuckians — especially younger ones.

Calls to the Kentucky problem gambling helpline more than quadrupled from 2022 to 2024 — from an average of 55 per month to 270 per month — according to the Kentucky Council on Problem Gambling.

“If you have a cell phone in your pocket, you have accessibility to gamble,” said Mike Stone, executive director of the Kentucky Council on Problem Gambling. “As gambling expands, more individuals will surface with a gambling problem.”

Legalized gambling has been a moneymaking boon for Kentucky, bringing in tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue in less than two years.

Much of that is driven by various forms of online sports gambling. Fans can quickly place bets on game outcomes, player performance, and even unusual prop bets, like the run time of the national anthem at the Super Bowl.

And for many of those bets, users can continue to live bet throughout the game, with odds that change in real time.

Stone said about 95% of people can handle that landscape, as well as more traditional forms of betting, like going to a casino, wagering on a horse race or buying a lottery ticket.

“It’s just entertainment, a diversion,” he said.

But, he said, “You’ve got 5% that can’t stop.”

The Kentucky Council on Problem Gambling, which does not take a position for or against the legalization of gambling, said hotline calls were already on the rise before Kentucky legalized gambling in the second half of 2023.

Calls, texts and chats had ticked up to about 66 per month during the first eight months of the year.

But they’ve exploded since then, totaling 3,240 last year.

Many helpline callers do not share information about the type of gambling with which they struggle, but for callers who did, the most common form by far was sports gambling.

According to data provided by the Kentucky Council on Problem Gambling, 603 people cited sports gambling as their reason for calling last year. That dwarfed the next most-common reasons for calling — more traditional forms of gambling like lottery games (147) and slots (120).

Stone said he suspects some of that spike can be attributed to awareness campaigns. Wherever sports gambling is advertised — on sports media websites, radio, television and social media — an ad for the 1-800-GAMBLER hotline is sure to follow.

Stone said it may be that Kentucky gamblers are simply becoming more cognizant of the fact that they have a problem.

And he noted that a large number of the calls coming into the hotline are what he refers to as “nuisance calls” — someone wanting to know the winning lottery numbers or what time the buffet opens at the casino.

But the number of calls in which a service was provided, such as a referral to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, is on the rise, too.

“People can manage their behavior. They can recover. They can live a normal life,” Stone said in an interview.

Still, industry experts say the trend is concerning.

RonSonlyn Clark is a certified gambling counselor who works as the chief compliance officer at Rooted Recovery in Owensboro and is president of the Kentucky Council on Problem Gambling.

She said she’s seen as many people seeking help for gambling in the past two years as she did in her first 20 years combined.

“We don’t currently have enough trained (counselors) to handle the capacity,” she said.

A national issue

On a national level, sports gambling has exploded since 2018. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a law signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992 that outlawed sports betting nationwide, with a few exceptions.

Among the exceptions were parimutuel wagering on horse and dog racing and sports pools in Nevada, where sports betting has been legal for decades.

Thirty-eight states now allow betting on sports, and most have public funding set aside to provide services for problem gambling.

And the industry continues to grow.

Nationwide, Americans wagered $30.3 billion on sports in the third quarter of 2024, a year-over-year increase of 42%, according to the American Gaming Association.

It was the 15th consecutive quarter of annual revenue growth in the commercial gaming industry, attributed to “recent market launches in Kentucky, Maine, North Carolina and Vermont,” the association said.

Since sports betting was legalized in Kentucky in September 2023, more than $3.6 billion has been wagered online, according to the Kentucky Horse Racing and Gaming Corp.

Jeff Marotta is a clinical psychologist, as well as president and senior consultant at Problem Gambling Solutions in Portland, Oregon. He said the sharpest increases in problem gambling are seen when states introduce mobile and online gambling options, which he said is a “concerning form of legalized gambling.”

“Individuals who do primarily engage through devices are at greater risk for problem gambling,” he said. “It’s creating a much greater access to gambling opportunities.”

That kind of betting is especially appealing to younger people, Marotta said.

