Gambling Update

Tony Bloom turned gambling into a business before taking on Cheltenham

2026-03-30T10:03:00.006+01:00

From the poker tables to the boardrooms, with a Premier League club to his name and seeking Cheltenham glory, Tony Bloom isn’t your average horse owner.

While the 51-year-old tends to keep a low profile where possible, this football fan with a keen eye for a bet has turned his teenage hobby into a reported billion euro success story.

Bloom’s horse Poniros is one to watch at this year's Champion Hurdle race at Cheltenham.

At 5 years old, he already has a place in the history books at the festival, romping home at odds of 100-1 in the Triumph last year.

From his humble beginnings at the arcades and bookmakers of Brighton to making millions through the Asian gambling market, taking in the professional poker tables on the world stage and moving into the boardroom of his hometown club, Bloom's reputation of being a winner in an industry of chance seems unmatched.

The Lizard, a nickname Bloom picked up while on the poker circuit, has a number of high profile finishes on the world tour, including a fourth place in the 2005 World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions, a second place finish at the Poker Million XI event in London in 2010 and he was part of the winning British team at the Poker Nations Cup in 2006.

His talents got noticed in the early 90s after ditching a job as a trader to become a professional gambler, where he caught the eye of bookmaker Victor Chandler, who later went on to become BetVictor.

In the late 90s Chandler introduced Bloom to the Asian market and their handicap system, a system that would see the Lizard bank millions. Bloom then went out on his own setting up a number of online gambling sites during the 2000s, taking time out from professional gambling to play against the world's elite in poker.

Such was his talent at the game, people said he must have been cold-blooded to make such cool decisions, and hence the Lizard was born.

In 2006 the professional gambler set up Starlizard, and although mystery surrounds why he is not named as a director, many speculate that the consultancy agency operates mainly as a gambling advisory to his exclusive gambling syndicate, which was set up around the same time.

Britain’s greatest gambler, as he has been referred to in the past, is reported to use the Asian handicap system to place his bets and it's said he asks for a £2m stake from potential clients to use his services. Using the proprietary odds created by Starlizard, along with his connections, Bloom and his syndicate can make smart high stakes bets, mostly on football matches, across Asia.

Bloom manages to keep his business shrouded in mystery as all of his employees are made to sign strict nondisclosure agreements when they commence working with Starlizard. Some former employees, however, did speak anonymously to Business Insider, where they revealed how the firm operates.

It would seem that people who join the company get the standard market wage for the role they take on, but are incentivised to stay with Starlizard by being offered a share in the firm's winnings.

One former employee told the publication that after overcoming probation employees get the chance to share in the winnings of one of the most successful bettors in the world.

Payments are made twice a year, with employees benefiting to the tune of less than £100 and up to £500k every six months. The amount you receive depends on the number of "stars" you have, or the size of your stake.

Most of the staff who join the syndicate do so for free, with their percentage of the winnings looked on as a bonus. One former employee said: "You could quite easily be getting £10,000 every six months – who would turn that down?"

There is a catch, however, with employees expected to top up the pot if the firm loses money. This doesn't happen too often and with a six-month payout scheme, it's is rare that the staff have to dig into their own pockets.

One worker in the industry explained it: "They don’t beat the market all the time, just enough times."

With things going well for the businessman, Bloom bought a 75% stake in his local club Brighton & Hove Albion in 2009, bringing them back to the Premier League in 2016/17 for the first time in 34 years. Such was his ambition for the Seagulls, Bloom pumped £93m into their stadium along the way so they had the grounds suitable for an English top-flight return.

While much of the man's business is a mystery, it will be no surprise to racing fans to see him in the winner's circle once again.

Corruption scandal rocks Czech football as police arrest dozens with top-tier clubs involved

2026-03-24T13:04:00.004+00:00

Early on Tuesday, Czech police initiated mass arrests in relation to corruption in football in connection with betting. Czech website iSport.cz first reported the story, stating that the police have already detained dozens of people, with players, referees and top-tier clubs involved in the scandal.

The leadership of the Football Association of the Czech Republic (FAČR) called an extraordinary meeting of the executive committee shortly after the story broke. After that, its chairman, David Trunda, confirmed the investigation at a press conference, saying that it is the result of three years of work and that the federation has cooperated in the process "for a long time."

