Since the legalization of online sports betting, Coloradans have wagered over a billion dollars on table tennis games. Table tennis has shown up on the top 10 list of most popular sports to wager on in every monthly report issued by the Colorado Department of Revenue.
The vast sums spent wagering on this obscure sport are a sign of deeper trouble lurking under the surface of these dry government reports, but unfortunately, we don’t have the data to know how acute the problem might be.
Table tennis is a sport almost custom made for gambling addiction. The games are quick (a match might be over in 10 minutes), and they happen at all hours of the day and night. Table tennis wagers are the slot machines of sports betting, and they have only been becoming more popular in Colorado.
In 2020 when the first legal, online sports betting started in Colorado (and when many professional sports leagues were shut down as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic), Coloradans wagered an average of $10 million on table tennis games each month. That figure declined somewhat until the latter half of 2022 when it began rising again. Across 2025 and the first half of 2026, Coloradans wagered an average of $30 million each month on table tennis games. It seems unlikely to me that there is $30 million a month worth of genuine, non-wagering-fueled interest in table tennis among Colorado sports fans.
A recent national survey estimated that 10% of Americans have used online gambling services at least occasionally over the past year. Assuming Coloradans have the same incidence of online gambling, there may be 480,000 online gamblers in the state. Research on online gambling shows that a small minority (about 10%) of users account for 80% of gambling activity. These figures imply that there could be as many as 70,000 “power users” in the state who gamble an average of about $70,000 each year.
The above calculations are just an informed guess because of the very limited information that is available about gambling in the state. The reports issued by the state give an accounting of the overall wagers and winnings, but Colorado does not collect the individual-level data that would be necessary to understand the scope and scale of problem gambling behaviors.
Colorado regulators should demand more robust reporting from the gambling companies. The state already requires sportsbooks to report how much Coloradans wager overall and how much they win or lose in the aggregate. It should also require them to report enough anonymized information about individual betting behavior to allow researchers to identify patterns associated with problem gambling.
How many people are betting every day? How many are rapidly increasing their wagers? How many are chasing losses? How many are depositing money repeatedly after losing? How many are using multiple platforms? How many respond to warnings by changing their behavior? How many simply move to another platform?
The gambling companies already have the answers to these questions. They need this information to operate their businesses, and they have far more detailed records of gambling behavior than any government agency or researcher could hope to collect through surveys.
Colorado should make sharing anonymized behavioral data with an independent research repository a condition of operating a sportsbook in the state. Researchers could then study gambling behavior while protecting the privacy of individual bettors. Regulators could use the information to determine whether existing safeguards are actually working and whether policy interventions like we saw with Senate Bill 131 and the recently implemented limits on credit card use are having their intended effect.
Ultimately, Coloradans will pay the price of the harms caused by the gambling industry whether directly for those addicted and those close to them or indirectly through the costs that ripple out to our other institutions.
This is fundamentally a data problem, but it is one Colorado can solve. The data that we need to evaluate the extent of the harm already exists, it is just a matter of being granted access to it.
Before we allow the gambling industry to grow any further, we should at least require it to tell us what harm that growth is causing.
Brad Jones, of Severance, is the founder of Colorado’s Political Landscape and holds a Ph.D. in political science.
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