Hello. My name is Craig, and I am a compulsive gambler. It wasn’t always this way, and yet now it always will be.
I remember fondly the days before I had a problem that cost me my livelihood, family, and freedom. I remember working at Yonkers Raceway in 1988 trying to pick the trotters, doing sports talk in Cleveland in 1992 where I got my first bookie, and flying to Costa Rica in 1998 to open my own offshore casino. Life was easier then.
My problem with gambling started years later, deeply rooted in ego and narcissism. The more successful I became on radio, the more my ego grew — and that was reflected in how much I gambled. My addiction resembled a shooting star: quick, burned bright, then faded away.
My story played out publicly, so I won’t rehash every detail. At the height of my addiction, I was gambling every day for three to four hours — in casinos, on illegal offshore sites, in underground card games. I was completely out of control, winning and losing millions.
It has been eight years since my last bet, and I’ve been dedicated to using my platform to help others facing similar issues.
With that goal in mind, I began partnering with FanDuel in 2021 as their first Responsible Gambling Ambassador. The idea: share my story to help inform the public about gambling’s potential perils, remove the stigma around problem gambling, and educate people that legal operators with customer protection tools are actually the safest place to bet. The partnership was initially met with ridicule, but now thousands of people have contacted me, and even more now use responsible gaming tools to help manage their play.
What makes the regulated market different are the specific tools that create guardrails for problem gambling, which take just minutes to set up. Deposit limits let customers set daily, weekly, or monthly spending caps that can’t be exceeded — preventing the kind of binge gambling that destroyed my life. Wager limits cap individual bet amounts, stopping players from making desperate large bets to chase losses. Time limits automatically log players out after predetermined periods, stopping you from getting lost in the game for hours.
The greatest tool of all though is self-exclusion. A tool that allows you to opt in to being banned from wagering in any manner either online or in person, that protects you from yourself no matter how desperate or eager you are to wager — something that would have been impossible with my illegal bookies or offshore sites.
I often wonder if I would’ve made the same mistakes if I’d gambled exclusively with legal, regulated operators that provided safety tools. But I’ve met hundreds of people who have benefitted by the structure created with legalization — real people whose gambling habits changed because they had boundaries that actually held.
Here’s what I want people to understand: you are far less likely to become a problem gambler if you avail yourself of the tools that only the legal and regulated operators provide you. They provide customer protections that simply don’t exist anywhere else. I have seen firsthand how these tools have saved people from making desperate, and at times devastating, decisions.
As someone who lost everything to gambling addiction, I can tell you these safeguards matter.
The genie’s out of the bottle, and there’s no putting it back. But we can do a better job highlighting gambling’s potential hazards and the paths for compulsive gamblers to get help — something I’ve dedicated my life to doing. Most importantly, we can choose the safest place to play — where protection and responsibility are a priority.
Carton is a WFAN radio host.
