When I was around 13 years of age, our neighbors had five children, three of whom were close in age to me. They would invite me to play card games at their place and we played for money. It was not high stakes in any absolute sense but it was for me since all I had was just the little pocket money that my parents gave me. So I did have thrill (if you want to call it that) of fearing a real loss. It was exciting to gamble and I was quickly getting drawn in and looked forward to playing after school. But I would end up losing consistently. After a while, while I could not prove it, I became convinced that the siblings were cheating by colluding against me. They were Indians and would sometimes speak and sing in Hindi, a language that is not spoken in Sri Lanka and that I did not know, and I think that they were communicating with each other. Anyway, I got tired of losing in an unfair game and stopped playing with them after a while. It was my first taste of how the gambling system is usually rigged against you and I lost my taste for it and never got attracted to it again.

Gambling in sports in the US has an ugly history with players accused of adjusting their play in order to make money by getting particular results. This led to federal laws that banned it and for the longest time it was restricted to just in-person gambling in the state of Nevada, primarily Las Vegas. Professional sports leagues vigorously opposed any attempts to legalize it nationwide, arguing that it would lead to the death of sports due to suspicions of cheating. But in 2018, the US Supreme Court overturned the federal ban, saying that the constitution did not allow for this federal power and that it was up to the states to decide whether they wanted to allow gambling or not, and then it was off to the races, as states vied to attract gamblers.

The professional sports leagues quickly did an about-face and went all in on gambling and became active partners with betting agencies, seeing it as a way of getting new revenue and countering the declining interest in professional sports that had been occurring as young people moved away from sports fandom. The online social media world offered more interest than watching games that lasted for hours. And the leagues made the right bet. For the sports leagues, betting results in people becoming deeply engaged in games that they would not otherwise care about and thus has revived flagging interest. The many betting apps available on phones means that people can bet anytime and anywhere and on pretty much anything. And they do. Betting on the results of actual games is just one of the options. One can bet on all manner of minutiae involving individual players and individual plays and do so even in real time as a game is progressing. For the addict, there are an infinite number of ways to lose money.

The Atlantic magazine assigned McKay Coppins to investigate the massively exploding world of online gambling, especially on sports. They gave him $10,000 to use for this purpose. Coppins is is a practicing Mormon, a religion that forbids gambling so he first checked in with his bishop. His bishop reluctantly gave his sanction, based on the fact that the money he was using was not his own and was part of his work.

Coppins bet mostly on football during the latest season. Although he started out with a dispassionate interest, he soon found himself sucked into that world and quickly acquired many of the habits of the compulsive gambler. His story is titled, appropriately enough. Sucker: My year as a degenerate gambler.

For 200 bucks, I had purchased an artificial rooting interest in a game I had no reason to care about. I kept watching even after a weather delay pushed it late into the night, scrolling frenetically next to my sleeping wife in search of angles to exploit with late-game bets.
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One rainy evening, I found myself parked outside a big-box store in Northern Virginia where my wife had sent me on an errand, obsessively scavenging for lines on my phone and jotting down favorites in my Notes app. When I looked up, 45 minutes had passed. I would be late for dinner.
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i was surprised at how quickly and extensively the experiment was bleeding into the rest of my life. I was listening to gambling podcasts in the shower and spending my Sunday afternoons watching five football games at a time—one on my phone and four on the TV’s split screen.
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It was now common for my family to catch me furtively tapping in wagers.
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My wife was no longer having fun with this stunt of mine. Having given up on the prospect of a big payday, she was now focused on the more immediately visible consequences of my gambling—like the fact that our 7-year-old daughter knew the difference between a point spread and a moneyline, and that our 10-year-old’s first question whenever I turned on a game was “Who are we betting on?”

The odds involved in sports betting are severely against you.

