Doubling Down

Doubling Down Doubling Down Online sports gambling has been normalized at a breakneck pace. Is there any way to push back against a predatory culture of promo codes and prop bets? In November 2014, less than a year into his tenure as NBA commissioner, Adam Silver quietly staked his claim to the most consequential position in modern American sports. “Betting on professional sports is currently illegal in most of the United States,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “I believe we need a different approach.” In 500 words of banal, press-release prose, Silver wrote fondly of England, where bets could be placed on a smartphone or “using a television remote.” He spoke optimistically of curbing the illegal betting industry’s “shady offshore” operations, which were, according to wildly inflated calculations, netting $400 billion annually. Silver ultimately made the case for bringing sports wagering “out of the underground and into the sunlight.” Only then could it be “appropriately monitored and regulated.” Silver’s statement represented a decided break with American sporting norms. His mentor and predecessor, David Stern, was a staunch opponent of gambling for most of his three-decade reign. MLB commissioner Bud Selig was similarly inclined, calling gambling destructive and “evil” in 2014. The NHL’s Gary Bettman thought betting would change “the very nature of [his] sport” for “the worse.” And the NFL’s Roger Goodell said legalization would fuel “speculation, distrust, and accusations of point-shaving or game-fixing.” These statements are laughable in retrospect. The leagues’ supposed reverence for integrity has proven easily amenable to the greater cultural—and financial—tides, which shifted rapidly following the 2018 Supreme Court case Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. In deciding Murphy, the court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which prohibited states from authorizing sports betting. The majority stated that the act violated the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering doctrine, which prevents the federal government from directly “commanding” state legislatures. “Sports betting was the substance of Murphy v. NCAA but it was also beside the point,” writes journalist Danny Funt in his meticulously researched account of the gambling boom, Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. Congress still has the authority to outlaw sports betting among individuals and operators, but it cannot order states to enact the ban themselves. American sports betting has surged from $7 billion in 2018 to $167 billion in 2025. It’s impossible to ignore the breakneck pace at which sports gambling, now legal in thirty-nine states, has been normalized, commoditized, and advertised. It’s equally difficult to overlook the cottage industry of participatory reportage sprouting up to make sense of the craze, as evidenced by recent cover stories in Harper’s and the Atlantic, features in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and countless investigative podcasts. What all this coverage has in common is the not-so-sneaking presumption that legalization has been an unmitigated disaster. A 2024 study found that “sports betting exacerbates the financial constraints of households already operating with less flexibility.” Every dollar of sports betting, harmful in its own right, leads to a near-equal “reduction in net investment.” In 2025, researchers from UCLA and USC found that legalization of online gambling led to lower credit scores and a “substantial increase in average bankruptcy rates.” Many of the numbers surrounding the craze are cause for concern: more than a quarter of American adults have a daily gambling habit, 42 percent of bettors have said they spend more than they should, and a majority of men ages eighteen to forty-nine have an active account with an online sportsbook. Some stats are even more alarming: one in five individuals with a gambling disorder have attempted suicide (the highest rate of any addiction disorder). Other figures are patently absurd: nearly one-third of eleven-year-old boys are estimated to have gambled in the last year. Still, the bigger picture is murky in these early days of the boom. And personal-liberty evangelists may point to evidence that the worst consequences of expanded access wane as the novelty tapers off—though this precedent seems shaky in an era of multi-billion-dollar data mining and targeted advertising. They also might point to the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) report on the relatively stable rate of problem gamblers (8 percent of adults), which ignores the explosion in the sheer number of gamblers and how much more accessible and addictive phone betting is compared to past methods (the NCPG itself acknowledges that it’s “too early to assume that rates of problematic play are stable”). There’s also the now-familiar argument that gambling has become a key source of tax revenue for state governments, specifically when it comes to funding education. But there’s ample evidence that gambling revenue supplants, rather than supplements, existing education dollars, and it’s a regressive tax: even if there is additional money being funneled into classrooms, it’s primarily coming from low-income households. Expansionists like Silver love to draw on Australia and Great Britain as paragons of successful gambling laws, ignoring plentiful evidence to the contrary: Brits lost £16.8 billion to the gambling industry in 2024-25 (not to mention their centralized gambling market bears little resemblance to the fragmented, patchwork system in the United States). In Australia, about one in seven adults experience betting-related