It’s Sunday. You told yourself last week would be the last week. You’re down more than you can admit to anyone so you place one more bet, because winning it back feels like the only way to make this go away. Part of you knows it won’t work. You do it anyway.
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. This week’s Sunday Project started with the people who are in it right now: gambling, trying to stop, and wondering how. Host Deborah Buhaj, a gambling addiction therapist, asked the panel one question. When you were gambling, did you ever believe there was no way to stop?
Every one of them said yes.
"The only way out was to continue"
Bob Gray, in recovery since 1993, remembers the math. He was earning about $80,000 a year and was $400,000 in debt. “I’m not gonna get out of this debt by just working at my job,” he said. “The only way out was to hit a pick-six or a 10-team parlay.” Long shots. More bets.
“I just thought the only way out was to continue,” he said. “And then I finally… the only way out was to stop.”
Rob Minnick, creator of ODAAT Gambling Awareness (One Day at a Time), felt the same pull from a different direction. For three or four years he believed he was going to be a professional sports bettor. Quitting meant giving up that dream and admitting gambling had beaten him.
He compares it to the stock market where a loss isn’t real until you sell. “That’s how I viewed all of my gambling,” Rob said. “The moment that I stopped is the moment that it would have actually been real. Up until that point, it was just a scoreboard.”
Knowing, and doing it anyway
For Yiss Solomon, who lived in New York when sports betting was legalized there, losing control looked different. He knew he didn’t want to gamble. He did it anyway.
“Your mind doesn’t want to do this but then your actions are actually doing it,” he said. “You’re not aligned and you know you’re not supposed to be doing it but you’re still doing it. That’s when it feels like you just can’t stop because you don’t really have control.”
He called it “a super frightening place to be.” If you’ve ever watched yourself open the app while telling yourself not to, you know what he means.
Win or lose, you keep going
Matt Zarb-Cousin, co-founder of the gambling-blocking app Gamban, pointed out that chasing losses is only half the trap. “Even if you won, the only thing you’d want to do with that money is gamble more, because you’re addicted to gambling,” he said. “So you create this kind of prison for yourself.”
The only way to come out ahead is to quit while you’re ahead, and someone who is addicted never does. Being good at it isn’t an escape either. If you start winning consistently at sports betting, Matt said, the operator will restrict or close your account. “The whole commercial model was designed for you to lose.”
Rob summed up the stories we tell ourselves: “I’m up money, so I can gamble this money. I’m down money, so I need to get the money back right away… Every distortion that I had was just a justification to keep going.”
The research shows how common this has become. In a 2026 survey of more than 3,000 Americans by the Siena Research Institute, 60% of online sports bettors said they had chased a bet, placing a bigger bet to win back a loss. That was up from 52% the year before. And a 2026 study of more than 36,000 online sports bettors found that chasing the day’s losses was the strongest warning sign of harm, including of bettors later choosing to self-exclude.
When the hope runs out
Marc Lefkowitz, who has worked in the gambling field for more than 30 years and has been in his own recovery since 1983, described a slower kind of despair. “I always gambled one day at a time,” he said. “Every morning when I woke up and had a new set of money, I always had that hope that today was going to be different.”
Until the day the hope ran out. “Had not somebody said something to me, I probably was considering killing myself that night.”
That’s the danger of believing gambling is the way out. It keeps you going until it doesn’t. If you’re at that point, tell someone today. Call or text 988.
Marc also shared something hopeful. He quit on a win. It was a fraction of what he’d lost but he decided that was it. “You can quit on a particular win,” he said.
What the addiction tells you, and what's true
| What the addiction tells you | What the panel learned |
|---|---|
| One big win will fix this | If you win, you’ll just gamble it |
| Stopping makes the losses real | The losses are already real. Accepting them is where recovery starts |
| I know sports, I can beat this | Winners get restricted. The model is built for you to lose |
| I’ve tried before, I can’t stop | People do stop, even after feeling totally out of control |
| I’m a bad person | You’re an ill person trying to get well |
Accept the Loss
Dan Field, LCSW, Clinical Director of Westside Gambling Treatment, starts with a blunt truth. Accept the loss. “The money was lost and it’s not coming back.”