The National Centre against Organised Crime (NCOZ) confirmed to the Czech news agency ČTK that it is carrying out criminal proceedings. According to ČTK, FAČR is currently investigating the matter and will issue a statement once it has established all the necessary information.

"Our department is carrying out criminal proceedings today. The submission of information is reserved for the High Public Prosecutor's Office in Olomouc," said NCOZ spokesman Jaroslav Ibehej.

According to iSport.cz, Europol and Interpol are also involved, and the raids were preceded by a three-year investigation. The website reported that the police action also involved first league and youth matches.

"Since 6:00 a.m., a giant crackdown has been underway, probably the biggest in the history of Czech football," it quoted from a text message sent out by FAČR chairman David Trunda to members of the executive committee.

"The Football Association is the initiator of this case. We have been cooperating with the police for a long time to uncover unfair practices," Trunda explained during his press conference.

According to him, 47 disciplinary proceedings have been initiated. Furthermore, the intervention does not concern anyone from the FAČR leadership. The association has been informing UEFA about its progress from the beginning.

"The focus is especially in Moravia, 99 per cent, which concerns dozens of people."

"This is the result of the cooperation between FAČR and the police of the Czech Republic. The Ethics Committee will today start proceedings with more than 40 players, officials, referees and clubs, including clubs of the highest competition down to the fourth league plus the youth leagues," Trunda wrote, according to iSport.cz.

The FAČR boss was due to attend the induction of former national team player Přemysl Bičovský into the Hall of Fame at 9:00, but excused himself.

Olomouc chief prosecutor Radim Dragoun said several dozen people were detained and searches were carried out at their homes and on other premises, according to the website of the High Public Prosecutor's Office.

The unpleasant affair for the entire Czech football movement comes just a day after the announcement of their Footballer of the Year (Pavel Sulc) and just two days before the men's national team begin the playoffs for the 2026 World Cup.

The biggest corruption scandal to date to shake Czech football was back in 2004. Based on police wiretaps, a number of officials, referees, delegates and influential people from the football association were punished. The protagonist of the affair was former Zizkov manager Ivan Horník.

According to iSport.cz, the current police investigation is primarily focussed in Moravia, concerning first division and youth matches. The news source stated that one of the suspects is Jan Wolf, the mayor of Karviná, who owns the first league club, and the player Samuel Sigut, as well as a professional referee. A city spokeswoman said there was no intervention at City Hall. Wolf was not answering his phone for comment.

Representatives of clubs from the first league and lower competitions, which ČTK contacted in the regions today, had no information about the police raid due to betting this morning. This concerns first league clubs Olomouc, Ostrava, Zlin, Slovacko and Mlada Boleslav, as well as Prostejov, Kromeriz and the Brno clubs Artis and Zbrojovka, which play in the second division.

The football club FC Zlinsko in Otrokovice, which focuses on the development of youth players, has also appeared in the media in connection with the case. Both the club's chief operating officer, Rostislav Zálešák, and its managing director, Tomáš Macek, told ČTK that they had no information that police had intervened at the club.

Bets on US-Iran ceasefire show signs of insider knowledge

2026-03-24T13:02:00.146+00:00

Several accounts on the online platform Polymarket laid bets on a US-Iran ceasefire over the weekend that appeared to show signs of insider knowledge, according to experts.

Eight accounts, all newly created around 21 March, bet a total of nearly $70,000 (£52,000) on there being a ceasefire. They stand to make nearly $820,000 if such a deal is reached before 31 March.

An account that made the same bet was created shortly before the US struck Iran on 28 February. It also placed a winning bet on those strikes, which raised similar questions around insider trading, and so far has bet on nothing else.

The new accounts all appear to have been created late last week, around the time when the US president, Donald Trump, appeared to first double down on war with Iran, then suggest in an after-markets Truth Social post that he was considering “winding down” military operations.

The wallets “definitely [look like] someone with some degree of inside info”, said Ben Yorke, formerly a researcher with CoinTelegraph, now building an AI trading platform called Starchild.

Polymarket accounts are anonymous, and it is extremely difficult to trace the owners of the crypto wallets that laid the bets.

