Connecticut, Five Years Into Online Gambling

The ExperimentEverything at once

Most states that legalized gambling after 2018 did it in pieces: sports betting first, online casinos later or never. Connecticut did both on one day. On October 12, 2021, under a deal between the state and the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes, online slots, online table games and mobile sports betting all went live, with the state's Department of Consumer Protection as regulator.

That makes Connecticut unusually useful. There is a clean before and a clean after, and the state paid for a serious look at both. In January 2024 the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services published Impacts of Legalized Gambling in Connecticut, a 200-page study by Gemini Research led by Rachel Volberg, built on a 2023 population survey and a direct comparison with the state's last one in 2008. Most of what follows comes from it.

The HelplineWhat happened first

The first signal was the phone. The Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling runs the state's only 24-hour helpline, and it gave the researchers its call logs. The monthly average number of calls, from gamblers or the people around them, went from 17 in 2020 to 32 in 2021 to 43 in 2022. That is an 88% increase in the launch year and a further 34% the year after. Counting every contact, including chats, texts and nuisance calls, the volume rose 91% between 2021 and 2022.

The Council's executive director, Diana Goode, said at the time that the organization felt "blindsided" by the pace, and that staff were "getting burned out," especially on nights and weekends. One operator responded that a spike in calls "is customary after market launches as customers are learning the new platforms." The state's own table shows the volume did not come back down.

We have seen the same shape elsewhere. Michigan's helpline calls tripled after its 2021 online launch, and Ontario's emergency departments saw gambling-disorder visits double after its 2022 expansion. Connecticut is the version with the cleanest baseline.

The SurveyWho is gambling, and who is paying

The 2023 survey found 69.2% of Connecticut adults had gambled in the past year, about the same as in 2008. What changed was where. Online gambling of any kind went from 2.0% of adults in 2008 to 10.7% in 2023. Sports betting went from 8.4% to 10.2%. Online casinos alone reached 7.2%.

Here is the part worth reading carefully, because it cuts against the easy story. The share of adults classified as problem gamblers was 1.8% in 2023. On the same instrument used in 2008, the rate was unchanged: 1.4% in both years, rising to 1.7% only after adjusting for differences in how the surveys were run. The researchers said larger increases "might have been anticipated" given the 2021 launch, and offered an explanation: participation in the new products was still comparatively low two years in, and the heaviest harm tends to lag.

So the headline is not "problem gambling doubled." It is something more specific. 1.8% of adults is roughly 50,000 people, and about 150,000 once you count the spouses and children living with the consequences. And those people are not a side effect of the market. They are the market:

The report's fourth recommendation to the state was to "reduce the industry's financial reliance on at-risk and problem gamblers," including automated alerts to people playing online when their spending crossed a line. We looked at why sign-up promos are built the way they are and at why limits tend to fail. This is the revenue math underneath both.

Three ListsThe ban that doesn't reach everywhere

Connecticut has a self-exclusion program. It has three, in fact: the state list run by the Department of Consumer Protection, which covers the online operators and retail sportsbooks, plus separate lists at Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, each with its own enrollment and its own durations. They do not talk to each other. The 2024 study's recommendation was blunt: "Merge the three separate self-exclusion lists in Connecticut and align the self-exclusion periods," and then build a regional list so someone could exclude from every venue and operator in New England at once.

The gap showed up on day one. When the state launched its online self-exclusion portal in September 2021, The Day reported that people who had signed casino exclusion forms years earlier assumed they were covered. Some found out otherwise when the marketing for the new apps started arriving.

The study also measured how many people the lists reach at all. Among Connecticut adults with a gambling problem, 32.5% did not know the helpline existed and 51.4% did not know the state had a voluntary self-exclusion program. Half the people the fence is built for have never heard of the fence. If you are one of them, how self-exclusion works is the practical version.

The Fourth DoorPrediction markets

Then there is the door no list reaches. In February 2026, testifying on a bill to bar prediction markets from serving anyone under 21, Diana Goode told the legislature's General Law Committee that the Council supported the age limit and the self-exclusion tools in the bill, but warned that the bill as drafted "could be interpreted as legitimizing prediction market platforms for adults over the age of twenty-one without clearly applying the comprehensive problem gambling and consumer protection standards that Connecticut has carefully developed."

Seven months later the state stopped waiting. On September 10, 2026, Governor Ned Lamont's office announced nine cease-and-desist orders against prediction markets, including Polymarket, Robinhood, Coinbase and Crypto.com, nearly 30 subpoenas to payment processors, app stores and media outlets, and a lawsuit against Kalshi, the largest operator. The announcement estimated $40 billion would be wagered on the NFL through prediction markets this season, and said these platforms "are known to offer and accept wagers from prohibited bettors, including people under the legal betting age of 21 and who appear on the state's voluntary self-exclusion list."

That is a state regulator putting in writing what we described last week in the self-exclusion gap: you can sign the list, and a federally supervised exchange will take your money anyway. Lamont's line was that the state legalized sports wagering "to create a safe, responsibly regulated market for Connecticut consumers, not to open a free-for-all."

What It MeansFive years in

Put the pieces together and Connecticut's five years say something more precise than "online gambling is bad."

Legalizing it online roughly quintupled participation without, so far, moving the share of adults in serious trouble. But the people in trouble carry the industry: seven dollars in ten. The helpline that serves them took two and a half times the calls it did before launch. Half of them do not know the exit exists, the exit is split across three doors, and a fourth door has opened that none of the three can close.

If you are in Connecticut: sign the state list at the Department of Consumer Protection and, if you have ever set foot in them, the two casino lists as well. Treat prediction market apps as the gap they are and block them on the device, not just in your head. If you are anywhere else, the same math almost certainly applies to your state, with less data to prove it.

And if the numbers in this piece describe you or someone at your table, free, confidential help is here, and the two-minute self-check is where most people start.

Sources

• Impacts of Legalized Gambling in Connecticut, Gemini Research for the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, January 2024 (2023 population survey; Table 49, helpline activity; recommendations 1 and 4)
• Governor Lamont Announces New Actions Against Illegal Prediction Markets Offering Sports Wagers in Connecticut, Office of the Governor, September 10, 2026
• Written Statement of Diana Goode, Executive Director, Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling, on H.B. 5038, General Law Committee, February 18, 2026
• Connecticut's Problem-Gambling Hotline Calls up 203%, April 18, 2022 (Goode and operator quotes)
• State launches online portal for self-exclusion from gaming, The Day, September 24, 2021
• DCP Announces Launch of Statewide Self-Exclusion List, Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection, 2021