The Atlantic’s April Cover: McKay Coppins on His Year as a Degenerate Gambler
For The Atlantic’s April cover story, “Sucker,” staff writer McKay Coppins reports from inside the country’s sports-betting epidemic, examining how gambling has come to consume American sports and culture. Prior to writing the cover story, Coppins had never bet on anything before––he is religiously prohibited from engaging in games of chance––but he received special permission from his Mormon bishop to gamble for reporting purposes, and The Atlantic fronted him $10,000 to bet over the course of the 2025 NFL season: “The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.”
Throughout the course of the piece, as Coppins narrates his wins and losses, he considers the societal consequences of the legalization of phone-based gambling for a generation of Americans, and for himself. As Coppins writes: “Practically overnight, we took an ancient vice—long regarded as soul-rotting and civilizationally ruinous—put it on everyone’s phone, and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather. What could possibly go wrong?” Coppins enlisted the betting and data-analytics expert Nate Silver to act as his personal gambling guru, along with fellow Atlantic staff writer and blackjack fan Tom Nichols, while also interviewing professional sports bettors in Las Vegas; professional athletes who have had their lives threatened by gamblers; lonely politicians trying to stem the flood of legalized betting with some regulation; recovering gambling addicts; and the president of FanDuel, one of the biggest gambling-app companies.
Coppins writes that ever since the advent of sports, humans have found ways to lose money gambling on them. But throughout most of America’s history, until recently, gambling was heavily regulated and generally discouraged. Now, he writes, “as a society, we are making an enormously risky bet: that we can reap the rewards of a runaway gambling industry without paying any price; that the litany of social ills long associated with this vice—addiction and impoverishment, isolation and abuse, cheating and chasing and corrosive idleness—can, this time, be kept in check; that, unlike every civilization that came before us, we can beat the house. What are the odds that we’re right?”
Gambling options have only grown in America with the rise of “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket. Live-betting odds have been featured on the Golden Globes telecast and CNN’s election coverage. Coppins writes: “In 2026, you can gamble on how warm it will get in Los Angeles tomorrow, and the winner of the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and how much money Avatar: Fire and Ash will gross, and the date of Taylor Swift’s wedding, and Time magazine’s Person of the Year, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life being discovered, and how many people will be deported from the United States, and the prospect of Iranian regime change, and the chances that Donald Trump declares martial law before his term ends, and whether Jesus Christ will return to Earth this year. In remarkably short order, gambling has permeated every nook and cranny of American life. (If this strikes you as apocalyptic, the odds for the Second Coming currently stand at 23 to 1.)”
Coppins writes, “I had always told people that I didn’t have an addictive personality, believing that to be so. Now I had to consider a different possibility: Maybe I had simply constructed a life with strong enough guardrails that I’d never had to test the premise. What would happen to me, I wondered, if those guardrails were removed?” When Coppins placed his first bet on an NFL game last September, he calculated that he was up $20. By the end of the NFL season in February, he’d lost nearly $10,000, was placing bets in his minivan while his family ice-skated, and was checking DraftKings in church. He concludes: “When I’d started this project, I had presented it to my bishop as journalism; at some point, it had veered into obsession. And as clearly as I could see that now, in the cold comedown from a brutal loss, I didn’t know how long that clarity would last. As I scrolled through the apps, my eye was drawn to the March Madness promotions—some of the Final Four odds looked intriguing. On Kalshi, meanwhile, the Oscars futures were calling to me. The temptation to chase would never go away, it seemed. Those fences that I, and the country, had erected—the ones that had convinced me that I wasn’t prone to addiction and America that it didn’t need to worry about this particular vice after all—suddenly seemed more vital than ever.”
McKay Coppins’s “Sucker” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests.
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