But online crypto watchers and experts suggested that the bets bore the signs of insider trading – both because they bought their positions at market price, and because some of the accounts looked like they could belong to a single investor attempting to conceal their identity by splitting their bet between multiple wallets.

“Typically, when you see wallet-splitting and deliberate attempts to obfuscate identity, it’s one of two scenarios: either a very large investor trying to shield their position from market impact, or insider trading,” said Yorke.

Polymarket’s own rating of the probability of a ceasefire before 31 March increased significantly in the past few days, from 6% on 21 March to 24% by Monday. More than $21m is currently being wagered on this outcome.

Online prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi are rapidly becoming a feature of modern warfare.

Timely bets laid this year suggest insiders may be using them to profit from secret information, such as Trump’s plans to kidnap the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, or the timing of US-Israel attacks on Iran.

Polymarket, whose investors include a venture capital firm owned by Donald Trump Jr, has faced criticism and regulatory scrutiny over potentially facilitating war profiteering and insider trading.

A New York Times story recently found that while the company described itself as “News 2.0” – a parallel source of information harnessing the power of prediction markets – its own social media feeds are full of falsehoods.

On several Discord channels devoted to Polymarket, users and automated bots on Monday traded tips on how to monetise the war – including arbitrage between different platforms, and following users with a history of good bets.

One post suggested users wager “YES” on “US x Iran ceasefire by March 31” because three historically profitable traders on the platform had bet “yes”, and a historically unprofitable trader had bet “no”.

Insider knowledge may not be enough to win this particular bet on Polymarket, as it requires both the US and Iran to agree that a ceasefire has been reached.

The rules for settling the bet read: “For the purposes of this market, an ‘official ceasefire agreement’ requires clear public confirmation from both the United States government and the government of Iran that they have agreed to halt military hostilities against one another.”

Polymarket bettors tried to make a reporter change his story about Iran missile strike — or else

2026-03-18T11:47:00.001+00:00

An Israeli journalist said Polymarket users tried to bribe him and threatened to kill him after he reported that an Iranian missile had struck Israel earlier this month.

Polymarket later condemned the harassment and said the conduct violated its rules.

"We've banned the accounts for all involved & will pass their info to the relevant authorities," the company wrote on X.

Emanuel Fabian, a military correspondent for The Times of Israel, wrote this week that the harassment began with emails pressing him to revise a blog post saying a missile hit an area roughly 500 meters from homes in Beit Shemesh, a small city in central Israel.

The initial outreach, written in Hebrew, was polite, Fabian wrote. "Regarding your Times of Israel report that described today's launch as an 'impact' — Beit Shemesh Municipality and MDA (Magen David Adom) later corrected their reports to clarify that what fell was an interceptor fragment, not a full missile," the first email said, referring to an Israeli emergency-response service.

Follow-up messages from others were more insistent. "I have an urgent request regarding the accuracy of your report on the missile attack on March 10. I would really appreciate a response if possible," read one.

Fabian wrote that he stood by the reporting, citing Israeli military information and video of a large explosion that, in his view, was inconsistent with interceptor debris.

What followed, he said, was a pressure campaign that spilled across email, X, Discord, WhatsApp, and backchannel outreach through another journalist.

Fabian described repeated requests to change the wording of his report, which he believed was intended to influence the resolution of a Polymarket market tied to whether Iran struck Israel on that date. He said some messages — which didn't explicitly mention Polymarket, but came from Polymarket users or seemed bizarrely hung up on his blog post — escalated into explicit threats.

uters; Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Mar 17, 2026, 8:10 PM EET
Save Saved

The prediction market Polymarket has few guardrails on what people can bet on.
An Israeli journalist said Polymarket users tried to bribe and threaten him into changing a story.
The $9 billion company condemned the threats and said it removed accounts linked to them.

An Israeli journalist said Polymarket users tried to bribe him and threatened to kill him after he reported that an Iranian missile had struck Israel earlier this month.

Polymarket later condemned the harassment and said the conduct violated its rules.

"We've banned the accounts for all involved & will pass their info to the relevant authorities," the company wrote on X.

Emanuel Fabian, a military correspondent for The Times of Israel, wrote this week that the harassment began with emails pressing him to revise a blog post saying a missile hit an area roughly 500 meters from homes in Beit Shemesh, a small city in central Israel.