harm and more than three in four think the country provides too many opportunities to gamble. Either way, the United States has hardly bothered to learn from these countries. State legislators “failed to look to the learned experience of other countries and heed the advice of addiction experts,” Senator Richard Blumenthal told Funt. If countless researchers, writers and legislators are to be trusted, we have a nascent public health crisis with significant economic ramifications on our hands. But while the exact contours of this potential—even likely—epidemic materialize, the proliferation of sports betting presents another sizable dilemma, which has less to do with public health and more to do with public trust. Silver said one of his foremost responsibilities “is to protect the integrity of professional basketball and preserve public confidence in the league.” In reality, the only thing the NBA and every other major American sports league has protected post-Murphy is its bottom line, as gambling-related partnerships have spiked alongside fan mistrust. A majority of fans now wonder if games are “rigged due to sports gambling,” and a staggering 65 percent believe athletes alter their play to “help gamblers win sports bets.” This wariness of sporting institutions is increasingly mirroring—and, I’d argue, reinforcing—public misgivings about the American government, news media, and countless other institutions in which trust keeps hitting record lows. For large swaths of the country, sports have historically felt like a respite from perceived corruption on Capitol Hill. But thanks to partnerships between gambling companies and their data purveyors with leagues, teams, players, and broadcasters, what used to serve as a reprieve from political double-dealing now feels more like doubling down. The most highly publicized incidents of corruption have centered on the athletes themselves. In November 2025, MLB pitchers Luis Ortiz and Emmanuel Clase were indicted for “rigging pitches” to win their coconspirators upward of $400,000. In March 2022, Atlanta Falcons receiver Calvin Ridley was suspended for betting on games, including his own (he later admitted to the “stupid mistake,” citing struggles with depression in his apology letter). In April 2024, fringe NBA player Jontay Porter was banned for life after manipulating his stats in conspiracy with bettors. (Porter also owned up to his actions; he reportedly entered inpatient rehab to treat a gambling addiction.) There have been dozens of similar high-profile charges leveled against athletes since Murphy. Most have centered on “prop bets”: wagers on specific, in-game “propositions,” often revolving around a specific player’s stats rather than the outcome of the game. As I wrote this article, Sports Illustrated informed me that two of the NBA’s best prop bets were on rookie phenom Cooper Flagg making more than 1.5 three-pointers and on Miami Heat forward Jaime Jaquez Jr. netting over 11.5 points. (Both were, for the record, wrong.) The sportsbook operators, including FanDuel, DraftKings, and BetMGM, set the number, or the “line,” and your potential payout, the “odds.” Both the line and the odds fluctuate based on highly sophisticated, proprietary algorithms that encourage even betting distribution, reducing risk for the sportsbook, colloquially called the “house.” Prop bets have proven comparatively ripe for corruption, as a player has far more control over their own performance than the final score. In the case of Jontay Porter, or the alleged case against guard Terry Rozier, the player in question found a foolproof way to ensure their under: exiting the game due to injury. The easiest way to drastically reduce the occurrence, or even the specter, of player corruption would be to abolish prop bets outright. At the very least, as leagues themselves are hopefully beginning to realize, these bets should be eliminated for bit players like Porter: why do we need odds on a benchwarmer eclipsing 0.5 rebounds? The same goes for college athletes: who outside the most compulsive gamblers would bet on a teenager at UC Irvine dishing out more or less than 2.5 assists? Current proposals to reign in sports betting, such as Congressman Paul Tonko and Senator Blumenthal’s SAFE Bet Act, are focused on the latter; their legislation would prohibit “all proposition bets featuring college and amateur athletes.” Unfortunately, such a prohibition is easier said than done. Sportsbooks will fight tooth and nail to preserve prop bets—often deemed “sucker bets,” they are tempting on the surface but disproportionately tilted toward the house. And abolition is further thwarted by operators becoming increasingly entwined with their prop-bet subjects: LeBron James went viral for his chummy DraftKings commercials with Kevin Hart; Houston Rockets forward Kevin Durant has engaged in social media spats over his partnership with FanDuel; three-time NHL MVP Connor McDavid has become a “responsible gaming” advocate through his deal with BetMGM. As if the environment weren’t murky enough, athletes (and leagues) are also rapidly entangling themselves with prediction markets. These platforms differ from sportsbooks in that the user places their money up against other market participants rather than the house. (Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket make money through commissions and transaction fees, a model that prioritizes high trading volume. Unlike sportsbooks, they have no concrete financial interest in outcomes, though I’d argue their finances are tied to their reputation, which is solidified on relatively accurate markets.) A strict regulatory environment under Joe Biden has relaxed considerably under Donald Trump, whose son is a Polymarket investor and Kalshi advisor (though there’s evidence that the administration’s position is flipping). The industry falls under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s federal jurisdiction, rather than that of state gaming commissions. Prediction markets have, per the Athletic, “woven themselves into a legal safe zone, where they are defined as futures markets rather than gambling companies.” You are, according to the current regulatory environment, not “gambling” or “betting” on outcomes but rather “trading event contracts.” (Make no mistake about how idiotic this is. Prediction markets are gambling platforms and should be regulated as such.) Prediction markets gained national prominence following the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, which netted an anonymous trader more than $400,000. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a special forces soldier involved with the planning and execution of the operation, was later charged with using classified information to bet on Maduro’s capture. Following the indictment, Trump seemed to lament his inability to curb prediction markets. “The whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino,” he said. “It is what it is.” The scope of available bets on prediction markets range from farcical—over half a million dollars was traded on the number of times J.D. Vance would clap at the State of the Union—to dystopian: nearly $1 million has been traded on India striking Pakistan by the end of the year using “aerial bombs, drones, or missiles,” and a Polymarket user trading under the name “Magamyman” made more than half a million dollars placing bets on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death shortly before he was killed by an Israeli strike. The vast majority of betting on these platforms, however, centers on sports. Athletes have taken note. Kalshi recently secured investments from NHL, WNBA, and NBA athletes, most notably two-time NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo. His partnership, unveiled on February 6, raised eyebrows for predictable reasons: a professional athlete getting in bed with a gambling company. But there was also a more scandalous response to the announcement due to its curious timing: the NBA trade deadline passed just one day prior, on February 5, and Antetokounmpo was enmeshed in countless trade rumors. His post-deadline home was the subject of a $23 million Kalshi trading market, and you hardly need red string and a pinboard to see how the conspiracies unfurled, especially since prediction markets are famously ambivalent toward, even encouraging of, insider trading. On 60 Minutes, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan called insider information inevitable and beneficial: “Having an edge to the market is a good thing.” I’m not suggesting Antetokounmpo manipulated the market for personal gain. There’s no evidence anything of the sort happened. But the story is indicative of a larger, burgeoning issue, whereby the convoluted connections between players and their gambling partners, and the growing prevalence of betting-centered corruption, dilutes fan trust. “The more intertwined the leagues, teams and players get with sports betting,” writes columnist Dan Wetzel, “the more fans are being asked to extend their blind faith. At some point, perception defines reality and optics are going to overwhelm everything.” The belief in corrupted, gamified simulations may start to feel more real than reality itself. While the instances of individual corruption are concerning, this is hardly a bottom-up issue emanating from the athletes themselves. Many players either oppose gambling or take issue with the negligent way it’s been unilaterally integrated into their sport. “We don’t benefit from any of the profits,” said Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown, “but we’ve got to deal with a lot of the extra negativity and scrutiny.” He added that there’s been “little to no conversation around [protecting players]. It’s all about, ‘How can we increase business and revenue?’” Brown, also the NBA Players Association vice president, was pointing to the NBA’s refusal to accept culpability for any betting-related harm. The league superstructure takes sole ownership of driving gambling partnerships and licensing gambling data, but the athletes themselves are the ones harassed by spiteful bettors, and any controversies are framed as issues of individual pathology. It’s a power dynamic Marxist scholar Daniel Sailofsky covers at length in Playing through Pain: The Violent Consequences of Capitalist Sport. When issues arise, leagues make painstaking efforts to promote a “bad apple” narrative rather than admit to a “rotten orchard.” There is, however, plenty of evidence that the orchard is compromised. Take the NBA, whose “official” gambling partners include DraftKings and FanDuel, and whose “authorized” operators include BetMGM, Caesars Sportsbook, and bet365, to name a few. The teams themselves—and their arenas—have individual sponsorships separate from the league: Betway is ubiquitous on the Philadelphia 76ers’ homecourt and home broadcasts, and Caesars operates a sportsbook out of the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., where the Wizards have been at the forefront of the sportsbook craze thanks to owner Ted Leonsis, an early expansionist with equity in multiple gambling companies. Leonsis looms large in the NBA’s embrace of sports betting, though he also, somewhat bafflingly, takes issue with calling the practice of wagering money on future outcomes a form of “gambling.” “Sport gaming and gamification is a much more accurate description,” Leonsis said. Sports betting