The house always wins. Which means its visitors always lose.

Not every single time. There are short-term wins. Over the long haul, however, the house is picking pockets like a six-fingered Artful Dodger.

Via David Purdum of ESPN.com, the American sports betting industry had a record $13.71 billion in 2024 revenue. It’s a 24.18-percent increase over 2023.

Last year, legal sports books took nearly $150 billion in bets, a 22.2-percent bump over the prior year.

Of the amount, 30 percent was wagered through digital technologies. That number was 13 percent only four years ago.

The gains undoubtedly come from the ongoing proliferation of states that have legalized sports betting. And while most states now allow it, a couple of states with massive populations — California and Texas — still haven’t embraced it.

California has more than 10 percent of the nation’s population, at nearly 39 million as of 2023. Texas, as of 2023, had 30.5 million residents.

So there’s still a lot more money to be made by the sports books. And lost by the betting public.

Most bettors know the system is rigged against them. It doesn’t stop them from betting. Many think they’re the exception, the one who will crack the code and raid the vault and pocket a pile of easy money while losing, one bet at a time, their hard-earned money.

That’s their absolute privilege. Implicit in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the right to make bad decisions that will lead, sooner or later, to the opposite of one or more of those things.