The initial outreach, written in Hebrew, was polite, Fabian wrote. "Regarding your Times of Israel report that described today's launch as an 'impact' — Beit Shemesh Municipality and MDA (Magen David Adom) later corrected their reports to clarify that what fell was an interceptor fragment, not a full missile," the first email said, referring to an Israeli emergency-response service.
Jack Newsham's face on a gray background.
Follow Jack Newsham

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Follow-up messages from others were more insistent. "I have an urgent request regarding the accuracy of your report on the missile attack on March 10. I would really appreciate a response if possible," read one.

Fabian wrote that he stood by the reporting, citing Israeli military information and video of a large explosion that, in his view, was inconsistent with interceptor debris.

What followed, he said, was a pressure campaign that spilled across email, X, Discord, WhatsApp, and backchannel outreach through another journalist.

Fabian described repeated requests to change the wording of his report, which he believed was intended to influence the resolution of a Polymarket market tied to whether Iran struck Israel on that date. He said some messages — which didn't explicitly mention Polymarket, but came from Polymarket users or seemed bizarrely hung up on his blog post — escalated into explicit threats.

"If you do not correct this by 01:00 Israel time today, March 15, you are bringing upon yourself damage you have never imagined you would suffer," read one.

Fabian wrote that he went to the police and provided evidence.

Polymarklet didn't answer questions from the Times of Israel about the details of the investigation. Representatives for Polymarket didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Advocates for prediction markets have said they encourage honesty by requiring users to put their money where their mouth is. Shayne Coplan, Polymarket's founder, has said that people in the Middle East can use military-strike markets to decide whether they want to sleep near a bomb shelter.

The nitty-gritty details of contracts and how they are resolved can lead to contentious arguments. People on Polymarket who wagered on whether Iran would strike Israel by March 10 still haven't gotten paid, as the contract appears to remain in dispute. Polymarket, which is legally based in Panama, uses a complex, crypto-based process to resolve disagreements.

Fabian isn't the first person to say they were targeted by prediction market users. The NCAA has cited concerns with prediction markets, reporting that 36% of Division I men's basketball players said they had been harassed by "someone with a betting interest."

In January, the organization called for a pause on college sports-related betting prediction market betting until the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates the platforms, "implements appropriate regulations."

Polymarket was valued at $9 billion last year and is seeking a $20 billion valuation in talks with investors, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. The company and its competitor, Kalshi, have poured millions of dollars into marketing online, on TV, and in real life, even giving people free groceries in New York City.

The largest chunk of activity on both platforms is betting on sports in a manner that competes with companies like DraftKings, BetMGM, and other traditional sportsbooks. The second-biggest category is speculating on cryptocurrency prices.

Business Insider has previously reported that Polymarket has drawn scrutiny from US lawmakers over concerns about manipulation, insider trading, and the difficulty of investigating crypto-based bets.

ers; Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Mar 17, 2026, 8:10 PM EET
Save Saved

The prediction market Polymarket has few guardrails on what people can bet on.
An Israeli journalist said Polymarket users tried to bribe and threaten him into changing a story.
The $9 billion company condemned the threats and said it removed accounts linked to them.

An Israeli journalist said Polymarket users tried to bribe him and threatened to kill him after he reported that an Iranian missile had struck Israel earlier this month.

Polymarket later condemned the harassment and said the conduct violated its rules.

"We've banned the accounts for all involved & will pass their info to the relevant authorities," the company wrote on X.

Emanuel Fabian, a military correspondent for The Times of Israel, wrote this week that the harassment began with emails pressing him to revise a blog post saying a missile hit an area roughly 500 meters from homes in Beit Shemesh, a small city in central Israel.

The initial outreach, written in Hebrew, was polite, Fabian wrote. "Regarding your Times of Israel report that described today's launch as an 'impact' — Beit Shemesh Municipality and MDA (Magen David Adom) later corrected their reports to clarify that what fell was an interceptor fragment, not a full missile," the first email said, referring to an Israeli emergency-response service.
Jack Newsham's face on a gray background.
Follow Jack Newsham

Every time Jack publishes a story, you'll get an alert straight to your inbox!

