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Colorado lawmakers who are concerned about rising gambling addiction and betting scandals in professional sports filed a bill Wednesday that would prohibit sports betting apps from offering proposition bets on individual athletes’ performances.
The bipartisan responsible gaming bill — SB26-131 — would also attempt to slow down gambling habits by eliminating credit card usage on sports betting apps, limiting the number of deposits a person can make into an account, and banning push notifications to gamblers’ cellphones from betting companies such as DraftKings and FanDuel.
“Frankly, the more I looked into i,t the more I became really, really alarmed by everything that has happened as a consequence of legalized sports betting and, in my view, placing very few restrictions on it,” said Sen. Matt Ball, D-Denver, one of the bill’s sponsors.
Ball, who is sponsoring the bill with Sen. Byron Pelton, R-Sterling, said the rapid growth of sports betting in Colorado is causing unexpected problems — including financial debts — across the state, and the legislature needs to move to protect people and the integrity of professional and collegiate sports. The bill also has a Democratic and a Republican sponsor in the House.
He cited studies that show more than half of 18-to-22-year-olds have engaged in some form of sports betting, and surveys of high school students that report that between 60% and 80% have gambled for money within the previous 12 months.
“We just didn’t know what we didn’t know,” Ball said of Colorado’s quick entry into legalized sports betting. “It’s just exploded and it’s happened very fast. I think we can see the harm that’s happened very clearly.”
Colorado voters legalized sports betting in 2019 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a law that previously had prohibited states from allowing it. It was one of the first states to launch online sports books in May 2020, just after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the country, including putting a pause on most sports. But the state’s residents quickly took to sports betting apps as the world returned to normal.
The amount Colorado bettors have wagered has steadily increased each year, with people betting more than $6 billion on sports in 2025. At the same time, the number of people calling the state’s problem gambling hotline has risen, too. The hotline averaged about 350 calls per month in 2025, according to the Problem Gambling Coalition of Colorado.
Joshua Ewing, executive director of Healthier Colorado, an advocacy group that pushes for better health policies in the state, said new studies are showing a growing rate of addiction among young men and boys who gamble, and addiction is causing financial debt, strained relationships and emotional stress.
“It’s not about rolling back voter-approved betting. It’s about guardrails,” Ewing said of the bill. “The goal is smart policy, not prohibition.”
The sports betting industry is prepared to push back on the legislation.
“Colorado should seize this moment to strengthen its state-regulated market — not hand it back to illegal operators or chase bettors to federally regulated platforms,” said Joe Maloney, president of the Sports Betting Alliance. “This proposal undermines the very consumer protections it claims to advance, rewarding actors who openly flout Colorado law and contribute nothing to the state’s communities by way of tax revenues.”
Maloney said the alliance will continue to engage elected leaders and regulators to reinforce consumer protections and responsible gaming standards that the industry already follows.
Proposition bets, or prop bets, are the moneymakers for sports betting apps because they come with higher odds. In those bets, a gambler could bet on whether Denver Nuggets star Nicola Jokic will score 30 or more points in a game or whether Denver Broncos quarterback Bo Nix will throw more than one touchdown.
Sports betting apps also allow gamblers to make multiple prop bets at one time to form parlays, which further increase odds in favor of the sportsbooks, but are wildly popular with gamblers.
For example, Bet365 on Wednesday offered a parlay bet called “Joker x Jamal,” where a gambler would win if the Nuggets’ Jokic and Jamal Murray both scored more than 20 points, and if Murray had more than 10 assists and Jokic grabbed more than 10 rebounds. A $10 wager could earn $100 if all four things happened in the Nuggets game against the Celtics.
Colorado already prohibits prop bets on college athletes, but Ball and the bill’s other sponsors want to prohibit all of these bets because of the temptation among athletes to take bribes to influence outcomes for gamblers.
The bill also aims to curb the barrage of television advertisements and phone notifications that people see during sporting events.
It would prohibit advertisements for sports betting apps between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. It would also ban the betting companies from sending push notifications or text messages to gamblers that solicit bets or deposits.
Revenue from Colorado’s sports betting market goes to the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which awards grants to various projects around the state that protect and conserve lakes, streams and groundwater.
Ball did not anticipate that the bill would impact those projects, saying sports gambling continues to grow in Colorado every year.
“Any impact that this has on revenue of the sports betting industry is going to be vastly outweighed by the growth of the industry and how much more tax money is coming into Colorado year over year,” he said.
This is the second bill filed this month that addresses gambling in Colorado. Last week, a group of legislators filed a bill that would block the Colorado Lottery Commission’s plans to open online lottery ticket sales.
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Noelle Phillips
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