The Real Killer? Sports Gambling

‍For more than thirty years, I attended sporting events for a living. The various levels covered the spectrum: youth sports, high school sports, college athletics and professional events.

‍ Through those three decades, there was one constant that pervaded. Unless you were in Las Vegas, you couldn’t place a legal bet on any aspect of those games. Another constant, however, was that newspapers carried daily odds of major college and pro games. So, wink-wink, it’s illegal to gamble, but in case you want to place a bet, here are the odds you’re dealing with.

If you ask why newspapers carried odds for every big football, basketball, baseball and hockey game in America for years and years, the answer is . . . readers demanded it. If you took the odds away — or, in the case of the Orlando Sentinel for a time, if you removed yesterday’s greyhound racing results and that day’s races and odds — the complaints never ceased. Betting makes the sporting world go round, it seems.

I’ve always found this a curious push-pull of American culture. Of the pantheon of things that were deemed legal vs. illegal, betting on a game (even throwing dice in a big-city alley) was against the law.

Again, unless you were standing in Las Vegas.

There were a handful of times when I worked as a journalist that I heard stories about athletes being involved in betting. Unfortunately, it was the kind of subject that, once brought up in conversation, promptly ended the conversation. No one would ever admit to A) betting or B) knowing about someone else betting.

Gee, no wonder gambling is a central part of “Dead Odds,” the first suspense novel with protagonist Conrad Keane.

Credit: depositphotos

Sports Betting: It’s All the Rage

The subject of betting arises today for two reasons. First, we’re coming to the end of one of most frantic and voluminous gambling periods of the year, the three-week NCAA Tournament. The NCAA will stage the men’s and women’s Final Fours over the next four days, concluding with the men’s championship Monday night.

‍This marks Year 4 since the U.S. Supreme Court declared the ban on U.S.-based sports gambling to be unconstitutional. Statista projects that people will wager $3.3 billion on this year’s tournament, an increase over last year but less than a quarter of the record of $15.5 billion in 2023 – the first time wagering on the tournament was legal.

Since that 2022 decision, most states have, one by one, gone into the sports betting business. Doing so lets them tax winnings, pouring millions into state coffers. North Carolina has generated more than $18 million in revenue just from the past two NCAA Tournaments.

States weren’t the only entities interested in gambling. Las Vegas wanted in. So did tech companies.

Caesars Palace, MGM Resorts, Circa, Westgate SuperBook, Wynn Resorts and many others launched sports books. Most of them are gone. Wynn left in 2023, five others exited in 2024.

What’s left are two major technology companies. FanDuel and DraftKings now dominate the online sports-betting market. Technically, they’re not a monopoly. But they practice the same, better-unfriendly tactics, according to complaints.

‘Against the Rules’

The second reason for today’s topic is that I just finished listening to an insightful series of podcast episodes about the subject. “Against the Rules” is a periodic podcast by Michael Lewis, who probes topics that best can be explained by one statement: Here’s what’s going on in America today, and this this fair or unfair?

‍Lewis is famous for writing non-fiction books that later became the bases for blockbuster movies, headlined by “Moneyball,” “The Blindside,” and “The Big Short.” But his first book started it all, unsettling his former colleagues and bosses on Wall Street. “Liar’s Poker” dug into how America’s large institutional banks and investment firms do what they do and how the rest of us are increasingly delusional if we think we can win by playing the U.S. stock markets.

‍Gambling Ain’t a New Racket

As I said, gambling in America has always fascinated me, and it continues to do so. I don’t recall anyone in my high school betting on college football or basketball games. Maybe they did, but even though I was a modest little athlete at the time, the subject never got to me.

‍I got introduced to it during my time at the University of Tennessee. Someone on the floor of my dorm showed up one fall Friday afternoon handing out parlay sheets. These carried the odds of every football game to be played the next day (college) and on Sunday (NFL).

Pick three winners in three games and get five-times your money back. Pick five winners in five games and get ten-times your money. Pick ten winners . . . you get the idea. Why, it’s totally worth the risk!‍ ‍

It took about three weekends of losing to discover that parlays weren’t as fun as they looked and that I didn’t like my money disappearing like that, even at $5 a pop.

‍After I embarked on a career as a sports journalist — someone who didn’t have all the inside knowledge of a team’s injuries, flaws, and information the public didn’t have — I saw the folly of betting on sports. Even games I was certain I knew the outcome of long before kickoff of tipoff often . . . went the other way.