Follow-up messages from others were more insistent. "I have an urgent request regarding the accuracy of your report on the missile attack on March 10. I would really appreciate a response if possible," read one.

Fabian wrote that he stood by the reporting, citing Israeli military information and video of a large explosion that, in his view, was inconsistent with interceptor debris.

What followed, he said, was a pressure campaign that spilled across email, X, Discord, WhatsApp, and backchannel outreach through another journalist.

Fabian described repeated requests to change the wording of his report, which he believed was intended to influence the resolution of a Polymarket market tied to whether Iran struck Israel on that date. He said some messages — which didn't explicitly mention Polymarket, but came from Polymarket users or seemed bizarrely hung up on his blog post — escalated into explicit threats.

"If you do not correct this by 01:00 Israel time today, March 15, you are bringing upon yourself damage you have never imagined you would suffer," read one.

Fabian wrote that he went to the police and provided evidence.

Polymarklet didn't answer questions from the Times of Israel about the details of the investigation. Representatives for Polymarket didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Advocates for prediction markets have said they encourage honesty by requiring users to put their money where their mouth is. Shayne Coplan, Polymarket's founder, has said that people in the Middle East can use military-strike markets to decide whether they want to sleep near a bomb shelter.

The nitty-gritty details of contracts and how they are resolved can lead to contentious arguments. People on Polymarket who wagered on whether Iran would strike Israel by March 10 still haven't gotten paid, as the contract appears to remain in dispute. Polymarket, which is legally based in Panama, uses a complex, crypto-based process to resolve disagreements.

Fabian isn't the first person to say they were targeted by prediction market users. The NCAA has cited concerns with prediction markets, reporting that 36% of Division I men's basketball players said they had been harassed by "someone with a betting interest."

In January, the organization called for a pause on college sports-related betting prediction market betting until the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates the platforms, "implements appropriate regulations."

Polymarket was valued at $9 billion last year and is seeking a $20 billion valuation in talks with investors, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. The company and its competitor, Kalshi, have poured millions of dollars into marketing online, on TV, and in real life, even giving people free groceries in New York City.

The largest chunk of activity on both platforms is betting on sports in a manner that competes with companies like DraftKings, BetMGM, and other traditional sportsbooks. The second-biggest category is speculating on cryptocurrency prices.

Business Insider has previously reported that Polymarket has drawn scrutiny from US lawmakers over concerns about manipulation, insider trading, and the difficulty of investigating crypto-based bets.

Sen. Chris Murphy and Rep. Greg Casar announced Tuesday that they will introduce the "Bets Off Act," which would ban certain prediction market trades, including terrorism, war, and assassinations.

The attacks on Iran are only one of several geopolitical flashpoints that have been accompanied by concern about the prospect of people with insider information cashing in. One Polymarket user made several hundred thousand dollars correctly betting on the US operation to remove Venezuela's leader, Nicolas Maduro.

My year as a degenerate gambler

2026-03-16T10:50:00.001+00:00

On a Thursday evening in September, I excused myself from the family dinner table and slipped into my bedroom. I didn’t want my kids to see what I was about to do.

With the door locked behind me, I pulled out my phone and downloaded the DraftKings betting app. I felt a certain thrill as I typed in my debit-card information and deposited $500. The first game of the NFL season was a few minutes away. Anything seemed possible.

I am not, by temperament, a gambling man. As a suburban dad with four kids, a mortgage, and a minivan, I’m more likely to be found wrestling a toddler into a car seat than scouring moneylines or consulting betting touts. And as a practicing Mormon, I am prohibited from indulging in games of chance. Besides, I had always thought of gambling as a waste of time. This makes me an outlier among my generational peers: Since 2018, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports, and roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook.

When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming 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.

This spiritual loophole intrigued me. But for the sake of my soul, I decided I’d better consult a higher ecclesiastical authority than The Atlantic’s masthead.

A few days later, I sat across from my bishop, explaining the experiment and watching a look of pastoral concern come over his face. After some consideration, he said (a bit tentatively, if I’m being honest), “I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong.” He grasped the difference between gambling with my own money and using my employer’s for research purposes. But he had also seen too many lives wrecked by vice to let me leave without a warning. He told me stories he’d heard about upstanding family men who had let an initially modest gambling habit ruin them, and a cautionary tale about a churchgoing lawyer who developed an unhealthy curiosity about sex work after handling a prostitution case and wound up devastating his family.

