MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Imagine wagering $10 on your phone that six different football teams will win their games. Five win; the sixth loses; you get nothing.
But instead of feeling as though you made a bad bet, you might feel as though you almost won. Within seconds, your phone offers you the chance to put more money on another game and try again.
What happens in that moment is the focus of new research at West Virginia University in Morgantown, where researchers are using real online gambling records to investigate why some people keep betting after they lose—and whether a near win can encourage them to risk even more money.
Researchers at WVU’s John Chambers College of Business and Economics recently received a nearly $300,000 grant from Arnold Ventures to study a behavior known as “loss-chasing,” in which people continue gambling in an attempt to win back money they have lost.
“Some people are placing hundreds of bets on sporting events in just one month through online gaming operators,” said Brad Humphreys, a WVU economics professor and director of the Chambers College Center for Gaming Research and Development. “West Virginians who gamble irresponsibly need help. Our research is going to make it easier to get those people help.”
Why almost winning may matter
Online sports gambling lets people use a phone or computer to wager money on the outcome of a game — or on specific events within it.
A person might simply wager that the Pittsburgh Steelers will win a football game. But increasingly, gamblers combine several predictions into a single wager.
That kind of wager is called a “parlay.” For example, someone might wager that the Steelers, Cincinnati Bengals, and Buffalo Bills will all win on the same Sunday. Each prediction is one part, or “leg,” of the parlay.
If all three predictions are correct, the gambler wins and can receive a larger payout than would generally be available from wagering on just one game. But if the Steelers and Bengals win and the Bills lose, the entire wager normally loses.
Nearly 90% of sports bets in West Virginia are parlays, according to the university.
That makes them especially interesting to researchers because a losing parlay can sometimes look and feel remarkably close to a winning one.
Someone who correctly predicts five outcomes in a six-part wager still receives nothing if the sixth prediction is wrong. But psychologically, losing that way may feel different from making several obviously incorrect predictions.
Researchers want to know whether that feeling of having “almost won” makes people more likely to gamble again immediately.
The behavior is known as loss-chasing—continuing to wager money in an attempt to recover money already lost.
“If our research is right that a near-miss parlay bet causes people to loss-chase and behave irresponsibly, operators can identify those people at the time they experience the loss and take measures like pausing accounts to prevent those people from doing financial harm to themselves,” Humphreys said.
“That’s the definition of making life better for West Virginians.”
West Virginia offers researchers something unusual
West Virginia is one of 38 states where online sports betting is legal, but researchers here have access to something particularly valuable—records showing how people actually gamble.
In 2024, state lawmakers enacted the Responsible Gaming Research and Industry Development Act, which requires online gambling companies operating in West Virginia to provide timely gaming data to WVU.
That means researchers don’t have to rely entirely on people remembering how they gambled or describing their behavior in a survey. They can study the wagers themselves.
Researchers can examine what someone was doing before a significant loss, what happened during the losing wager, and what that person did afterward. They can then look for patterns, such as whether someone immediately placed another wager, began wagering more money, or started making riskier bets.
That could help researchers identify the point at which recreational gambling begins to develop into potentially harmful behavior.
“As more states allow online gaming, the need for evidence-based research is growing,” said Joshua Hall, Milan Puskar Dean of the Chambers College.
“This grant from Arnold Ventures positions Dr. Humphreys and the Center for Gaming Research and Development to generate insights that help policymakers, industry stakeholders, and public health professionals make informed, data-driven decisions.”
Gambling has moved from casinos to phones
Sports betting is only part of the online gambling market that researchers are examining. West Virginia is also among seven states where a form of online gambling known as iGaming is legal.
In simpler terms, iGaming brings many of the games found in a casino to a phone, tablet or computer. Depending on the service, someone can wager money on digital slot machines, poker and other casino-style games without entering a physical casino.
Humphreys said the amount of money wagered through those online casino games is dramatically greater than the amount wagered on sports.
“Most bets on sporting events or in iGaming have negative expected values,” Humphreys said. “The shocking thing is the amount of money that’s wagered on iGaming is an order of magnitude larger than the amount of money wagered on sports betting.”
“Negative expected value” is an economic way of describing something familiar to generations of casino visitors: over enough wagers, the mathematics generally favors the house rather than the gambler.
But smartphones have made it faster to place another wager.
Someone who loses money in a traditional casino might leave a table, walk across the casino or go home. With online gambling, another opportunity to wager can be only a few taps away.
That makes the period immediately following a loss particularly important to researchers.
If certain kinds of losses consistently trigger increasingly risky gambling, researchers believe online gambling companies may eventually be able to recognize those patterns as they occur and intervene, potentially by temporarily pausing an account.
Research in West Virginia could have national implications
Humphreys has studied gambling for more than 20 years, and policymakers outside West Virginia have sought his expertise. Georgia lawmakers, the National Council of Gambling Regulators, and lottery commissioners in Colorado are among those who have recently called upon him.
The West Virginia research could become increasingly relevant as legal online gambling expands across the United States.
Rather than focusing solely on how much money people win or lose, researchers are trying to understand the decisions people make from one wager to the next—particularly what happens after a loss that feels tantalizingly close to a victory.
“That shows we have something starting at WVU that is unique,” Humphreys said. “The idea is to become an international leader in this type of research.”
Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy that supports research intended to inform public policy, awarded the nearly $300,000 grant through the WVU Foundation.
For researchers, the larger question is whether millions of individual decisions made on phones can reveal the warning signs of dangerous gambling and whether recognizing those signs soon enough could prevent a string of losses from becoming something much more serious.