How Gambling Ate the World
When I was in business school at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 2010s, I played in my one and only fantasy football league. I was in an “executive” MBA program, a variation on the traditional MBA degree that caters to mid-career and occasionally senior managers and executives, which is exactly what we were: a bunch of mostly middle-management guys (and a very few women), all of us looking for a résumé-burnishing credential that would bump us up a couple of pay bands and win us access to better boardrooms. We worked all over the place: in health care, the rail industry, steel, IT, law, nonprofit, oil and gas.
One of the fellas worked in marketing for Pittsburgh’s Rivers Casino. (Slots were legalized in Pennsylvania at select locations in 2004, and, believe it or not, Pennsylvania lags behind only Nevada in total legal casino revenues.) He told some hilarious and hair-raising stories about the tricks of the trade for keeping the most compulsive customers, in this case largely fixed-income retirees or un- and underemployed adults, locked into the games, the never-ending sounds and lights of obsessive, repetitive, bets. You had to understand, he explained, that it wasn’t only or even mostly about winning. It was about the flow, the disappearance of anything other than the machine and the game. It was about action. Not the outcome so much as the anticipation, the suspended time between the bet and the result. They bring the drinks to you for a reason. Losing was a reason to keep playing, and the rare win was, well, reason to keep playing, too.
As for the fantasy league, I’d always been a sports fan, but I was never a stats guy. I just let the computer draft for me, allowing some algorithm to assemble the rough equivalent of an index fund, something like a representative, weighted average of the NFL as a whole, and I let it ride. I am a zealously passive investor, and I became a passive fantasy sportsman.
My league partners—not coincidentally, many of them were also intensely fond of day-trading stocks—took a different tack: tracking statistical minutiae, daily injury reports, message-board rumors, and making constant trades and roster changes. I spent the first half of the season winning and then, beset by injuries to my relatively static team, spent the second half losing. In neither half did I get much pleasure out of it. But my fellows, even (perhaps especially) when they were making manic trades to try to reverse a losing streak, seemed to be having a lot more fun. It was all about the flow.
Betting and investing have much in common, and they increasingly overlap, as young men who bet on sports are also likely to dabble in crypto, stocks, and more exotic vehicles. Both are predominantly men’s games, with yawning gender divides in participation. Recent data from Morning Consult shows that sports betting is 70 percent male. Most men place their first bet on a sporting event in high school or college—their first foray into financial speculation, and their first taste of the adrenaline rush of action. According to a Siena survey, 48 percent of men aged 18 to 49 have a betting account.
All this activity has become remarkably visible in the culture over just a few years. On TV, ads for betting apps have now achieved a ubiquity that puts gimmicky insurance companies to shame. NFL broadcasts partner with FanDuel and DraftKings, integrating highlights from games directly into the apps. And enticements to gamble reach beyond sports: CNN has announced it will partner with Kalshi, a “prediction market,” displaying a live ticker of odds on-screen during its news broadcasts. Bet if you dare, on the next market crash or atrocity. Pundits, posters, and commentators cite Polymarket along with poll numbers to predict future world events. Polymarket was also an “exclusive partner” of the Golden Globes, a desperate stunt for a moribund awards show. “Never tell me the odds,” barked Han Solo to C-3PO, but that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. We have no such option, and our garish Death Stars are all sponsored by BetMGM.
For a long time in America, sports betting was mostly illicit. You had an uncle or a friend or a frat brother who took a little action under the table. Or you pooled some money with friends and did a March Madness bracket. Then, with the rise and popularization of the internet, it became easy to bet online. A thriving gray market of offshore betting parlors like BetOnline or Bovada eventually emerged, often starting with online poker as early as the 1990s and expanding into sports betting in the early 2000s, allowing U.S. customers to circumvent anti-gambling statutes in the United States. (Offshore bookmakers also became early adopters of cryptocurrency, unsurprisingly, as it allowed easier movement of money out of the United States without banks or credit card companies subject to U.S. regulations having to take note.) Even before betting apps on smartphones, the relative lack of friction of online betting paved the way for a new, faster, higher-frequency form of wagering.