[Nate] Silver laid out some basic realities of the sports-betting economy. The books effectively charge you about 4.5 percent for every bet you place, he explained, which means it isn’t enough to win 50.1 percent of the time; you have to win 52.5 percent of your bets just to break even, and that’s before taxes.
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Live betting—placing wagers in the middle of games—was also a bad idea, he told me, because it leads to gambling based on emotion more than logic. Also, televised games are broadcast on a delay, which means the sportsbooks can adjust lines before you even see what has happened on the field. You are, in effect, betting against people who live 20 seconds in the future.

But the lure of idea that you will be able to beat the odds is sufficiently strong to result in enormous amounts of money being wagered.

In 2017, Americans legally bet $4.9 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion—and once you’re hooked, the list of sporting events you can gamble on is seemingly endless. Unsatisfied with wagering only on Sunday football games? Not to worry: How would you like to bet on an Indian cricket match, or Lithuanian Ping-Pong, or a Polish soccer game in a league whose name you can’t pronounce?

One consequence of money being-involved is that when players fail in unexpected ways, the fans can get outraged because they have lost money, sometimes a lot. This can result in them attacking and even threatening the offending player and even accusing them, the referees, and even the entire league of cheating, (like I suspected with my neighbors).

There actually is cheating going on.

On October 23, the FBI announced the arrests of more than 30 people in a pair of interlocking gambling schemes. The indictments alleged a yearslong mob operation that drew on insider information to manipulate NBA games and win bets. Terry Rozier, while playing for the Charlotte Hornets, was said to have tipped off associates that he would leave a game early with a foot injury, enabling bettors to place more than $200,000 on “under” prop bets for his points, rebounds, and assists. The implicated included NBA players and a retired Hall of Fame point guard turned head coach. (They have pleaded not guilty.)
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The NBA gambling ring exposed in October was only the beginning. In November, two MLB players pleaded not guilty after being indicted for manipulating pitches to help bettors. In January, federal prosecutors accused 39 college-basketball players across 17 Division I teams of taking bribes from gamblers to underperform. (The indictment alleges that the scheme began with rigging Chinese professional-basketball games, then spread to the NCAA.) That same month, the Ultimate Fighting Championship canceled a bout after reports of suspicious betting activity.

Taken together, the proliferating scandals have posed the most significant threat to the credibility of organized sports in the U.S. since Shoeless Joe Jackson got paid to help fix the 1919 World Series. One recent poll found that 65 percent of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes; in another poll, 70 percent of respondents agreed that sports betting “lessens the integrity of the game.”

Coppins describes his own reaction when a player dropped the ball in the end zone, nullifying a sure touchdown that would have won him his bet.

Rewatching clips of Demercado’s fumble, I was filled with an irrational hatred for this person I had never met. I hated the way he sauntered so cavalierly into the end zone. I hated the way he tossed the ball to the ground like a used dish towel in what I’m sure he thought was a cool flex. I hated the way he shrugged off reporters’ questions in the locker room afterward by repeating the same meaningless quote (“Just gotta be smarter”).

The intensity of the feeling, fleeting as it was, unnerved me.

Caroline Garcia doesn’t remember the first abusive message she received from an angry gambler who lost a bet on her, but she knows she was still a teenager.

Garcia, a French tennis player who at her peak was ranked fourth in the world, told me she got so many deranged messages over the years—so many slurs and death threats, so many fuck yous and kill yourself—that they started to feel like background noise. She recalled the dissonance of receiving the most unhinged message imaginable and then looking at the sender’s wholesome Instagram: “His profile picture is with his kid of 1 year old, and you’re like, I don’t understand—what is the problem with you? ” I felt a twinge of shame as I realized I could empathize with that gambler’s brief spell of insanity more than I’d like to admit.
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But the rise of legal, normalized betting has coincided with an increase in harassment. More than a third of men’s Division I college-basketball players say they’ve received abusive messages from gamblers, and 21 percent of gamblers themselves cop to lashing out at athletes in person or online.
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Seeking company in my misery, I pulled up X, where I found a stream of outraged gamblers accusing the referees of fixing the game, perhaps with the aid of the NBA commissioner.
“Clearly they had money on Indiana,” one wrote.