is “informed by data. The more research you do, the more due diligence you do, the more you study the smarter your bet will be.” This is, on some level, true, but you’re also “gaming” against multi-billion-dollar corporations staffed with the most sought-after data scientists in the world, who have a built-in advantage thanks to the “vig” (the cut they take on your bet). The exact figures are murky, but industry estimates suggest about 3 percent—perhaps as little as 1 percent—of online sports bettors turn a profit long-term. It’s hard to find a concrete number for comparison, but a 2013 study found that 13.5 percent of casino gamblers win money. To call sports betting anything other than gambling is manipulative, irresponsible, and false. It minimizes the devastating consequences brought about by expanded access, which are, beyond the astounding stats, evidenced by countless horrific stories of self-destructive behavior: relay and meter technician Jordan Holt told the Athletic that he contemplated suicide after losing more than $100,000 over two years. He wagered nearly $900,000 and lost $63,000 in 2023 alone, aided by close to $8,000 in “FanDuel enticements.” A thirty-three-year-old in New England would excuse himself to the bathroom to bet on “sports in other countries that [he] knew nothing about.” His desperate circumstances deepened, and he gambled his and his partner’s life savings away on a Boston Bruins game. I myself know compulsive bettors who’ve amassed sizable credit card debt on everything from American football to English soccer to—I kid you not—Czech table tennis. At least one of these people ended up in rehab. As hyper-addictive sportsbooks grow in prominence, so too does the power of their data purveyors like Genius Sports and Sportradar, which serve as analytical intermediaries between leagues and their gambling partners. Somewhat unbelievably, these same firms that are tasked with licensing and collating gambling data are also charged with monitoring gambling integrity. The NBA does have its own internal group of lawyers and full-time data scientists investigating irregularities, but they lean on Sportradar to “spot fraud.” The data firms argue they’re uniquely equipped to snuff out corruption because of their ample resources and industry expertise. Many outsider observers, such as match-fixing expert Chris Kronow Rasmussen, argue integrity monitors should be completely independent to avoid conflicts of interest. In conversation with Funt, Rasmussen compared the current approach to drug dealers being tasked by police with monitoring drug use, as the entities entrusted with quashing misconduct are the same ones profiting off their product’s perceived legitimacy. If fraud allegations slip through the cracks, leagues, data firms, and sportsbooks are incentivized to stamp them out as swiftly as possible. But prior to any rumors circulating, there’s perhaps an even greater incentive to suppress misconduct altogether. Some of this might read as overly cynical, perhaps even a touch conspiratorial. But the accountability structure’s present makeup invites this kind of thinking. One of the commonly stated goals of legalization was, per Silver, to weed out corruption by bringing gambling’s “shady” illegal operations out of the shadows and “into the sunlight.” Gambling’s now getting plenty of sun, yet the leagues and their gambling affiliates have never been less trusted. Sports media is at risk of becoming another casualty of the gambling boom. For decades, prominent publications—both legacy outfits and their plucky independent counterparts—have been ravaged by declining ad revenue, private equity acquisitions, and waning subscriptions. Sports Illustrated, formerly a bastion of longform journalism, has been hollowed out beyond recognizability; Deadspin is a glorified content farm; ESPN axed its magazine; and sports desks at newspapers far and wide, including the Washington Post, have shuttered. A gaping hole in the media has emerged. Gambling companies have swooped in to fill it, producing their own coverage in-house. DraftKings has a 24/7 streaming channel and FanDuel has a digital cable network; both boast impressive rosters of ESPN veterans and former NBA stars. They’ve further supplemented their unique content with media partnerships: ESPN named DraftKings its official sportsbook as part of a $2 billion deal, and FanDuel is the exclusive odds provider for the NBA on Amazon Prime, where bettors can link their FanDuel account to their Prime Video profile to see their wagers play out in real time (similar offerings are available on League Pass, the NBA’s streaming service). It’s impossible to overstate the degree to which sports content has become gambling content. Watching SportsCenter or listening to a Ringer podcast now requires fluency in gambling-speak, and resisting the plentiful offers of “bonus bets” and promo codes can call for Herculean self-restraint. This shift in media coverage has altered the phenomenology of sports watching itself: viewers are rooting for arbitrary statistical outcomes that may bear little relation to the final score. As a result of its ubiquity, gambling has been rapidly normalized on a massive scale. Young people are being socialized into equating fandom with betting, when hardly a decade ago the two were antithetical. It’s part of an effort to achieve Gramscian hegemony: gambling hasn’t sprouted organically from any grassroots movement but rather has been pumped into the cultural atmosphere by profit-motivated companies and leagues with deep pockets, manufacturing consent among their immense audiences. Media partners are more than just compliant with this new landscape—they’re also profiting from converting