That feels hopeless at first but it’s also the starting point. The scoreboard Rob was protecting stops being a reason to keep going.
And trying and failing before doesn’t mean you’ll fail this time. “People do succeed,” Dan said, “even if they’ve had that terrible feeling of being totally out of control.” What makes the difference is committing to change and getting support, from a counselor and from Gamblers Anonymous or others in recovery.
In Dan’s program, that commitment is practical:
- 50 hours of treatment over seven weeks.
- Financial transparency. Hand over your credit cards and let someone you trust oversee your money for the first few months while your brain recalibrates.
- Skip a season. “How many football seasons have you watched in their entirety over the last 10, 20 years?” If that’s too much, try a four-week break from sports media.
Riding the urges
Urges are powerful, and they’re real. In treatment, Deb asks clients to rate their urges from 0 to 100. People who are still gambling usually say around 90. Over time that number comes down. Notice where you feel the urge in your body, put a number on it, and ride it out. Clinicians call it urge surfing.
Yiss remembers going to a Stanford football game about 45 days into recovery. He was so angry and irritable that he hit the bathroom stall. But he didn’t bet. He left, didn’t check the score, and woke up the next day feeling relief.
What helped him was changing how he saw the urge. An urge doesn’t mean recovery isn’t working. Every time you get through one without betting, it shows that it is. “If you can make it past one day, you’ll make it past the next,” Yiss said. Stack up the days.
You don't have to stay this person
“You’re not a bad person trying to get good, you’re an ill person trying to get well,” Matt said. If you feel shame about how you’ve been acting, it’s because you know you’re better than this.
Bob said gambling “kidnapped” him and turned him into 10 different Bob Grays, with a different story for his bookie, his employer, his family and his friends. Recovery meant becoming one person again: “the same Bob Gray in every room. What a relief.”
Rob discovered he hadn’t been the huge sports fan he thought. “It turned out I was just a huge gambling fan.” Football bores him now and he’s fine with that. When the webinar ended, he was heading to lunch with friends.
Where to start today
- Block it. Gamban blocks gambling websites and apps worldwide, on all devices, and is hard to remove for the period you choose. State self-exclusion only covers your state, Matt said. The more layers between you and gambling, the less likely you are to act on an urge.
- Hand over the money. Let someone you trust hold your cards for now.
- Plan your weekend by Wednesday. Marc asks his clients midweek what they’re doing at the weekend. A hike, a picnic, a walk on the beach. Otherwise you’re white-knuckling it.
- Get outside. Yiss calls a walk “low effort, high reward.”
- Go to a meeting. Gamblers Anonymous meets in person and online across the US.
- Talk to people who’ve been there. Everyone on this panel was once sure they couldn’t stop.
As Bob puts it: you win every bet you don’t make.
If betting has taken over your time, your money or your head, Stop Betting Sports can help. Join the Sunday Project every week, watch past episodes on YouTube at Stop Betting Sports, or reach out at stopbettingsports.com.
If you or someone you love is in crisis or thinking about suicide, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) in the US.
Sources
- Siena Research Institute & St. Bonaventure University (2026, April 13). American Sport Fanship Survey: Over half of men 18–49 have sportsbook accounts. https://www.sbu.edu/news/2026/04/13/siena-sbu-survey–over-half-of-men-18-49-have-sportsbook-accounts
- Edson, T. C., Tom, M. A., & LaPlante, D. A. (2026). Investigating the impact of loss accumulation periods on the predictive relationship between loss chasing and potential gambling harms. Addictive Behaviors, 175, 108605. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2026.108605
Support is available
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