I promised the bishop that I would steer clear of slippery slopes. “This will really just be a journalistic exercise,” I assured him.

Fifteen minutes before kickoff, I scrolled through the available wagers on DraftKings in wide-eyed bewilderment. Struggling to make sense of the terminology—Profit boosts? Alternative spreads?—I punched in bets almost at random. I bet that the Eagles would beat the Cowboys by at least nine points, based on the sophisticated premise that the Eagles had won the previous Super Bowl and the Cowboys had not. I placed a bet that Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts would throw for more than 200 yards, and wagered on something called a “same-game parlay” that would pay out if both Hurts and running back Saquon Barkley scored touchdowns.

Then, after tucking in my kids for the night, I turned on the TV in our bedroom and settled in next to my wife, Annie.

Watching the game was unexpectedly stressful. Toggling among my five different bets—monitoring their progress, weighing live “cash out” options—left me feeling harried and sweaty. Four seconds into the game, I got a taste of the capriciousness of the enterprise when the Eagles’ best defender inexplicably spit on the Cowboys’ quarterback and got himself ejected. Had the Eagles’ chances of beating the spread, and my chances at winning $75, just been expectorated away?

But the experience was also strangely mesmerizing. For 200 bucks, I had purchased an artificial rooting interest in a game I had no reason to care about. I kept watching even after a weather delay pushed it late into the night, scrolling frenetically next to my sleeping wife in search of angles to exploit with late-game bets. Most of my bets ended up losing, but the long-shot Hurts-Barkley parlay hit, and when the game ended, I calculated that I was up $20.

The next morning, I proudly shared the news with Annie, who high-fived me and immediately began to fantasize about how we would spend my winnings for the season. Could we replace our dying KitchenAid mixer? Remodel the kitchen pantry? Like so many wives before her, she had looked upon my foray into sports gambling with a bemused air of exasperation; now she was seeing a potential upside.

I laughed at her sudden enthusiasm—but I was starting to get ideas myself. I had made $20 on my very first night of gambling. Scale up the wager sizes, multiply across all 272 games in the NFL season, throw in some NBA and college football, and I stood to make—what, $10,000? $20,000? More?

I knew, of course, that I wouldn’t win every bet. But I didn’t see the harm in dreaming. As Annie and I traded home-improvement fantasies, I tried my best not to dwell on the last thing the bishop had said to me: “Be careful.”

Ever since the advent of sports, humans have found ways to lose money gambling on them. Ancient Greeks wagered on the (occasionally rigged) early Olympic Games; Romans bet on chariot races and gladiatorial contests (also sometimes rigged). When 17th‑century settlers arrived in North America, they encountered Native tribes placing high‑stakes bets on “little brother of war,” a precursor to lacrosse.

Throughout most of America’s history, gambling was heavily regulated and generally discouraged. In 1631, Puritans banned games of chance in Plymouth Colony “under pain of punishment.” In 1794, a Pennsylvania law prohibited “cockfighting, cards, dice, billiards, bowling, shuffleboard, horse racing, or any other type of gambling.”

Laws varied by state and century, but the practice always came with a healthy social stigma, one rooted in millennia of accumulated wisdom. To humanity’s great thinkers and leaders, gambling was an impediment to an ethical life (Aristotle), an invention of the devil (Saint Augustine), and a tax on the ignorant (Warren Buffett). It fostered selfishness and a something-for-nothing ethos that was poisonous to the soul. George Washington went so far as to warn that “every possible evil” could be tied to gambling: “It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and the father of mischief.” As a result, gambling was largely contained to certain disreputable corners of society, such as riverboats, red‑light districts, and Nevada. For a time, it was the near‑exclusive province of leg‑breaking bookies and pin-striped criminals. Later, Native American reservations and offshore bookmakers got in on the action.