America’s gambling landscape had long been a patchwork, but sports betting was tightly regulated throughout most of the twentieth century, and the major sports leagues were scrupulously united in opposition to gambling, which they rightly viewed as a major threat to the integrity of their games. But the public was more ambivalent, and as states sought new sources of revenue, Congress decided to act.
The most significant anti-sports gambling law was the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, abbreviated as PASPA (and sometimes called the Bradley Act for one of its sponsors, Bill Bradley, a U.S. senator and former professional basketball player). The law—which garnered 62 co-sponsors in the Senate and passed both houses overwhelmingly—was in fact a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. It did not technically outlaw sports gambling nationally, although that was broadly its purpose, but rather prevented state, local, and tribal governments from legalizing it. It contained robust carve-outs for Nevada (of course) and also for existing sports lotteries in Delaware, Montana, and Oregon. It exempted pari-mutuel horse and dog race betting and, for some reason, jai alai. It gave New Jersey—in a gift to Atlantic City—a year to come up with its own legalized sports betting regime. But, as writer and researcher Jonathan D. Cohen observes dryly in Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling, “New Jersey, being New Jersey, failed to do so.”
This failure was in some sense the great precipitating event of the broad legalization of sports gambling in the United States. After two failed attempts to overturn PASPA, Chris Christie, then the Republican governor of New Jersey, in 2014 signed a state law legalizing sports gambling in New Jersey in contravention of PASPA. The four major professional sports leagues and the NCAA brought suit; that suit eventually became Christie v. NCAA; by the time it was decided by the Supreme Court in 2018, Christie had been term-limited out of office, and it was renamed Murphy v. NCAA, after the state’s new Democratic governor, Phil Murphy. The Supreme Court overturned PASPA in May of that year, with Samuel Alito writing the majority opinion, concluding that PASPA illegally “commandeered” the authority of state legislatures and violated the states’ rights that we always hear about when some part of America wants to do something terrible. The floodgates opened. As of December 1, 2025, with the legalization of sports gambling in Missouri, a total of 39 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico had legalized some form of betting on sports.
Losing Big and Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, by sports journalist Danny Funt, each trace this story. Losing Big is perhaps a bit more cerebral and reads at times (particularly in its concluding chapter) as a policy white paper; Everybody Loses is occasionally scattered, its chapters jumping from topic to topic, but it is deepened and enlivened by the many extraordinary and candid contacts and conversations that Funt makes with industry insiders, from lobbyists to “VIP hosts” to corporate and league executives. Both cover in depressing detail the swift collapse of guardrails; the rush of revenue-hungry state governments to get in on the action; the swift acquiescence of professional and college sports, whose concerns about cheating and integrity were overwhelmed by the smell of money; and the ubiquity of Kevin Hart on your television and mind, selling vice.
Both books focus on the two dominant players in the U.S. market—DraftKings and FanDuel. FanDuel started in Scotland, a pivot from an early “prediction market” company called Hubdub that allowed people to bet on the outcomes of the 2008 U.S. elections and found that, when the elections ended, the market evaporated. It turned to daily fantasy sports, or DFS, a rapidly expanding market in the United States, if a questionably legal one. As with BetOnline and other already existing internet-based sports betting sites (many of these based in the Caribbean), it was trivially easy for players to move real dollars into virtual, offshore online accounts for the purpose of placing bets.
