A Social Worker’s Case for Sweepstakes Casinos: The Gambling Addiction Cure
- Daniel Carr
- Jun 5
- 8 min read
This is going to be a little off-topic from OCD, however, I felt this was important to discuss due to all of the social hysteria around the "gambling epidemic".
Many states have banned online sweepstakes casinos while claiming its to "protect" children and adults from gambling addiction, steering them towards "safe" state-approved gambling options.
Politicians talk about the gambling addiction epidemic claiming to care about law and fairness. The language sounds clean, serious, and moral. Then, you walk into any convenience or grocery store and need to encounter a display of state-approved scratch tickets in order to pay for food.
That is where the moral story starts to crack.
This article discusses a social work perspective on how sweepstakes casinos could be the cure to gambling addiction and also how offshore sweepstakes casinos bring more direct benefit to people in poverty and the American citizen, than the Federal government.
I'll get to the discussion of how sweepstakes casinos like Stake offer more free financial assistance to citizens than most government programs. However, before I get to that critical factor, I cannot ignore the fact that they are companies and their goal is to make money.
In order to understand predatory gambling, like the state approved programs, and how they differ from sweepstake casinos, the reader needs to understand one basic term: house edge.
House edge means the built-in mathematical advantage the gambling operator has over the player. If a game has a 30% house edge, that means that over time, the casino expects to keep about $30 for every $100 bet.
This is what the average gambler feels when gambling vs the reality of gambling:
Certainly, someone digging their own financial pit from house edge would benefit from using a little kid's toy hand shovel instead of an excavator.
So why would the state aim to "protect" society from gambling addiction by ensuring only excavators are available?
This is the key difference between sweepstakes casinos and government approved regulated casinos:
1) Sweepstakes casinos typically offer house edge of about 0.1% - 4%.
2) The "safe" state approved casinos and state lottery offer a modest 30% house edge.
Yes - I said 30%. The average scratch ticket in the gas station has a 30% house edge and the average slot or virtual scratch ticket from a sweepstakes casino has a 2% house edge.
Does the government believe that the more someone loses, the less likely they are to develop a gambling addiction? The data shows that gambling loss actually increases addiction. Gambling addicts along with their families certainly don't benefit from losing more money at a quicker rate.
Not only this, if they were concerned about gambling addiction, they would not be advertising new state lottery scratch tickets and games on billboards and commercials.
Sports betting is also noteworthy. All state regulated sportsbooks incorporate two ways of ensuring profit: The first is the "vig" which is the fee for the bet. A standard "vig" or house edge on a sportsbook bet is about 5% per bet. Opening bets for a sports game when the teams are deemed an equal match is -110/-110. A $100 bet on an "even money" game - returns $190 instead of $200.
The second way government sportsbooks (like RI Sportsbook) and government approved/regulated sportsbooks profit is called "shading lines". Shading lines is where winning probabilities determine the fair value of a very popular bet, the government enforced sportsbook adds in their house edge, THEN add an ADDITIONAL profit move by reducing the fair bet payout when the bet already has the house edge baked in.
Sportsbooks like Novig have no vig. ZERO house edge. They do not shade lines because anyone can offer any bet payout and Novig does not determine bet payouts. They make money the same way Google does — data. They also have private companies that use high tech team analytics models who attempt to beat sportsbooks and which can pay a fee to offer bets. The bets they offer are still without vig and based on their proprietary models which may or may not work. These lines given by prop firms are still at a substantially better cost than casino sportsbooks, still with no house edge..
meaning:
for every $1 the gambler bets on sports the casino keeps $0.000.
The majority of bets on Novig are peer to peer. Several states have highlighted the need to 'crack down' on "peer to peer" betting exchanges in ways that make the citizen feel that they are some rogue darkweb gambling den.
The average person feels "the representatives are keeping us safe" when it is actually the opposite, the are ensuring people lose money and monopolizing their own predatory high-profit based system.
It is important to note that typically sweepstakes casinos discuss "house edge" with an alternative term called RTP and they display the RTP to players in-game. RTP means “return to player", a game with 2% house edge has a 98% RTP.
When someone has a gambling addiction - there is a major harm difference between a casino that lets them keep $0.98-$0.995 cents of every $1.00 bet- over their entire lifetime..
and a predatory state casino that keeps $0.30 per $1.00 bet.
They are not the same. Not ethically, not in terms of societal harm, risk, or in any conceivable way.
Politicians and state approved casinos do not oppose gambling and their house edge says they want to monopolize it and cause as much damage as possible. They enforce the most harm possible by using their position to masquerade as fighting the gambling epidemic.
They create laws to exterminate competition and to ensure people gamble only with their products - the most destructive ones that take nearly half the money a person bets over a lifetime: state lotteries, state approved sportsbook or casino apps, and physical casinos.
Why Sweepstakes Casinos Bring More Benefit to Citizens than Government Programs like SNAP
The state will make a person in poverty fill out paperwork and wait to prove they need food.