But professional sports leagues remained determined to keep gambling at a distance. High-profile scandals—the White Sox World Series fix in 1919, the Mafia-instigated point-shaving scheme at Boston College in 1978—had convinced commissioners that betting posed an existential threat to organized sports. In June 1990, officials from the major U.S. leagues testified before the Senate. Paul Tagliabue, then the NFL commissioner, captured their shared assessment: “Nothing has done more to despoil the games Americans play and watch than widespread gambling on them.”

Two years later, Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which effectively banned most sports betting outside Nevada. It remained the law of the land for decades.

Then, in 2012, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, hoping to boost Atlantic City’s flagging economy, signed a bill expanding sports betting to licensed locations in his state. The leagues sued New Jersey, and the case began winding its way through the federal courts. When I spoke with him recently, Christie recalled the thundering indignation that his bill provoked at the time. He was once cornered at an event by Bill Bradley, the former Knicks player turned senator, and NBA Commissioner David Stern, who both shouted at him so loudly that other attendees started to gawk. “I’m not an animal to be bet on, like a horse,” Bradley scolded Christie. “We’re going to come after you with everything we’ve got,” Stern warned.

“You know what, David?” Christie recalled telling Stern. “After I win this thing—and I’m going to win it—you’re going to thank me.”

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?

Week Two
Total gambled: $376.00
Down $58.15

If I was going to do this, I decided, I would need a gambling guru—someone to talk me through the basics of sound sports betting (if such a thing existed) and teach me best practices.

The obvious choice was Nate Silver, America’s most famous statistics nerd. Silver first made a name for himself as the founder of 538, an election-forecasting website that accurately predicted the winner of all 50 states in the 2012 presidential campaign. A few years ago, Silver, citing a midlife crisis and political fatigue, discarded the pundit suits, threw on a baseball cap, and started writing more about gambling. He launched a newsletter full of sophisticated sports-betting models and wrote a book about the psychology of successful gamblers. He estimates that he has netted in the “mid–six figures” over the course of his gambling life. If anyone could turn me into a respectable bettor, I figured, it was him.

Before our first call, I sheepishly sent Silver my week-one bet slips. After that first triumphant game, things had gone downhill. Scrolling through DraftKings’ offerings, I had turned into a little kid at a carnival, emptying my parents’ wallet into any ring toss or high striker that caught my eye. I’d taken fliers on games without doing any research, and placed live bets on whatever ESPN happened to be showing when I turned on the TV. On Saturday afternoon, while casually watching a random college-football game with my brother, I bet $10 that the point total wouldn’t go over 52.5, lost, tried to make my money back with a new bet that it wouldn’t go over 61.5, and lost that one too. Of the 14 wagers I’d placed in my first week, I’d won three.

Silver pulled up my slips when we got on the phone, and began to audibly react as he scrolled:

“Okay …”

“Oh.”

“Oh no.” He started laughing.

Is it possible to be emasculated by Nate Silver? Apparently, yes.

Perhaps sensing my humiliation, he tried to soften his assessment. “Look, the nice way to put it is that you’re betting like a recreational bettor.” I took this as a withering insult.

Silver laid out some basic realities of the sports-betting economy. The books effectively charge you about 4.5 percent for every bet you place, he explained, which means it isn’t enough to win 50.1 percent of the time; you have to win 52.5 percent of your bets just to break even, and that’s before taxes. My most obvious mistake, he said, was that I was using only DraftKings. To find edges, I would need to shop for lines across at least three or four books every week.

He gave me other tips, too: Avoid “prop bets” on individual players (Josh Allen to rush for more than 50 yards) and multi-leg parlays, which pay out only if every outcome hits (the Chiefs cover the spread, the Ravens win, and the Chargers score more than 24 points). Props and parlays are how sportsbooks generate most of their profits. “They’re suckers’ bets,” Silver said, which made sense, given that I had already placed several of them.

Live betting—placing wagers in the middle of games—was also a bad idea, he told me, because it leads to gambling based on emotion more than logic. Also, televised games are broadcast on a delay, which means the sportsbooks can adjust lines before you even see what has happened on the field. You are, in effect, betting against people who live 20 seconds in the future.

To guard against emotional betting, Silver suggested a Tuesday-morning ritual: I should sit in a quiet place, study the lines for that week’s games, gather information on injury reports and weather forecasts, and then place $100 bets on the six or seven games I liked best.

