Bettors have always swapped picks with friends. What’s changing is that the group chat, the betting feed and the wager itself are increasingly happening in the same app.
From ancient Romans gambling on chariot races to today’s sports fans sharing wagers in group chats, sports betting has always been a social experience.
At Rome’s Circus Maximus, spectators watching the races could root for one of four racing factions: Red, White, Green, or Blue. And if they were feeling lucky, they could also bet on their favorite team.
Fast-forward almost two millennia, and while the setting has changed, the social behavior looks a lot like it did in ancient times. Friends trade picks in group chats, share bet slips, and follow other bettors on platforms like Discord, X, and Reddit.
However, in this 21st-century group chat version of social betting, the conversation and the actual wager often don’t happen in the same place. Instead, someone shares their parlay with the group, a friend sees it, opens a sportsbook, finds the same markets, and rebuilds the bet.
That can make the betting experience feel social even though placing the wager is very much an individual act.
Betting companies have recognized that disconnect and are starting to bring the social side of betting and the act of placing a wager into the same product.
FanDuel’s Community Feed is one example of how sportsbooks are doing this. Players using the feed can see the wagers other customers have placed and add them directly to their bet slip with just one tap.
Over on DraftKings, Social Betting Groups let users create or join groups, track their friends’ bets, chat in real time, and compete on a leaderboard.
All of these new features don’t mean that sports betting is becoming more social in and of itself. What’s happening is that sportsbooks are making it easier to be social within their products.
That means many of the social interactions that once had to happen outside the app are now taking place within it.
Sportsbooks Are Bringing Social Betting Into the Product
While feeds and wagering groups are a big part of the social betting experience, it doesn’t stop there. Sportsbooks are creating all sorts of new ways to keep users engaged and make betting more social.
Last year, just in time for Thanksgiving, FanDuel introduced Pass the Leg. This limited-time promotion let friends and family build multi-leg parlays together. Along with sharing turkey and stuffing, each person contributed a leg, then individually decided whether to place the finished bet.
The sportsbook even said it got the idea from watching how fans were already collaborating in group chats.
FanDuel’s new partnership with social sports app Real is another example of its efforts to make betting more of a shared activity. However, with Real, it’s doing things a little differently.
Instead of putting a social feed into a sportsbook, the company is putting its odds and betting markets into an app where fans are already following games, reacting to plays, and talking to each other.
Slips, a peer-to-peer betting platform, is taking a different approach to making gambling more social. It recently debuted a feature that lets friends create their own bets, send them through an in-app group chat, and settle them there too.
Gambling Insider asked Adam Bjorn, CEO of Plannatech, the company behind Prime Sports and Betcris Arizona, why sportsbooks are putting more emphasis on social experiences in their products.
“Everything today is about community,” Bjorn said. “Outside the US, sharing bets and following other bettors has been part of betting culture for years, through forums, tipster groups, and WhatsApp. The US market is now bringing that inside the product.”
He said the goal is “to take the conversations already happening in group chats and on X and give them a home inside your own ecosystem.”
These companies also have a business reason for pursuing this approach.
“Social is fundamentally an engagement and retention play,” Bjorn told us. “Sportsbooks compete for attention with every app on someone’s phone, not just other books.”
From Bjorn’s perspective, the biggest change isn’t the social behavior itself.
“None of this is new,” he explained. “The difference now is that operators can keep that activity in their own ecosystem instead of losing it to third-party platforms.”
Betting Feeds Are Changing How Users Find Wagers
In a traditional sportsbook, the betting menu generally works best when bettors already have some idea of what they’re looking for.
They scroll through the menu, choose a sport, pick a game, and check out the available markets to find the wager they want.
A betting feed works differently. Instead of users having to search for a specific market, the feed puts bets in front of them, including those they may not have been looking for in the first place.
Matt Bresler, co-founder and CEO of Odditt, a sports betting content company that builds bet and parlay discovery tools for operators, told Gambling Insider that feeds can change how users find wagers.
“Searching assumes you already know what you want. Most people don’t,” Bresler said.
“A casual fan doesn’t open the app thinking, ‘I want to analyze the Lakers’ spread.’ They think, ‘I want to bet on something that resonates with me.’”
Betting feeds open the door for sportsbooks to show users wagers they may never have searched for on their own.
“A feed flips the job from search to discovery,” Bresler said. “The product brings you a parlay built around a rivalry, a rainy road game, three players who share your birthday, and you decide whether it’s interesting.”
Sportsbooks Are Making It Easier to Copy Someone Else’s Bet
Before social betting features came into vogue, bettors who wanted to recreate a friend’s wager from a group chat often had to open their sportsbook app and find the same markets themselves.
Bjorn told Gambling Insider that sportsbooks are “removing friction between inspiration and action.”
“It comes down to one click,” he said. “In a group chat, someone shares a slip, and everyone else has to rebuild it by hand in their own app. Inside the platform, you tap once, and you’re on the same bet.”
Having those features inside the sportsbook can also make certain types of group bets easier to pull off. Bjorn pointed to a concept where several friends each chose one leg of a shared parlay, saying the whole thing becomes simpler when it can be tracked and settled in one place.
Making bets easier to copy also changes the role of the traditional bet slip, Bresler told us.
“The bet slip stops being the product, and the content becomes the product,” he said. “When a user can tap a bet they saw in a feed and have it land in their cart, the sportsbook is just the checkout.”
