Most sports bettors assume their biggest enemy is a bad line or a late-game collapse. New research suggests the real problem might be the bettors themselves.
A study out of Australia titled Wins, Windfalls and Willpower: Liquidity and Self-Regulation in Online Sports Gambling analyzed the complete betting records of nearly 25,000 online sports bettors across two major Australian platforms over the course of a year. What the researchers found should give every bettor the tiniest bit of pause when it comes to their gambling habits, specifically how they bet the day after.
The first finding is a little shocking in its symmetry: It doesn’t really matter whether a bettor won or lost the day before; either way, they’re coming back. Bettors were 8.2% more likely to place a bet the day after a win, and 6.9% more likely to place a bet the day after a loss, compared to days when no bets had been made. Winning feels good, losing stings, but both, apparently, are reasons to rinse and repeat.
However, what bettors do when they return the next day does depend on which side of the ledger they ended up on.
After a win, bettors opened their wallets. Stake sizes jumped 41.1% following a winning day. The researchers describe this as the “house-money” effect, the well-known tendency for people to treat recent gains as somehow less real, therefore easier to risk. When you’re betting with money you just won, it doesn’t feel like your money in quite the same way.
After a loss, something different happened. Bettors didn’t necessarily put more money down. They took a different kind of risk.
The hangover cure: worse odds
The data showed a clear shift toward higher-odds wagers following losing days, without a corresponding increase in stake size. In other words, losing bettors weren’t simply betting bigger. They were betting on outcomes less likely to hit, but if it does, more likely to get them even or ahead, hoping one swing could undo the damage.
The study also examined what happens when bettors get a cash infusion. Using Australia’s annual tax-refund season as a natural experiment, the researchers found that an influx of money didn’t cause more people to start betting, nor did it push bettors toward longer odds. What it did do was boost average bets among bettors already identified as at risk by the platforms’ own algorithms.
Additionally, the researchers — Kristle Romero Cortés of UNSW Business School, Sally Gainsbury and Robert Heirene of the University of Sydney, Mandeep Singh of the University of Sydney, and Susan Thorp of Monash University — found that most light-touch responsible-gambling tools showed limited evidence of changing behavior, while tools that directly restricted engagement with the platform were more effective.
The platforms studied offered a range of options, including deposit limits, time-management tools, market restrictions, self-exclusion, and awareness nudges that notify bettors when they’ve exceeded self-set spending or time limits. Only about 13% of bettors used any of them. And when they did, they often used them reactively rather than proactively.
After losses, bettors became more likely to activate these tools, but also more likely to deactivate them, suggesting they were often being used less as guardrails and more as emergency brakes. After wins, engagement with the tools declined. Even when bettors seemed to recognize a problem, that recognition often came in the middle of the spiral, not before it.
And most of the tools didn’t work the way one might hope.
Deposit limits and market restrictions showed little evidence of changing bettors’ tendency to come back after wins or losses. Awareness nudges did reduce how often bettors placed bets, but among bettors who kept betting anyway, the nudges were associated with a striking move toward riskier wagers, as average odds were about 42% higher among bettors who got the nudge.
The tools that seemed to help were the ones that directly reduced engagement with the platform, such as time-management features and self-exclusion.
