Oct 20, 2026 · Jonathan
Ghouls, Horrors and Other Halloween Treats
This Saturday, the Philadelphia Zoo is hosting Boo at the Zoo. There’ll be face painting and candy, costumes and critters, and all manner of spooky good fun. I’m sure the kids of all ages are going to have a great time. Part of me wishes I was up in Philadelphia to join in the fun.
But part of me is glad I’m nowhere near the event. After all, there’ll be a ghoul hiding out amongst all the Halloween revelers!
Your first hint that something is amiss will be a registration table right by the entrance hosted by…cue spooky music…FanDuel.
As part of its VIP program, FanDuel is offering its VIP customers, along with up to three guests, including kids, free entrance.
Trick or treat.
The Philadelphia Inquirer broke the story this week. FanDuel’s response was that it isn’t a sponsor, there’s no branding on site, and it simply bought tickets the way anyone would. It gives its most loyal customers all kinds of perks, it said: museum exhibits, game tickets, dinner reservations. Its own flyer, though, sold the day as a FanDuel VIP event. Pennsylvania’s Gaming Control Board says it is looking into whether a benefit went to anyone under 21.
The zoo isn’t the scary part, of course. In this case, it’s the costume.
What a sportsbook VIP program actually rewards
You don’t become a sportsbook VIP the way you become a frequent flyer. You become a VIP by betting a lot. That’s the product. At a sportsbook, over time, betting a lot means losing a lot. The house edge doesn’t take nights off.
So the VIP list is, more or less, a list of the people who have lost the most. Some of them can afford it, but plenty can’t. The people with a gambling problem aren’t spread evenly across a sportsbook’s customers. They bunch up right at the top, where the hosts, the comps, and the free stuff live.
The zoo invites went to the heaviest bettors, and their kids, in costume, eating free snacks courtesy of the company they lose money to.
Lions, Tigers, and Bryce Harper. Oh my!
This isn’t the first sportsbook VIP treat to make the news this year. Over the summer the Inquirer reported that, in 2024, a FanDuel VIP manager sent a personalized video of Bryce Harper to Terry Thompson, a local bettor. Terry had a gambling addiction.
The video even called out his young son. FanDuel had flown the two of them out to California to watch Super Bowl LVI.
Later, after burning through his final $10,000 on a parlay bet (on DraftKings), broke and contemplating suicide, Thompson finally reached out to his therapist who contacted the police, who intervened to prevent him from self-harming. Thompson subsequently entered a psychiatric facility for gambling addiction treatment.
FanDuel has told lawmakers that its rewards aren’t designed to encourage destructive gambling, and that its VIP managers are trained to spot problem betting.
Hold that thought.
The scariest costume of all
In September, the New York Times reported that DraftKings built a machine-learning model, starting in 2023, that scored customers on how much more they were likely to lose after getting a promotion. It looked at how often they bet, their daily balances, and how their losses stacked up against their wagers. According to former employees, a separate effort that could flag customers who might be gambling compulsively stalled and was shut down.
Hmm. The same data. One use finds the people in trouble so you can help them. The other finds them so you can send them a bonus. One of those projects kept going. Boo!
DraftKings denies targeting customers based on losses or signs of problem gambling. Massachusetts regulators are reviewing how sportsbooks use AI, and a proposed class action has been filed. That will play out. But the takeaway doesn’t really depend on how it plays out. These companies know who their at-risk customers are. They have better data on it than any clinician ever will. Being trained to recognize the problem is great, but what do you do once you recognize it?
Parenthetically, it’s not as if the alternative is impossible. According to Baltimore’s lawsuit against the sportsbooks, FanDuel’s parent company, Flutter, ended VIP programs in the UK and added protections for younger customers there. Same company with different rules made different choices.
Why the kids matter
The old casino world had an unwritten rule: nothing with kids. A former Pennsylvania casino president told the Inquirer as much. A child psychiatrist at CHOP pointed to tobacco. The industry once found plenty of clever ways to reach teenagers, until the 1998 settlement shut that door.
These days kids are well within the blast radius. A 2025 Common Sense Media survey found that more than a third of boys ages 11 to 17 had gambled in the past year. A happy zoo day paid for by the betting app is exactly the kind of memory a brand wants planted early.
And the children of a sportsbook’s heaviest bettors are already living with it. The money, the moods, the time that goes missing. Pennsylvania researchers estimate the state’s problem-gambling rate at somewhere between 2.4% and 6.4%, more than double the national figure. Some of those families just got fun Halloween plans. Boo!
Under the mask
Halloween is the one night we all agree to play pretend. It’s a joyful reframe of scary things where the monsters are friendly, strangers hand out candy, and marauders roam the streets without anyone caring who’s under the masks.
The sportsbooks have figured out how to keep that going all year. The VIP perk is the candy and “loyal customer appreciation” is the costume. Under the mask is a model that knows how much you’ll lose after the next bonus and a host whose job is to make sure you get it.
At Clear Odds Recovery, we’ll hear from a lot of these customers after the host stops calling.
