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Go to WarHorse Casino on any night, and it’s not uncommon to find college students.
Take 22-year-old Will Wooden for example.
“I don’t do much of, you know, the traditional gambling, like blackjack, poker, craps, but I try to find that edge on sports books,” said Wooden, a senior accounting major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
In 2020, Nebraska voters legalized casino gambling at horse racing tracks, and WarHorse’s Lincoln operation was the first to open in 2022.
Last year, the casino brought in more than $82 million, including about $3.7 million in sports betting, as the state’s casino industry hit record revenues.
Sports betting remains a very small slice of the casino's business, but some groups are seeking to get mobile sports betting on the ballot this fall. Sports betting is currently legal in the state, but only in person at casinos. It’s popular across the United States, particularly among young adults 18 to 29 years old, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center study.
“Most of the people that I know are saying, yes, yeah, I’m probably putting some money on someone to win, someone to win by this much, or someone to score a touchdown or score a certain amount of points,” Wooden said.
According to UNL Campus Recreation, approximately 75% of college students placed a sports bet in the past year, and 18% say they gamble at least weekly.
The motivation for betting can be social or monetary.
“For the majority of people, it’s definitely for social, and that’s I think definitely a lot of the sports books, and especially a lot of the ads that you see on TV with sports books, they’re pandering more to the social scene,” Wooden said.
Wooden said money is his motivation; he filed taxes for his winnings the past two years.
But that makes him an outlier. Studies show that less than 5% of sports bettors win more than they lose over the long term.
Aaron Duncan, a communications professor at UNL, teaches COMM 440: Rhetoric of Sports and Games. He noted the risk of gambling addiction with sports betting.
“You hear stories about people betting on, you know, ping pong matches in Russia, or because they’re up in the middle of the night and there are no American sports at 2 a.m. to gamble on, so they’re gambling on things overseas that they have no idea about,” Duncan said. “If you’re addicted to your phone and you’re addicted to gambling, we’re now multiplying addictions.”
Duncan said physical casinos have more safeguards in comparison to mobile betting.
“At least with the casino, there’s a lot more safeguards just sort of inherently built into a physical experience, and casinos should have responsible gambling limits and things like that,” he said.
A 2023 article from the Milken Institute noted that in states – like Nebraska – where sports bettors must make their bets in person, the average bet is less than $100. But in states with mobile betting, the average bet is closer to $1,000.
The National Council on Problem Gambling defines problem gambling as, “gambling behavior that is damaging to a person or their family, often disrupting their daily life and career.”
“We’re behind in treating gambling the same way we treat alcohol or we treat other potential behaviors that can be done responsibly, but also carry inherent risk,” Duncan said.
“When you’re drinking alcohol or doing drugs, like, okay, a little bit of it can be fine, but if you do it too much, then that’s where it starts to become a problem. Like, same thing happens with gambling,” Wooden said.
The Nebraska Collegiate Prevention Alliance consists of 26 universities and colleges in the state. The alliance’s main work focuses on alcohol and drug-use education, but it has been looking for ways to change research efforts into understanding student perceptions of gambling.
UNL’s assistant director of alcohol and drug education, Jon Gayer, is a member of the NECPA advisory board. He said he finds students' conversations around gambling to be more casual.
“I think sports betting, especially with our college students, it doesn't have the stigma that maybe alcohol or even cannabis does, right? It’s freely talked about amongst friends in public,” Gayer said.
The alliance’s project director, Megan Hopkins, said research questions need to be reworded.
“The surveys that do ask students about problem gambling, ask about it as ‘problem gambling,’” she said. “So one, they’re saying ‘gambling,’ which for a lot of folks when you say ‘gambling’ what comes to mind is slot machines or scratch offs or things like that, right? Casino games, which is not usually what students are doing.”
The NECPA implemented five new questions about sports betting in the Nebraska Assessment of College Health Behaviors survey. Results from the survey should be available this summer. The alliance is also adding questions to its Year One College Behavior Profile, a survey used to gauge what incoming students’ understanding of alcohol, drug and gambling behaviors are like.
Colleges can use personalized data from the profile to shape education efforts on their campus.