The thought that crept into my brain repeatedly was (and is): the guys in Vegas setting these odds really know their stuff.

Michael Lewis and His Podcast

And this, people, is one of the overriding points of Lewis’s podcasts about sports gambling. Not only do oddsmakers know what they’re doing, but they’re helped by the fact that an overwhelming number of betters don’t have a clue what they’re doing.

‍Lewis is one of the great storytellers of our time. One of his primary skills is that he can boil down big, hairy issues into understandable bite-sized pieces and anecdotes. Another is that he finds people who, through their personal histories, demonstrate the big picture in relatable ways.

One of his other skills is that he knows what he doesn’t know, and he finds people who know. Then he asks them good questions. Even when people are hesitant to talk to him, they still do.

In the gambling season of “Against the Rules,” which published in 2024, Lewis takes you through all aspects of gambling in America, from the old-school days of bookies, oddsmakers, and bookmaking to the reality of betting odds and their mathematical probability, from gambling legislation and its evolution to the real-world lives of winning and losing everyday gamblers, professional sports gamblers (old school and new school) and the story of how FanDuel and DraftKings came to be the dominant companies in U.S. online sports wagering — and how they’re screwing customers who show any betting savvy.

FanDuel and DraftKings grew prominent because of their exceptional technology, including online customer experience, and a massive database of existing users, thanks to their businesses in fantasy sports.

Lewis hints, not so subtly, that what the two companies are doing is illegal, except he points out that no one is worked up enough about it yet to do anything about it. The shady stuff? That both companies remove or significantly limit players who show any skill in their wagering habits while placing no limits on losing players. In fact, the charters for all online sports gambling companies insist that they identify and protect the worst players from getting too far underwater.

The other overriding lesson from the series is what the emerging scholarship about legalized online gambling is doing to American culture, especially to the younger men in our society. It’s not just the sudden and shocking indebtedness that’s happening secretly — when’s the last time anyone asked you how much you owed your credit card company? — it’s also our incessant relationship with our phones and, conversely, the lack of relationships with other people.

There are so many red flags about how bad sports betting is being regulated that by the time the governments wake up and do something, an entire generation of young sports betters are going to be out money. If you think young people can’t afford to buy houses today, just wait ten years.

One podcast guest points out how long it took the government to crack down on Big Tobacco (for its lying) and on alcohol companies (for their advertising). So far, legalized online sports wagering has yielded a spike of 25% to 30% in personal bankruptcy filings in states were gambling is allowed.

So, yes, this is sort of a public service announcement for anyone who bets on sports to listen to this podcast series.

Episode 4 is probably my favorite because Lewis spends time with three old-school bookies, one of whom explains why the average sports gambler has no chance of winning money over the long haul.

Another great one is Episode 10, during which Lewis gives his teenage son $5,000 to bet on sports but only after having him talk to betting experts about the best bets to make – and the worst. The outcome will surprise you.

Lewis observes, “Your teenage son will not listen to you. But it turns out he will listen to your friends.” That’s information for life for any parent.

Credit: NCAA

A Personal Story

‍Last week I spent several days with friends for a boys weekend of golf and basketball. Our Marsh Madness, as we dub it, consists of golf in the mornings and basketball in the evenings, with food and naps in between.

Several members of our esteemed group are customers of online gambling establishments. Most of their in-game cheering is based on what outcome they need for the betterment of their bracket (another game of chance), but sometimes their cheerleading is based on a current wager. It’s not always apparent which is which.

But Sunday brought one of the craziest games in recent memory in the East Regional final, top-seeded Duke vs. second-seeded Connecticut. UConn, which had trailed by 10 or more points for most of the game, won the game with an improbable (OK, miraculous) three-point shot at the buzzer.

We all shouted. “Yessss!” “Nooooo!”

A few minutes later came a text from a member who couldn’t join us for the weekend. It read: “I fucking hate Hurley and UConn.”

All of us in the room laughed, for we knew it wasn’t true. What we were sure we knew was that our buddy had bet on Duke – and had just lost money on one of the greatest games in NCAA Tournament history. Although he probably only cared about the money.

That’s one of the sad parts about betting.

If You Bet, Consider It Entertainment

If you want to bet on sports, my free, unsolicited advice is to think about it the same way you think about going to the movies or paying for Netflix. It’s all entertainment, and you’re OK paying the entertainment fee.

‍If having money on a game means you enjoy the game more, then place your bet. Just don’t bet more than the cost of a movie ticket.