He said the wager also comes with context that a line on a betting menu doesn’t always have. That extra context could come from a friend’s recommendation or from content built around a particular story or theme.
Extra Steps Give Bettors More Time to Think Before Placing a Wager
When sportsbooks make it easier for users to copy someone else’s bet, they’re also getting rid of some of the steps that used to come between seeing a wager and actually placing it.
Elizabeth Schwab, PsyD, a professor in the Business Psychology Division at The Chicago School, told Gambling Insider that those extra steps can play a role in how people make decisions.
We asked her whether being able to see another person’s bet and place it almost immediately could make that social influence stronger than seeing the same wager somewhere outside the app.
“It could — for the simple reason that barriers to making that decision/bet are lessened within [the] app,” Schwab said.
She compared it to embedded payments, where having a credit card already saved makes it easier to complete a purchase than having to stop and take the card out of a wallet.
The same principle can apply when there are extra steps between seeing a bet and placing it.
“That friction can help us to slow down, delay rewards, and consider things from a more logical (and less emotional) point of view,” Schwab explained.
However, she pointed out that a little extra friction isn’t always enough to change someone’s mind once they’ve decided they’re going to place a bet.
“If we are fully engaged and committed to making a bet, walking to the kitchen to get our wallet and credit card won’t make a difference.”
Seeing What Other Bettors Do Can Influence How People Bet
Besides putting more wagers in front of users, betting feeds and social groups give them a window into what their friends and other bettors are doing on sportsbook apps.
Schwab explained to us that people often look to others to get a sense of what’s normal or expected, especially when they’re not sure about a decision.
“Consider any of our social media apps – they tap into the urge to see what other people are doing to better understand the norms or expected behaviors of a group,” she said.
And it doesn’t have to be a person a bettor knows personally for that influence to have a real impact.
“If someone is perceived as an expert, for example, we’re more likely to believe them,” Schwab said. “Many times, we don’t validate whether the expertise is relevant or real; it’s just the perception of expertise that can really affect us.”
When it comes to gambling, the influence of friends or online communities is often more than just seeing what other people are doing.
“Betting with friends or an online community could help to reduce natural feelings of uncertainty and fear, so gamblers feel more comfortable taking a chance,” she told us.
“Gambling is all about risk and to some extent, gamblers believe they can mitigate their risk by gathering additional information or doing their ‘homework’ — social proof is one of those tools that gamblers might use to feel like something is working in their favor, in addition to feeling like the risk is shared.”
Sports betting research has uncovered similar patterns. A University of Washington study of 221 young adult sports bettors in 36 states found that how participants perceived their friends’ betting habits was associated with how much they bet during the two weeks between the initial survey and a follow-up.
Those participants who believed their friends approved of higher wagering amounts tended to place more bets, and those who thought their friends would wager more money tended to wager more themselves.
In a separate study, researchers in Australia interviewed 33 regular bettors ages 19 to 29 about smartphone betting. Researchers found that betting habits could change depending on the social setting, with nearly all respondents saying they bet more when their friends were involved.
One participant described wagering $5 or $10 when betting alone but $20 or $30 with friends, saying there was “a bit of pressure there to bet a bit more.”
While these studies didn’t look at what happens when social cues are built directly into a sportsbook app, they do show that social influence can play a role in how people bet.
What’s changing is that sportsbooks are increasingly building that social experience into the app itself.
Instead of having to get a tip from a friend, scroll through a forum, or rebuild a bet someone shared elsewhere, users can see what other bettors are doing without leaving the sportsbook.
Responsible Gambling Gets More Complicated as Betting Becomes More Social
It makes sense that sportsbooks have moved to make betting within their apps more social. After all, as Bjorn pointed out earlier, there’s a clear business case for them doing so.
Social features keep users engaged and within that particular ecosystem, whether that’s Slips, DraftKings, or FanDuel.
But once companies decide to place social interaction alongside the wager in an app, the question becomes: what does that mean for responsible gaming?
When betting is social, friends can also play a role in responsible gaming. Bjorn said betting as part of a group can create “natural safety nets.”
“Friends notice when someone is chasing losses or betting more than usual, and they say something,” he said.
“Done right, socializing can make betting more visible and more accountable. It shouldn’t become a way to push people to follow bets they can’t afford.”
One question that comes up with features like betting feeds and copy-a-bet is whether they can make it too easy for someone with a gambling problem to find and place their next bet.
Bresler said reducing the steps between finding a bet and placing it doesn’t necessarily create a responsible gaming risk.
“The problem isn’t friction, though. It’s framing,” he said. “If you take that framing and make it one tap faster, you’ve made it worse. If you frame betting as entertainment, the way we do with Betflow, low friction is fine.”
In Bresler’s view, what users see before placing a wager, and what happens when they need help, matter more than simply adding extra steps to the betting process.
“So the real design questions are what you tell people about the bet before they place it, and what you put in front of them when they need help,” he told us.
That’s why he believes the bigger risk is something else: “Feeds and copy-a-bet aren’t the risk. A feed with no context and no exit ramp is.”
Social betting may be as old as time, but in the modern world, the way it’s packaged is different. The sportsbook is no longer just where the bet is placed; more and more, it’s becoming where bettors see what others are doing and decide whether they want to follow along.
The post The Social Sportsbook: How the Group Chat Is Moving Into Betting Apps appeared first on Gambling Insider.