have you read McKay Coppins on sports betting?

by Jay, San Diego, Friday, March 27, 2026, 12:24 (5 days ago)

Feature story on the history of sports gambling and the current unfettered landscape. As an angle on the story, the Atlantic staked him 10K and, well...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-betting-app-addiction/686061/

Some excerpts:

G. K. Chesterton once wrote about two people who encounter a fence erected across a road. One of them demands that it be torn down; the wiser of the two responds that they should find out why it was put there in the first place before deciding on a course of action.

By 2018, Christie’s case had landed before the Supreme Court, which overturned the federal ban on sports betting. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, made no effort to consider the public-policy rationale that had led Congress to make the law, or the cascading consequences of overturning it. He simply ruled that the Constitution empowers states, not the federal government, to regulate gambling, and scrapped the entire legal framework that had been in place for the past quarter century. No one involved—not Alito; nor the five justices who joined him; nor the legislators in 36 states who would legalize sports betting for their constituents; nor the league commissioners, who would rush into partnerships with online sportsbooks—seemed acquainted with Chesterton’s fence.

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?

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There is something unsettling about the suddenness with which gambling became omnipresent in American sports.

Turn on any game, on any channel, at any time of day, and you are likely to be bombarded with neon-soaked, star-studded ads for sports-betting apps: Jamie Foxx stalking a Bellagio suite, phoning Wayne Gretzky, Kevin Garnett, and Barry Sanders for betting tips. Shaquille O’Neal and Kevin Hart hyping new-customer bonuses for DraftKings. Hall of Famers who would have been selling sneakers and Wheaties a generation ago are now getting paid millions of dollars to lure 21-year-olds into online casinos.

Virtually every sports-media outlet in America, from CBS Sports to your favorite niche football podcaster, takes sponsorship money from gambling companies. ESPN now recaps the day’s games by covering which teams beat the spread; gambling talk pervades pregame studio panels. Every major TV network now seems to employ a data whiz with glasses and rolled-up sleeves who can break down the betting angles for viewers at home.

The leagues, initially so opposed to legalized sports betting, embraced it to help reverse sliding TV ratings and lure back the younger fans who were drifting away. Before long, they found themselves beholden to the industry they’d helped create. Now the NFL, the NBA, and MLB all have large equity stakes in the data companies that power the sportsbooks. They license broadcast rights directly to sportsbook-operated streaming services, and hurry to defend their partners whenever a game-fixing scandal breaks. “Gambling touches everything,” the former ESPN reporter Joon Lee recently wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “The betting apps are in charge now, and everyone knows it. The leagues are hostage to the forces they unleashed.”

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? In 2023, an offshore book called BetOnline briefly allowed people to gamble on the Special Olympics. The plan ran aground when athletes were apparently awarded identical medals in the same event—the Special Olympics is not, strictly speaking, about winners and losers—and bettors revolted after their payouts were delayed. A spokesperson for BetOnline acknowledged to the New York Post that grading the Special Olympics had been “more challenging than we expected.”

Now, with the rise of “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket, gambling options are no longer limited to sports. Live-betting odds have been featured on the Golden Globes telecast and CNN’s election coverage. 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.)

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I first noticed it during the fourth quarter of the Cardinals-Titans game that Sunday. The Cardinals had been heavy favorites, and I’d bet on them to win by a touchdown. Early in the fourth quarter, it looked like a win was in the bag. The Cardinals were already up 21–6 when running back Emari Demercado ran for what looked like a game-sealing 72-yard touchdown. But when the referees reviewed the play, they found that Demercado, who had dropped the ball after scoring, had actually let it go half a step before reaching the end zone. The touchdown was reversed, the play was ruled a fumble, and the Titans proceeded to pull off an improbable 16-point comeback to win the game. My money vaporized.

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.