DraftKings was founded in Boston in 2012. The two companies were intensely competitive with each other, and their competition drove them to market dominance. They spent millions on lobbyists. (Kamala Harris emerges from Funt’s book as an accidental villain. He reports that when she was California attorney general, lobbyists heard a rumor that she was about to send DraftKings and FanDuel a cease-and-desist letter. At that time, her chief of staff was married to a partner in the law firm that represented the apps, who turned out to be a key figure in shaping efforts to get Harris to back off, according to one lobbyist who spoke to Funt.) FanDuel and DraftKings attracted millions of customers, and they learned a great deal about them, including personal financial information and their favorite sports and players. When PASPA fell and states began to legalize sports betting, they had an enormous first-mover advantage and a ready-made customer base to transform into dedicated, legal gamblers.
Like traditional casinos, online sportsbooks use a variety of mechanisms to entice gamblers in and then to keep them betting. They use deceptive advertising, claiming generous “average” payouts when in reality “just 1.3 percent of [daily fantasy sports] players were collecting 91% of prize money,” according to a McKinsey report cited by Funt. Like traditional casinos, they employ “VIP hosts” to cosset heavy hitters, and they lure big bettors with comped Super Bowl trips and other complimentary goodies. For more ordinary suckers, their strategies have become more refined. For example, they track your betting frequency, and when it declines, they bombard you with special offers and incentives to get you going again. They are becoming shockingly sophisticated users of mined personal data. Because sportsbook apps require that users activate geolocation on their devices (ostensibly to be sure that gambling is legal where players are), they can pinpoint exactly where a gambler is sitting in a ballpark and use seat prices to infer income and wealth information. An exec at a geodata firm speculates to Funt that they could soon pinpoint the type, and price, of the residences in which bettors live. And of course the pure seamlessness of the apps, the incredible ease of moving money from a bank account into the app, is an enormous incentive to compulsive behavior: the drugs, the dealer, and the ATM all in a single, handheld device. Americans placed $150 billion in bets in 2024, a number that has continued to rise. DraftKings alone has nearly four million monthly users.
Even as they strive to lure players in, sportsbooks are also perfectly willing to kick people out, to limit bets and arbitrarily reduce payouts. Sports betting is not pure chance, and while amateur gamblers are prone to making ill-informed bets for bad reasons (betting on personal favorite teams is a big one), smart gamblers and close followers of statistics and betting lines are quite capable of making money. “Increasingly,” Funt writes, “sportsbooks are seeking to boost profits by weeding out winning customers.... Sometimes customers don’t even get a chance to make money: They’re limited simply for demonstrating glimmers of competence.” A “Chicago-area attorney” and regular DraftKings customer named Beau Wagner, for instance, makes a sharp, $1,000 bet on a long-odds NBA scoring outcome and wins 50 grand. The next day, he finds himself limited to $100 bets on whole game outcomes and less than $4 a bet on single-game, single-player scoring. Funt goes on to quote DraftKings CEO Jason Robins, “This is an entertainment activity. People who are doing this for profit are not the players that we want,” and then an unnamed former DraftKings employee: “At the end of the day, these companies are built on losers.”
Many losers appear in both Funt and Cohen’s narratives, such as Kyle, a pseudonymous young man who opens Losing Big on a losing streak that costs him his job and financial independence, and who closes it by relapsing into gambling after a failed recovery. Several of the features of online gambling make it easier than ever to lose large amounts. Bettors are able to instantly re-up their accounts with more and more money. This enables them to “chase their losses,” to imagine that the next winning bet will cover all the preceding losses. And if that doesn’t work? Bet again. Unlike traditional casinos, to which access is at least somewhat limited by physical location and hours of business, mobile betting platforms afford opportunities to gamble constantly. Bets can be placed continually throughout games and events. And bettors have access to any sport in any time zone. Too early or late for American football? There is a soccer match in England, boxing in Thailand, snooker in Australia. In this way, online sports gambling mimics social media’s endless, addictive scroll.
