This article was produced as part of the New York Jewish Week’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around New York City to report on issues that affect their lives.
“It all started innocently,” says Eli Senor, a senior at The Heschel School, the Jewish day school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Two years ago, when he and his friends were sophomores, they started playing monthly poker games at friends’ houses the games actually started with $20 buy-ins that escalated to $100. But by the spring of that year, Senor and friends were using their laptops to play online Texas Hold-’em while pretending to be doing homework.
“And then that circled into sports bets online,” he says. “By junior year, our [sports-betting] really went nuts,” Senor said. All of his buddies had accounts and were obsessing over NFL games when they weren’t playing online.
After attending a 2025 Super Bowl watch-party that had grown frantic as 20 teens kept placing in-play bets — and the losses piled up — Senor stepped back and took a breath. He realized his friends were in trouble and he had to do something about it.
“Many of my friend’s grades suffered, and some people lost a ridiculous amount of money,” he remembers. One friend blew through $6,000, his entire bar mitzvah savings.
Such escalation is hardly reserved for teens at Jewish or private schools. Studies published in recent years suggest widespread participation in gambling among older teens and young adults in the United States. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Gambling Studies found that frequent sports betting was one of the strongest predictors of later problem gambling among young men, eclipsing other forms of gambling and most psychosocial risk factors.
The problem has grown more acute since 2018, when legal sports betting started expanding across the country. What changed everything was the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Murphy v. NCAA, which struck down the federal ban on sports gambling and allowed states to legalize it. Since then, more than 35 states have created regulated markets, and online sportsbooks have grown just as quickly. In 2024 Americans wagered $150 billion on sports — a 3,000% increase since 2018.
Suspicious of the betting apps, Senor began studying them closely. He noticed the confusing ways the odds were presented, how quickly they shifted during a game, and how the entire system seemed built to keep users guessing. He realized he was not playing against other fans. He was playing against a machine designed to win.
As he dug deeper, he learned about the few professional bettors who actually make money, including people with advanced math training who identify tiny statistical advantages that ordinary users could not see. That discovery sparked an idea: If these experts understood how the system really worked, maybe they could help his friends see what they were up against and they would realize the odds were against them and it was a lose-lose situation. The plan soon grew into a speakers bureau that he started called Behind the Bet, designed to educate other teens about the risks of sports gambling.
Senor’s first call was to a wunderkind named Isaac Rose-Berman. At 25 years old, Rose-Berman made a name for himself as a successful sports bettor — and a crusader against youth gambling. He runs a Substack blog called “How Gambling Works” with over 2,000 subscribers, and is a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men.
Senor knew a hot shot would get his peers attention. “He’s young, and he’s talking sports-bets,” says, “so the kids in my school will listen hard. They really look up to him.”
Last year, Rose-Berman addressed the student body at the Trinity School in Manhattan with a speech called “How Not To Lose.”
“My talk went into the basic math of how odds work and how the posted odds always favored the house,” he told JTA over the phone from his home in Brooklyn. Then he went into the unknowables that affect every sports bet – an injury on the field, a star player getting ejected. “That’s why sports betting is almost as much about luck as playing the slots, which is all luck,” he said. “So the next time kids see a gambling ad, they can say to themselves, ‘Oh, that’s why this is BS; I see how they’re trying to trick me into betting a losing play.’”
Trinity’s communication director, Kevin Ramsay, said the school “truly appreciated his insightful engagement and the meaningful perspective he shared with our students.”
Despite warnings and safeguards, teens say they are able to gain access to gambling apps through older friends and family. (JTA)
In November, Senor arranged for Rose-Berman to speak to his senior class at Heschel. All eyes were fixed on Rose-Berman as he explained how these gambling companies hire celebrities like Drake or LeBron James to specifically lure in young male bettors. Students were surprised to learn that everything in the apps is designed by experts to make them lose money. And even if they somehow manage to beat the odds using high-level math, they will eventually be limited or banned from the platform.
“Unlike most speakers who were very distant in age from us, Isaac was a lot more relatable,” said Heschel senior Liam Barlev. “He comedically used the same words as we do to describe everything, backed by clear and understandable evidence, and that made his argument really compelling.”
Even students who do not gamble agreed that the presentation was compelling. Juliette Heisler, a Heschel senior, said, “It opened my ears to an issue that had not been on my radar before this because I don’t use the betting apps. However, he was able to connect with the boys in our grade through his rhetoric more than I think any other speaker could have on a topic like this.”