consumers into gamblers. (Active bettors have proven more likely to watch and spend money on sports.) Broadly speaking, such practices belong under the umbrella of “affiliate marketing,” where partners, such as media outlets, often receive a predetermined fee for each conversion (meaning a user signing up for a sportsbook or making their first deposit). But the industry is increasingly shifting to revenue sharing, whereby the affiliate earns a percentage of the lifetime revenue generated by a converted customer. Under such an agreement, the affiliate is quite literally profiting off their users’ losses. The goal, per Funt, is always the same: “to attract as many bettors as possible.” A former employee at Action Network, a betting-centric sports media company, told Funt that the current marketing framework encourages a deluge of low-quality slop because more content means more click-throughs, and more click-throughs means more cash. The employee took particular issue with revenue sharing, saying it incentivizes targeting the most compulsive gamblers—something that may sound excessively cynical if it weren’t an open secret that betting companies push their most exploitative promotions to their most vulnerable customers. While the specifics can get convoluted, the underlying conflict of interest is simple: as gambling becomes sports media’s primary subject of interest, it’s also becoming a primary source of revenue. It’s not that outlets are trying to convert customers to sportsbooks with purposefully bad bets; such intent isn’t necessary, since the advice will be plenty terrible without them trying. But the system’s ethics are, at best, suspect, and it’s all been received with open arms because sports media was desperate for a life raft. The prevailing industry sentiment, it seems, is to embrace gambling, or die. There are still meaningful contributions being made to sports journalism. Funt’s gambling exposé is a work of old-fashioned muckraking; the superb Pablo Torre Finds Out is a triumph of investigative audio journalism; the worker-owned Defector has revived the Deadspin ethos under a different name. And while I’m not much of a fan of the sport myself, I was happy to learn a Tennissance is taking place both on court and in print. But these are exceptions to a sports paradigm—both in the media and beyond—that is increasingly viewed as an extension of Big Gambling. Again, the trend holds up an eerie mirror to, and serves as a worrying reification of, waning confidence in public life writ large. We’re seeing this reflected on the individual level: 65 percent of Americans believe individual players alter their play to service bets; 68 percent think a member of Congress would “accept a bribe if offered one.” The institutional level: 70 percent of Americans believe sports betting “lessens the integrity of the game”; just 17 percent trust the federal government to do “what is right.” And while it’s difficult to find specific polling on waning confidence in sports media, ESPN used to be among the most trusted news sources in a largely mistrusted media landscape. Given the diminishing effect betting has on consumer trust more broadly, it’s hard to believe their DraftKings partnerships and tireless gambling integration won’t damage their perceived integrity. (There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that this is well under way.) Barring major changes, the outlook seems unavoidably bleak. The aforementioned SAFE Bet Act would be a good starting point for reform, as it would institute federal guardrails to rein in live-event advertising and the most predatory marketing tactics, along with requiring sportsbooks to conduct regular “affordability checks.” The bill stalled in the House, but Congressman Tonko and Senator Blumenthal continue to bang the drum. Then there’s Senator Chris Murphy—by far the most cogent Capitol Hill authority speaking on the issue—who unveiled the BETS OFF Act with Representative Greg Casar in March. The bill would “ban wagering on government actions, terrorism, war, assassination, and events where an individual knows or controls the outcome.” (The fact that such a “ban” requires congressional intervention seems a healthy breach in whatever remains of the social contract.) The overturning of PASPA unleashed the wild west of gambling, but Congress retains the power to regulate the industry. If it does so soon, the emergent crisis may look more like an aberration than the onset of a sustained catastrophe. But this is not, I’d argue, solely an issue of legislation. Legalized sports gambling—not even a decade old—has quickly become a treasured American pastime; a multifaceted ideological campaign has normalized the phone as a harmless, pocket-sized casino. It calls to mind cultural theorist Neil Postman, who said that media—which, broadly speaking, gambling is— “tend to become mythic,” meaning we treat techno-cultural innovation as if it belonged to the “natural order of things.” Regardless of what your podcast ad indicates, there’s nothing natural about online gambling. Until recently, this seemed like common sense. And if there are glimmers of hope to be found, it is in the possibility that predatory promo codes and death-fueled prediction markets represent a kind of rock bottom, a forced acknowledgement of how deranged this recently unthinkable system really is. Once people are ready to walk away, like Kenny Rogers’s titular gambler, maybe we can start building trust back and tallying the damage. There’ll be time enough for counting when the dealing’s done. Michael Knapp teaches at College of the Canyons. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, the Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere.