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Online sports wagering is a popular and still growing gambling activity around the world. Like other types of gambling, it can lead to problems that include devastating financial, social, and health-related harms. The first analysis of actual online sports wagering activity (LaBrie, LaPlante, Nelson, Schumann, & Shaffer, 2007) suggested that levels of financial and time involvement were more moderate than anticipated from earlier survey studies. However, these findings are now more than a decade old. The current study examined actual online sports wagering activity of a similar cohort of 32,262 online gamblers from 2015 to understand how sports betting might have changed in ten years. Measures included subscriber characteristics, betting activities, and transactional activities. Online sports wagering behavior was similar to what was found a decade ago, with the majority of subscribers exhibiting modest to moderate, and a small subset exhibiting disproportionately high engagement, transactional activity, and in-game betting. These findings suggest that further investigation of individual trajectories of sports wagering behavior and engagement with different types of sports wagering products is merited.

Researchers and gambling operators have developed game-based responsible gambling tools and interventions that are intended to mitigate risks for gambling-related harm. We conducted a scoping review of this literature, with a focus on replicability and transparency. We charted 86 studies on characteristics such as study design and sample size. No tools or interventions had unambiguous evidence of efficacy, but some show promise. Pre-registration of research hypotheses, methods, and analytic plans was absent until 2019, reflecting a more recent awareness of open science practices. Published studies also inconsistently reported effect sizes and power analyses. Finally, we observed that the replicability of the responsible product design literature is uncertain but could be low. Specifically, entering each study’s primary result into a z-curve analysis—a tool for quantifying the replicability of a body of literature—revealed some evidence of publication bias based on statistical significance. Greater transparency and precision are paramount to improving the evidence base for responsible product design to mitigate gambling-related harm.