Is sports betting gambling?

Is betting the same as gambling?

Betting is one of the main forms of gambling, so a bet on a game counts. UK law says so directly, defining gambling as gaming, betting and taking part in a lottery.

In the US, the question that took longer to settle was whether states could allow it. A 1992 federal law, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, stopped most states from authorizing sports betting until the Supreme Court struck it down in Murphy v. NCAA in May 2018. The justices said legalizing sports gambling “requires an important policy choice, but the choice is not ours to make,” which left each state “free to act on its own.”

Most states have since said yes. By the end of 2025, legal sports betting was offered in 39 states plus Washington, DC, according to the American Gaming Association. Commercial sportsbooks kept $16.89 billion of what was bet that year, after paying out winnings, so bettors as a group lost that much.

How the sportsbook’s cut works

Sportsbooks build a fee into the odds, called the vig (short for vigorish). On a standard bet on the point spread, which is a bet on whether a team wins by more than a set number of points, you risk $110 to win $100. Economist Steven Levitt describes this setup in a 2004 study of NFL betting.

The gap looks small, but it decides who wins over time. If a game is a true coin flip, you win $100 half the time and lose $110 the other half, so on average you lose about $5 for every $110 you bet. To break even, you’d have to win 52.4% of your bets.

Why parlays cost you more

A parlay combines several picks into one bet, and every pick has to win for it to pay. The payout is bigger than on a single bet, but the sportsbook’s share is much bigger too. Regulators measure that share as the hold, meaning the percentage of all money bet that the sportsbook keeps.

In the 12 months to June 2026, Nevada sportsbooks held 7.75% of all sports bets. On the paper parlay cards they sell, the hold was 30.86%, so about four times as much of each dollar went to the house.

Does skill change anything?

Skill counts for more here than at a roulette table, because you can study injuries and matchups, though the sportsbook does the same research. Levitt studied a contest where 285 people picked NFL games against the spread, and he found little evidence that any of them could beat the bookmaker over time. Their results looked like random coin tosses, and a good record so far didn’t predict how someone would do next. The bookmakers were at least as good at predicting games as the best bettors, and they shifted the lines to profit from fans’ habit of backing favorites.

Fantasy apps and prediction markets let you put money on the same games under a different label. We cover those in our pages on fantasy football, PrizePicks, prediction markets and Kalshi.

If you bet on sports, treat it as paying for entertainment with a built-in cost. Stick to single bets if you want the smaller cut, and set a budget you’d be fine losing.

Questions people also ask

Sources

1. UK Gambling Act 2005, section 3 (meaning of gambling)
2. Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, 584 U.S. 453 (2018)
3. American Gaming Association, State of the States 2026
4. Levitt (2004), Why are gambling markets organised so differently from financial markets?, The Economic Journal
5. Nevada Gaming Control Board, Monthly Revenue Report June 2026

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