The industry claims to support “responsible gaming,” and it allows “self-exclusion,” a porous and ineffective mechanism for voluntarily banning oneself from gaming, but these are a tissue. Since 2017, and especially since the pandemic, whose limits on social activity unsurprisingly turbocharged online gaming, calls to gambling addiction hotlines have exploded: From 2022 to 2025, calls to 1-800-GAMBLER quadrupled to 19,000 a month. There are now recovery centers for gambling addicts such as one run by Right Choice Recovery in Dayton, New Jersey. Athletes, including college athletes, routinely face abuse, harassment, and even death threats over their performance and appear resigned to it as background noise to their vocation. And everyone now openly speculates that someone—the players, the coaches, the refs—is on the take.
Both books concede that sports gambling is here to stay, and they offer a variety of regulatory and technological fixes. They propose creating what Cohen calls more “friction”: imposing waiting periods between adding funds to an account and laying bets; limiting the number and frequency of bets; conducting finance checks on players, especially those who lay high-dollar wagers. Both call on the federal government to do more to create guardrails and enforce standards.
These are the weakest sections of two otherwise excellent books and analyses. Like so much else about our present social, political, and economic discourse, such narrow recommendations feel like admissions of defeat. Sports gambling and all the abuses and problems it entails are part of a larger predicament, one that seems to be engulfing our entire society—a jackpot culture that prizes the lottery above work, wages, steady returns on investment. Equity markets are frothier than ever, with enormous AI companies puffing more and more into a self-inflating, self-dealing bubble. “Meme stocks” appear and disappear. Strange things are happening in commodities markets, with silver prices in particular rising even faster than gold over recent months. The entire extended Trump clan hawks various coins and crypto products.
And now, nearly two decades after FanDuel’s election-prediction forerunner, so-called prediction markets are back with a vengeance. These are another form of casino, where players—often the same young men who play sportsbooks—can bet on the outcome or likelihood of, quite literally, anything. These casinos style themselves as “markets,” seeking the respectable patina of stocks, bonds, and commodities, but they are a form of wagering little different from sports betting. There is of course an element of chance in traditional capital market investments; stock prices can go down, companies do go out of business, creditors can go unpaid. But these things are not supposed to be a pure wager: There is supposed to be some asset at the other end, an ownership stake, a future cash flow, a barge full of soybeans. The invested or lent capital is, theoretically, being allocated into some productive enterprise: a business, a factory. How antique!
“The long-term vision,” said Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of the prediction market company Kalshi, with the remarkable candor that now dominates a society that has abandoned niceties, decency, and restraint, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” To financialize everything. To do for the society and economy of the entire world what DFS and parlays and prop bets did for sports: crack them up into microscopic, constitutive parts and induce the population to wager on lines going up and lines going down, to take the greater whole and make it even less than the sum of its billions of parts.
When in January the United States armed forces invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife, Cilia Flores, one particular story, a minor subplot to the invasion, immediately caught my eye. A newly created account on the prediction market site Polymarket appeared on the Friday just before the invasion and bet $30,000 on what was at that time the extremely low probability that Maduro would be ousted. Like a long-shot racehorse winning the Derby, a low-probability event promises enormous rewards on these markets, many multiples of the original wager. Several other accounts then bet even more specifically on Maduro’s capture. That $30,000 bet turned into over $400,000 when the United States launched its weird, swift assault. These bets, a report from Axios observed with considerable understatement, “will renew longstanding questions about inside information and access to prediction markets.”
“War,” wrote Smedley Butler, “is a racket.” And it is the “only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” That was in 1935. We’ve advanced since then. We’ve collapsed the distance between profit and loss, between winning and losing, and we’re well on our way to eliminating the distinction between dollars and lives. How long will it be until we can bet on the single soldier, the success of a single bullet?
There is something fundamentally anti-human about the transformation of every victory and every misfortune, every event, incident, outcome, opinion, intention, or accident into an occasion for a wager. How can we govern ourselves—and I mean this in both the political and the old-fashioned, personal sense—if we replace conscience and consciousness with nothing more than a guess? Whether a person or a society, those that take as a guiding attitude that they have nothing to lose will soon discover that it’s become literally true.