“We’re seeing younger people, primarily males, gambling more,” he said. “Sports wagering is being really embedded within the larger sports fan culture.”

Sports shows, which once focused only on the players and the game, now talk about odds, too.

“That kind of commentary or inclusiveness of gambling within ... sports media just wasn’t there” before, Marotta said. “It’s becoming much more normalized.”

Kentucky’s gambling toll

Industry experts and people who have lived with a gambling problem say the addiction takes a heavy toll on the gambler and those around them.

Ewing, the former gambler, said he was “never happy” when he was gambling.

If his horse lost, he’d lost the bet. And “if he won, you’d be disappointed that you should’ve won more,” Ewing said.

While horse racing is somewhat limited by the racing season and number of tracks where racing is going on at any given time, Ewing said now that sports betting is legal, people can always find something to bet on.

“When you go to a track or a casino, you know that you’re likely to throw away whatever money you brought,” Ewing said.

But he said mobile sites are “pushed as very mainstream,” and people who think they know sports “get sucked in very quickly.”

Advertising for sports betting is virtually inescapable.

Two of the primary apps people use to gamble on sports, FanDuel and DraftKings, have marketing deals with the major American sports leagues.

Several Major League Baseball teams began airing games this year on regional affiliates of a TV channel called FanDuel Sports Network.

Advertisements for FanDuel and DraftKings — including specific bets — are shown onscreen during sports broadcasts.

And many betting apps offer “welcome bonuses” and special promotions to keep customers betting.

“I can’t imagine if your phone says, ‘Hey, you’ve got $200,’” Ewing said. “If you get fulfilled by getting the dopamine rush of betting, it can be a problem really fast.”

That rush is powerful, said Clark, the counselor.

“It’s a brain disease, not much different than substance addiction,” she said. “It targets the same areas of the brain.”

Marotta, Clark and Stone agreed it’s not even necessarily about the money.

“Money is not the reason people gamble,” Stone said. For “the disordered gambler, the money is only the means to gamble. They’re gambling because of the rush and the feeling that they want to attain that comes with their gambling activity.”

Particularly for young men who grew up playing sports, “it’s a way to be competitive,” Clark said. “You can still be engaged in sports. You still want to feel like you’re part of the action.”

Clark said most people who develop a gambling disorder start with a winning streak.

“There’s a big win, and right after the big win, you see some losses,” she said.

Sometimes, she said, people begin spending money they don’t have, thinking that if they keep going, they can earn back what’s been lost.

“The next one’s going to be the one,” Clark said. “We call it the magical thinking of the gambler.”

And like many other forms of addiction, disordered gambling can cause myriad other problems.

Besides leading to financial difficulties, it takes time away from other pursuits and can interfere with work and family relationships.

She said partners of problem gamblers may experience headaches, high blood pressure or gastrointestinal symptoms.

She said the children sometimes have headaches, asthma-like symptoms, behavioral problems or trouble at school.

“It just affects the entire family,” she said.

Clark said gambling has been linked to domestic violence. She pointed to a 2024 University of Oregon study using crime data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System. The study showed when an NFL team lost unexpectedly in a home game, intimate partner violence increased 10% in the hours afterward.

“The effect is larger in states with mobile betting, where higher bets were placed, around paydays, and for teams on a winning streak,” the authors wrote.

And, Clark said, gambling addicts have a higher suicide rate. She said one in five people with a gambling disorder will attempt, complete or think about suicide.

In Kentucky last year, 20 callers to the gambling helpline expressed thoughts of suicide when they called for help, according to the call data.

Seeing a need for help

Ewing said he stopped gambling after being confronted by his wife when she found his TwinSpires Betting account.

It’s been 10 years since he last placed a bet, he said.

“For me, it was a clean cut,” Ewing said. “I feel fortunate that once I made a decision to stop, I was able to.”

He went to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting the next day, and he said he doesn’t think he would have been able to quit if he hadn’t.

Even then, Ewing said, “it took about a year (before) I wasn’t thinking about betting or thinking about what I was missing out on.”

And, he said, the years he spent with a problem he “took a lot out of my 401(k).”

Now, he said, he’s found “other things to do with all the time that was spent gambling or reading the Racing Form.”

He enjoys traveling, spending more time with his family and, for the past eight years, has done stand-up comedy shows in Louisville.

“Life is so much better without gambling,” he said. “I don’t have to worry every day, ‘What bills am I not going to pay? ... Is my wife going to find out? Feelings of shame and regret — I don’t have that anymore.”

Marotta and others said people with a gambling disorder often don’t seek help right away.

“They tend to be gambling at problem levels for quite some time ... before they actually get help,” he said.

Experts say because sports wagering is still relatively new in Kentucky, the commonwealth may see even greater spikes in calls to helplines and hotlines as its popularity spreads.

If Kentucky is seeing increased numbers of people looking for help now, those numbers might continue to increase because sports wagering hasn’t been allowed here for even two years, he said.

“Along with losing, people win,” Marotta said. “It tends to take this prolonged losing streak” before people find themselves in trouble and ask for help.

Funding for solutions

When the Kentucky General Assembly approved legislation allowing online sports wagering in 2023, a key piece of the law was establishing a program to help Kentuckians affected by problem gambling.

Now, 2.5% of the revenue from sports wagering goes into a fund in the newly established Problem Gambling Assistance Program in the Department for Behavioral Health, Developmental and Intellectual Disabilities.

So far, the fund has received just under $1.5 million, said program administrator Emily Flath.

“There’s a broad range of what that can be used for,” she said in an interview. “Right now, what we’ve really been focusing on is public awareness efforts.”

The state wants people to understand more about the signs of a gambling problem and ways to gamble responsibly, since Flath said people can’t seek help until they understand the problem.

She said the state is also trying to help train its existing behavioral health workforce to address problem gambling.

“We don’t have a lot of individuals who are certified” to provide counseling and treatment to gamblers, Flath said. “It’s a pretty new and emerging issue for the state, so it’s going to take a little bit of time to get people up to speed.”

In October, the state released a notice of funding opportunity for organizations interested in working on problem gambling, and three proposals were approved for funding.

The Kentucky Council on Problem Gambling was awarded $52,609 for expanding its 2025 conference, including improving access through live-streaming and recording.

Project Ricochet in Lexington was awarded $100,000 “for a public awareness campaign to increase access to services and resources in an effort to reduce problem gambling,” the state said in an email.

“The campaign focuses on the intersections of gambling, mental health, and substance abuse, particularly within veterans, youth, and minority populations, and highlights the connections between gaming, e-sports, and gambling among college students. The campaign will include multimedia content, such as videos, infographics, and PSAs.”

Another notice of funding opportunity will be issued later this year, Flath said.

Flath said the state has sought advice from other states, including Massachusetts, as it begins working to address the burgeoning problem.

“We are leaning a lot on other states that have set up similar programs,” she said.

Marotta, the consultant, said states have taken varying approaches to addressing problem gambling, but many start by developing their workforce.

“It’s a slow process to get services in place,” he said.

In Nevada, he said, the state is working to integrate gambling treatment into its existing addiction services, including starting an initiative to address gambling as an issue in opioid treatment.

He said Nevada is also using telehealth to reach people, since a single clinic could provide care for a broad area.

Another approach, Marotta said, is apps designed to help gamblers curtail their use of betting apps.

He’s the chief scientific officer for one such company, Evive, which has developed a mobile platform to help people curb their gambling or stop it entirely.

Most states with legalized betting have funding set aside to address the problem of gambling addiction, and Marotta said Evive has contracted with several states to make the app free to users.

In Oklahoma, where the app has been available for about a year, Marotta said more people are downloading it than are calling the helpline for gamblers.

Ewing said the Legislature could also prohibit mobile betting apps from offering vouchers and other enticements that incentivize problem gamblers to keep going.

“They can see who’s spending the most money,” he said. “The problem gamblers are their biggest customers, and they’re going to push them.”

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