The Freedom to Lose (Hunter Field Editor’s Note)

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I believe adults should be free to gamble. I also believe what’s happening in Arkansas is a slow-motion disaster. Just take a look through the numbers we’ve published on Page 13.

Since the state’s three casinos opened, Arkansas gamblers have lost more than $4 billion. In 2025 alone, total gambling losses topped $742 million. That works out to roughly $2 million leaving the pockets of people in Arkansas every single day.

The slot machines are the workhorses. More than $7.8 billion was fed into terminals across our three casinos in 2025. That is hard for me to even fathom.

Casinos kept roughly 7.8%, about $610 million. That hold rate has barely budged in seven years. Casinos don’t need that rate to be large. They just need volume, and Arkansas delivers.

But the real accelerant is mobile sports betting. In its first partial year, 2022, the mobile sportsbook handle was $122 million. By 2025, it had crossed $617 million — a fivefold increase in three years. Mobile now accounts for 94% of all sports wagering in the state. The retail sportsbook handle, the kind that requires you to physically walk into a casino, has been almost cut in half since 2021.

The friction is gone. You can lose money from your couch, your car or a deer stand in the woods.

The money gambled on mobile apps is only going to grow with the addition of national players Draft Kings and Fan Duel into the state.

And while my free market instincts inform my support of legalized gambling, Arkansas has nothing close to resembling a free market. We the people constitutionally imposed a three-casino monopoly (four if you count the doomed Pope County casino license).

Now layer on top what’s coming: prediction markets. Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are turning everything from elections to weather events into a wagering opportunity. If mobile sports betting removed the friction of driving to a casino, prediction markets remove the friction of needing a game to bet on. The product is limitless, the access is instant, and there’s hardly any regulation.

The state collected $116 million in gambling taxes last year. That money is real, and it funds real services. But it represents just 15.6 cents of every dollar gamblers lost.

I don’t have a clean answer for any of this. I believe adults have the right to make bad decisions with their own money. But is a right exercised within a rigged system truly a right?

More than $4 billion in losses since 2019 means billions not going into retirement savings, kids’ and grandkids’ college funds, family vacation funds, local charities and or even business opportunities or investments. Bankruptcies, higher divorce rates and increased instances of domestic violence are coming.

I’m not so naive to believe people weren’t gambling in Arkansas before 2019, but we’ve created a system that is harder and harder to defend.

Email Hunter Field, editor of Arkansas Business, at hfield@abpg.com