If approved for EBT/SNAP benefits, the average individual will receive $188 per month.
The person will encounter these safe scratch tickets at the convenience store or supermarket where they can use EBT, they might even buy one or two with the hope of having more than $188 to eat this month.
After this chain of events, the state will call sweepstakes casinos predatory.
Sweepstakes casinos, at a bare minimum, without any deposit ever needed, offer citizens $1 every single day for free, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
That is a strange moral universe.
Yes that is correct, sweepstakes casinos offer $1 per day for free. That is $30 per month per company. Sweepstakes casinos also offer something called AMOE which pays $5 for filling out an index card and requesting sweepstakes credits worth USD. Stake states there is no limit on these index cards.
These seems fishy, however, if you understand WHY a sweepstakes casino needs to provide AMOE to avoid confiscation of all of their funds, closure of their business, and the sweepstakes casino owners not going to federal prison - it begins to make sense.
AMOE is called "Alternative Method of Entry". It is offered so the sweepstakes casino can be legally considered a sweepstakes and not an illegal unregulated gambling operation. There are people who have been entering AMOE cards in many sweepstakes casinos every day for many years. Some sweepstakes take longer to fulfill AMOE requests than others, however, citizens who fill out AMOE from the major sweepstakes casinos will receive their funds faster than social security disability income (SSDI) begins after approval.
It's unclear how much AMOE a person can receive before a sweepstakes casino marks it as unfair, however, there are no reports of that occurring. A citizen could fill out 20 cards a day and receive about $700 a week - $2800 per month, not including the daily bonus, although this may take half a year to appear in their account and will cost the price of stamps.
It is important to note the specific AMOE requirements. For example, the citizen needs to have the envelopes mailed by handing them to the counter staff their local post office asking to have them validated at that specific location, because if the envelopes get processed in the mail from a state that is "protecting" them - the sweepstakes casino must reject them, even if hundreds of dollars was spent on stamps. A good example of this is Southeastern Massachusetts USPS routing mail to process in Rhode Island before being delivered. Due to the fact that Rhode Island stamped the envelope for processing and is "protecting" its citizens by making sure they can only gamble at Bally's , RI lottery, and RI Sportsbook, those envelopes cannot be accepted for the AMOE once arriving at the sweepstake casino mailbox. The citizen then could end up wasting all their savings on stamps because a different state was making sure to 'cut down on the gambling epidemic by legislating against these predatory sweepstakes casinos'.
Aside from AMOE, the easiest and most accessible benefit is the free daily bonus. This ranges anywhere from $0.20 to $1.00 per day across several dozen sweepstakes casinos.
That benefit alone on just a few of the many reputable sweepstakes casinos, is worth over $180 per month - more than SNAP/EBT.
Here is a list of a small number of reputable sweepstakes casinos that offer a free daily bonus:
1) Stake - $1 per day (flat)
2) Zula- $1 per day (flat)
3) Spinquest - $1 per day (flat)
4) Courtside - $1 per day (flat)
5) Fliff - $1 per day (flat)
[Fliff is $2 max until it must be played, secured by betting a sports team and betting same game other team on Novig (no risk of loss) - eventual Fliff loss = Novig easy withdraw]
7) GlobalPoker - $1 per day (average)
8) Chumba - $1 per day (average)
9) LuckyLand Casino - $1 per day (average)
10) LuckyLand Slots - $1 per day (average)
11) Yay Casino - $0.50 per day
12) High 5 Casino - 0.50 per day
Total for the average citizen just for that small number of reputable sweepstakes casinos = $11 per day - $77 per week - $308 per month - nearly twice as much as SNAP / EBT.
That is before the $5 per request AMOE.
That is before regular deposit matches (i.e. deposit $10 get $30 in play) that can turn daily casino play into gambler edge when games have only a 0.5%-2% house edge.
That is before the fact that sweepstakes casinos allow as little as 0.01 (sometimes 0.10) per scratch ticket, slot spin, or live dealer blackjack hand - compared to the state casino demanding $1 per slot spin/scratch card and $15 per blackjack hand.
Sweepstakes casinos are not the gambling-addiction crisis.
They are the solution.
AT WORST - they are the best harm-reduction model any professional could fathom, being attacked by the real predators: government lottery and government approved casino companies selling 15%-30% house-edge slots, scratch tickets, and one in a billion powerballs to desperate people under the fake halo of public revenue and "regulatory oversight".
The sweepstake casinos should not only be fully legalized - they should be subsidized.
They should be the government model, not the target. The government should allow Stake to guide them on how to reduce problem gambling and provide real assistance to the average citizen, instead of creating a false public hysteria to line their own pockets.
That is why, as strange as it may sound, there is a social work case for sweepstakes casinos. Not because gambling is good, not because addiction is harmless - because people in poverty and active gambling addicts deserve low or no house edge options, direct daily personal benefits, and companies/regulators who are honest enough to not pretend to care about gambling addiction while prompting every citizen, child and adult, to consider gambling, just to purchase candy or food.
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