CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Betting Ads in Sports Broadcasts

NARRATOR: Anyone who has watched a hockey game in the past few years will have noticed a striking change during the commercial breaks. Where viewers once saw advertisements for pickup trucks and fast food, they now see a steady parade of betting apps, urging fans to place a bet before the third period. Since Ontario opened its online betting market in 2022, these commercials have become almost unavoidable, and a growing number of voices are calling for them to be banned during sports broadcasts altogether.

NARRATOR: Among them is Leonard Fisk, a high school counsellor in Hamilton. Fisk says his students can recite betting odds the way earlier generations memorized hockey cards. Many of them are too young to place a bet legally, yet the advertising, he argues, teaches them that gambling is simply part of being a fan. He compares the situation to tobacco sponsorship, which once seemed perfectly normal at sporting events and is now unthinkable. For Fisk, voluntary limits written by the industry are not enough, since the companies drafting the rules are the same ones profiting from the ads.

NARRATOR: Broadcaster and former league executive Monica Albright sees things differently. Gambling, she points out, is legal, and adults who choose to bet deserve to know which companies are licensed and properly supervised, rather than drifting toward offshore websites with no protections at all. Advertising money also helps pay for the broadcasts themselves; without it, she warns, more games could disappear behind expensive subscriptions. Albright takes the risks seriously, and she would welcome tighter rules on when the ads can air and who can appear in them, especially famous athletes. A complete ban, though, would in her view punish responsible viewers for the habits of a few.

NARRATOR: Fisk doubts that the problem is limited to a few. In his own school, he says, more students come to him with betting worries every year, and teenage boys seem especially vulnerable. Albright replies that more young people asking for help might simply mean more of them know where to find it.

NARRATOR: Both make reasonable points, though the comparison with tobacco may prove the more telling one. Society once accepted that advertising could go wherever it pleased, and later decided otherwise. Whether betting ads follow the same path will likely depend on what the evidence shows over the next few years.