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Sports leagues, of course, are not the first American institutions to suffer a crisis of authority in the 21st century. (See also: Wall Street, Congress, the military, the police, the press, etc.) But the recent decline of trust in sports is, to an extraordinary degree, self-inflicted and avoidable. By embracing gambling so completely—normalizing it, celebrating it, reaping massive profits from it—the leagues have all but ensured that many fans will see it as baked into the game itself. Even if point-shaving is rare, each new revelation reinforces the notion that the system is rigged. To watch sports in 2026 is to become, almost inevitably, a kind of conspiracy theorist.

After a late penalty in a December game between the Broncos and the Raiders turned a meaningless field goal into a bad beat for anyone who had Denver minus 8.5, the Barstool Sports founder, Dave Portnoy, filmed himself melting down on camera. “This is the most rigged game I have ever seen in my entire life,” Portnoy ranted, pacing around his living room alone, looking like a paranoid QAnon adherent. He demanded that the referees be investigated; he demanded that the Raiders’ coach, Pete Carroll, be investigated. Then he called for more decisive punishments. “Prison for Pete Carroll!” he bellowed. “Murder Pete Carroll! I want Pete Carroll murdered!”

Portnoy apologized the next day, clarifying that he’d only been calling for a “metaphorical murder.” But he didn’t back off his accusation. He had lost a quarter of a million dollars on “one of the wildest sequences” of the season, he told his audience. Somebody needed to get to the bottom of it.

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In Kansas, industry representatives plied lawmakers with steak dinners, premium whiskey, and cigars in a private club as they pushed favorable tax legislation. In Mississippi, DraftKings courted the House speaker, bringing him and his wife to New Orleans for the Super Bowl, where they mingled with celebrities in a luxury suite over drinks and gourmet Creole food.

The lobbyists’ pitch to politicians is easy enough to understand: Tax revenue from online gambling can help fund schools and roads. In 2024, online sportsbooks generated at least $2.9 billion in taxes for state and local governments, a figure that is growing rapidly. Mindful of this, Tonko has been careful to frame his proposals in terms of basic harm reduction. “We’re not out to outlaw sports gambling,” he told me. He has proposed a new bill that would restrict how online sportsbooks can target and track customers, as well as cap certain kinds of losses, ban prop bets on college and amateur athletes, and create a national self-exclusion list so that people who want to bar themselves from betting don’t have to fill out a new form every time they cross a state line.

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I had been aware of platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow users to “invest” in predictive outcomes and trade their “positions.” I also knew that the platforms, which are available in all 50 states, were competing for market share in sports betting with FanDuel, DraftKings, and other incumbents.

But my curiosity wasn’t piqued until U.S. forces stormed Venezuela in January. Days before the operation, an anonymous user had created a Polymarket account and started wagering tens of thousands of dollars that President Nicolás Maduro would be in U.S. custody by the end of the month. When Maduro was captured, the account holder walked away with more than $400,000 in profit.

I assumed at first that the story was an example of obscene abuse—insider trading on a deadly military raid. But once I started playing around with the markets, it became clear that insider trading was a feature, not a bug. The platforms’ founders say they’re providing a social utility, moving the entire digital public square from social-media sites, where AI slop and rage bait reign, to prediction markets, where you are incentivized to invest based on what you genuinely know or believe. “People don’t lie when money’s involved,” Tarek Mansour, a Kalshi co-founder and its CEO, told The New York Times. And although the platforms technically prohibit manipulation—and, in Kalshi’s case anyway, insider trading—proponents have acknowledged that insiders making bets based on what they know only heightens the markets’ predictive value.

But scrolling through the available bets on Kalshi, I struggled to locate the civic spirit. Would anyone truly benefit because I could wager on which words Trump would use next week (5-to-1 payout on Somalian), or which nicknames he’d deploy for his political enemies (3-to-1 for Newscum)? Was the quality of the discourse improved by our ability to gamble on drug-boat bombings in the Caribbean or whether Gaza would experience a famine? “The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” Mansour has said.