“Disgusted.”

“Adam Silver must resign.”

I am not usually prone to paranoid thinking. But to my surprise, I found myself wondering if these venting gamblers were right. The morning’s indictment lingered in my mind. Had the refs rigged the game? Were league officials involved? What about players? How deep did this thing go?

And then there is the problem of addiction, with some gamblers starting young in that “one survey found that nearly one-third of 11-year-old boys had gambled in the past year”, which reminded me of my own early experience of it. If not checked, it can get out of control.

Experts estimate that only about 2 to 5 percent of gamblers will develop compulsive behaviors. But as Carton likes to point out, that small percentage becomes a very large number when tens of millions of Americans suddenly have casinos in their pockets.
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Gambling addiction is similar to other addictive disorders, but there are key differences. It’s easier to hide, at least at first—the addict doesn’t have glazed eyes or slurred speech, and no one can smell it on him. Plus, the compounding financial pressure of the habit can quickly turn a private vice into a full-blown crisis. One in five compulsive gamblers will attempt suicide in their life, a higher rate than for any other category of addict.

Executives at the major online sportsbooks are quick to trumpet their commitment to “responsible gaming.” But that purported commitment runs up against an economic reality: As much as 90 percent of the sportsbooks’ revenue comes from less than 10 percent of their users. Their apps seem clearly designed, much like TikTok and Candy Crush, to keep users scrolling and tapping in a hypnotic stupor. If your account is nearing empty, DraftKings will offer a “reload bonus” of gambling credits to entice you to deposit more money; if you’ve gone a couple of days without making a wager, you might get a push alert from FanDuel offering a “no sweat bet,” promising to refund a loss with site credits to be used for more gambling.

Coppins found that there is a gender gap when it comes to betting, both within his social circle and generally.

Neither their wives nor mine expressed interest in joining us. This had become something of a pattern since my experiment began—whenever I started talking about gambling with a couple, the woman would almost invariably tune out or recoil, while her husband leaned in attentively, eager to hear more. Neuroscientists have sought to explain this phenomenon. Men are, on average, less psychologically affected by financial loss than women, and more prone to optimism (rational or otherwise) about their financial future; this combination naturally leads to more risk-taking. There are complicated brain-chemistry factors involved that have to do with testosterone, and dopaminergic systems, and kappa-opioid receptors, all of which seem to add up to a Jim Gaffigan joke about how men are morons compared with their wives. Whatever the reason, the gender split is undeniable: Men make up about 70 percent of sports bettors in America and, according to one study, 98 percent of online sports bettors who qualify as “problem gamblers.”

You can easily bet on almost anything now, even political events, and that has led to people with insider knowledge taking advantage of it.

Kalshi and Polymarket, the two biggest prediction market sites, rushed to institute new industry guardrails and add new surveillance tools on Monday after two key senators announced legislation that could severely curtail the industry’s prospects.

Kalshi said it would ban political candidates from trading on their own campaigns, and it would pre-emptively block anyone involved in college or professional sports from trading contracts related to the sports they play or are employed by.
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Polymarket, in particular, has faced intense criticism after some of its users made substantial bets ahead of the US-Israel war in Iran and the US’s military action in Venezuela earlier this year. Those users appeared to have profited handsomely from knowing in advance that Donald Trump was going to take military action in those regions.

With the rampant corruption in the Trump administration, it is not hard to believe that there are many taking advantage of their insider knowledge to make bets. Without such knowledge, gambling is a mug’s game in which the odds are against you. Coppins ended up losing almost the entire $10,000 he started with. I am glad that my suspicions that the system was rigged against me inoculated me against it early in life, so that now it has no appeal for me whatsoever. So maybe I owe my childhood neighbors who cheated some gratitude.