Sports betting is raking in record revenues across the United States as the industry skyrockets in popularity.

This includes in Illinois, which represents the third-largest sports gambling market in the country.

At the forefront of the sports betting boom is accessibility, starting with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 overturning of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992. The ruling lifted a federal ban on sports gambling that allowed states to legalize sports betting. Currently, there are 38 legal sports gambling states, along with Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

“In the majority of these legalized jurisdictions, we have mobile sports wagering where sports gambling is as easy to do as ever, in the comfort of your own home,” said Noah Henderson, a clinical instructor in sport management at Loyola University Chicago’s Quinlan School of Business. “If you have access to a computer or a cellphone, you can fire it up, turn on your TV, watch a game and start gambling off your phone. It’s exploding in other reasons because, well, in the state of Illinois, we’re in Big 10 country: People love sports, professional sports, college sports. All are made available on these apps and kind of a limitless platform to play.”

Some sports gamblers also believe that betting on the big game is a skill set, compared to say, randomly pulling down a slot machine handle at a casino.

“People are emotionally connected to sports,” said Jason Kotter, an assistant professor of finance at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Finance. “They often consider themselves experts in their team or their player, in ways that you don’t always feel like an expert when you walk into the casino. And that makes it easier for people to feel like they have an advantage when they place these bets.”

According to a study Kotter co-wrote called “Gambling Away Stability: Sports Betting’s Impact on Vulnerable Households,” sports gambling can be much more costly to draining household finances than other forms of gambling.

“An important thing that we find in our recent research is that the advent of sports gambling has really been negative for family finances,” Kotter said. “The biggest thing that we’ve seen in our study is that as households begin betting on sports, they actually stop investing in stocks. And so they sort of transfer some of their long-term savings into sports betting, which is just really a bad decision in terms of the long-term financial health of their balance sheet. And moreover, … we see this happen most with the households that are least able to be prepared to deal with this. So, households that are already pretty tight on their finances are the ones that we see cutting their savings the most. They increase their debt also that they can participate in this betting market.”

Last year, sports gamblers legally bet more than $120 billion nationwide, bringing in nearly $11 billion in revenue. In Illinois, gamblers bet a total of $11.6 billion in the Illinois sports wagering market, yielding $1.5 billion in gaming revenue for 2023, according to the Illinois Gaming Board.

This year, 2024 is on track to become the most legally wagered sports gambling season in history.

“I think firstly for states, as far as states are concerned, tax revenue is huge,” Henderson said. “Governor Pritzker has recently signed into law new tax codes for sports gambling. It’s going to be the first ever progressive tax code in the United States where, depending on total revenues from sports gambling retailers, they could have to pay anywhere from 20 to 40% tax rate for their revenues, which will more than double the projected tax income in the future for the state.”