Sports betting surveys are everywhere these days, and they sometimes produce little new insight. However, a survey from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University offers an extraordinarily insightful and novel look at the U.S. online sports betting crisis.
The national survey of 2,548 adults found that half of men downloaded a sports betting app, and about 75% of those who did eventually deleted it.
Of those people who delete the app, about 75% end up reinstalling it.
Researchers described it as a “delete and reinstall loop.”
The paper’s authors wrote that the loop “reflects personal awareness that gambling is a harmful influence in the user’s life, but that ultimately the draw back to gambling pulls many back into this self-defeating and addictive behavior.”
Chasing Losses?
The survey, released Oct. 13, 2026, didn’t ask about specific reasons for deleting the app, which may include being inundated with direct marketing through push notifications. Nor did the survey ask how many times a sports bettor typically deletes and reinstalls the app, leaving the loop’s full extent unclear.
A separate 2026 study from the Siena Research Institute found that 60% of U.S. online sports bettors answered “yes” to this question: “Have you ever ‘chased’ a bet, that is, bet an increased amount in hopes of getting your money back from a previous bet where you lost?”
Chasing losses could be one reason to reinstall an app. On the other hand, research shows that people also engage in at-risk gambling after wins, in what may be called the “house-money effect.” Still, it seems less likely that someone would delete the app after withdrawing more money than they spent (note: winning is rare).
In 2025, at a legislative hearing in Kansas, a sports betting industry lobbyist made a revealing statement: he believed it was normal for a sports bettor to check an app 10 or more times in a single day. Is this compulsive checking?
Even checking odds and lines repeatedly without placing a wager could overwhelm someone and lead them to delete a betting app.