The administration at Heschel declined to comment.
FanDuel, a leading online gaming company, calls its sign-up process “rigorous” and a “hallmark of a regulated platform,” according to Senior Vice President Cory Fox. However, even though the sign-up process includes these verifications and the legal age for online sports gambling is 21 in New York, on platforms like FanDuel and DraftKings teens can gain access to an adult-created account if someone shares the account information with them. FanDuel also uses an online platform called Trusted Voices to address the issue with adults in teens’ lives. That didn’t stop Senor and his friends from using accounts made by older family and friends. (Such proxy betting violates many state regulations.)
The urgency of Rose-Berman’s message is being felt by other Jewish students in the region. “Most kids think betting a few dollars is not a big deal, but that is exactly how you get addicted,” Shai Katz said. Katz, a sophomore at SAR High School in Riverdale, watched the rise of sports betting among his own classmates and says the patterns feel alarmingly familiar. He added that in school, “we learn about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, but we never talk about gambling, even though it is already affecting us.”
He invited Rose-Berman to SAR this fall, so students could hear directly from someone who understands the system and why teens are especially vulnerable to it. While Dr. Russell Hoffman, the school’s psychologist, said that this topic is important for all teens, he added, “a Jewish school can frame the discussion not only as important for behavioral and mental health, but also as a behavior that Torah and halacha have important positions on.”
Students at other schools are feeling the same urgency. Liav Klein, a sophomore at the Leffell School, a Jewish day school in Hartsdale, New York, is a passionate sports fan who roots for the Mets, Panthers, Islanders and Pelicans. He says he hears gambling talk everywhere, even among students who barely follow the games.
“I see a lot of my schoolmates talking about gambling, which is totally ok, I do too,” Klein said. “But the activity needs to be kept an eye on to ensure nobody gets into a poor situation.”
He has seen students in his own school struggle with gambling, which is why he wants to bring a speaker from Behind the Bet to Leffell. His goal, he says, is to help his peers understand that the companies running these apps are trying to make money, that the house always wins, and that students should proceed with caution. “In other words, never gamble more than you can afford and always be all right with losing what you are betting,” he said.
Elisha Andron, director of student services at Leffell, is spearheading pedagogy about the risks of underage gambling at the school. “Much like the trend with marijuana, the legalization of gambling has caused the perceived risk among young people to drop significantly, therefore making teens feel that it is safe to gamble,” he said.
Experts say what these students and educators are seeing in their hallways is no accident. Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation,” argues that sports-betting apps are engineered to seize the adolescent brain at its most vulnerable stage. The problem, he said, is the shift from “slow dopamine,” which comes from long-term effort, to “quick dopamine,” which arrives instantly with every wager.
“Gambling, which is already so addictive, has gotten as fast, or faster, than social media,” Haidt said in an interview with JTA. That speed, he notes, creates the same dynamic that the 20th-century behaviorist B.F. Skinner observed in his lab animals: rapid, unpredictable rewards that keep users hooked. “The strongest response comes from a variable ratio reinforcement schedule,” Haidt said, meaning teens win just often enough that they keep betting, without ever seeing the larger pattern designed to drain their accounts.
For teens, who are overwhelmingly online and often dealing with high academic expectations, Haidt warns that this creates a dangerous mismatch between modern devices and adolescent development. Phones have become “the hypodermic needle of the digital age,” he said, delivering dopamine hits throughout the day and making it harder for young people to build the patience and self-control that protect against addiction.
Research also helps explain why boys are bearing the brunt of the harm. The recent Journal of Gambling Studies study found that young men were far more likely than young women to gamble frequently, and that frequency was the single strongest predictor of problem gambling. Because sports betting is disproportionately and repeatedly used by boys, they face significantly higher risk.
“Every single boy who is at risk for addiction will now become addicted,” Haidt said, “because they are being exposed over and over again to an intensely addictive product.” He argues that age limits are the only real guardrail and that schools should treat gambling apps the way they treat other predatory industries like tobacco or alcohol.
It is exactly this cycle that Senor hopes to interrupt through Behind the Bet with messengers like Rose-Berman. “Gambling’s always been a problem,” Rose-Berman said, “but it used to be man versus vice. Today, it’s man versus vice and the billion-dollar tech companies, and that’s simply not a fair fight.”