Before we hung up, I asked Silver what kind of profit would make it a successful season for me.

He seemed confused by the question. “If you make one penny, that would be better than 98 percent of people over an entire season,” Silver answered, as if this were obvious.

I was taken aback. Hadn’t Silver himself made hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling? Yes, he said, but that was mostly from poker tournaments. Sports betting was a game of razor-thin margins and microscopic edges. NFL football was among the hardest sports to win money on—the lines were too sharp, the teams too evenly matched. Silver told me that, even with his quantish models and prognosticatory brilliance, he would consider it cause to celebrate if he broke even on the season.

Intellectually, I understood what he was saying. But some part of me didn’t believe him. Somehow, I was still convinced that I could beat the odds.

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.)

Week Three
Total gambled: $1,011.00
Down $185.40

In late September, my family piled into our Honda Odyssey and drove to Greenville, North Carolina, for the Brigham Young–East Carolina football game. Like any good father, I had made a project in recent years of indoctrinating my young kids in the sports fandom of my alma mater. We rolled up to the BYU tailgate party—fancy bespoke sodas instead of beer; a canned-food drive in place of keg stands—and spent the hours before the game eating barbecue and taking pictures with Cosmo, the beloved Cougar mascot.

I had decided in advance not to bet on the game—I didn’t need any action in order to be invested in its outcome, and the stress might sour the family experience. But at the tailgate, I met a BYU administrator who told me about how prepared the team was and how the defense would be “locked in.” This was hardly insider information, but it was enough to compel me—an hour before kickoff—to put $100 on BYU to win. When I mentioned this to my 12-year-old daughter, she rolled her eyes. “That’s not very Mormon of you,” she said.

The game was a blast. BYU fans had traveled from all along the East Coast to fill a large section of the stadium. Our defense was indeed locked in, forcing two turnovers and propelling the team to an early lead. By the middle of the third quarter, East Carolina fans were leaving in droves while my kids and I belted the Cougar fight song until we were hoarse: Rise and shout, the Cougars are out!

It was one of those ecstatic family moments—a core memory in the making. And yet, as we sang, I couldn’t quite ward off an intrusive thought: I should have bet BYU to cover the spread. Much better juice.

Week Five
Total gambled: $2,206.00
Down $220.13

By October, I had settled into a rhythm with my betting. Following Silver’s advice, I had downloaded several more sportsbook apps (FanDuel, ESPN Bet) and spent time early each week searching for the most enticing games on the NFL schedule. I kept tabs on roster updates and checked various prediction models.

One of my most valuable resources was a website that aggregated the lines across all sportsbooks and tracked the micro-movements in real time. The differences were minimal, but Silver had told me that exploiting even the tiniest advantage was crucial. If I liked the Seahawks to beat the Buccaneers, one book might have them as four-point favorites, while another would have them at 3.5; one might require me to bet $110 to win an additional $100, while another needed only $106. The books are constantly adjusting their lines to keep users evenly balanced on each side of a given bet, in order to limit the risk of lopsided payouts, which would cut into their profits.

I took a certain perverse pride in my mastery of the lingo and the basic betting math. Scouring the sportsbooks each week for the best lines made me feel like a sharp. But the process could be time-consuming. One rainy evening, I found myself parked outside a big-box store in Northern Virginia where my wife had sent me on an errand, obsessively scavenging for lines on my phone and jotting down favorites in my Notes app. When I looked up, 45 minutes had passed. I would be late for dinner.

Doing all of this homework heightened my investment in the games—but it also conjured something disconcerting and primal in me.

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.

Caroline Garcia doesn’t remember the first abusive message she received from an angry gambler who lost a bet on her, but she knows she was still a teenager.

Garcia, a French tennis player who at her peak was ranked fourth in the world, told me she got so many deranged messages over the years—so many slurs and death threats, so many fuck you s and kill yourself s—that they started to feel like background noise. She recalled the dissonance of receiving the most unhinged message imaginable and then looking at the sender’s wholesome Instagram: “His profile picture is with his kid of 1 year old, and you’re like, I don’t understand—what is the problem with you? ” I felt a twinge of shame as I realized I could empathize with that gambler’s brief spell of insanity more than I’d like to admit.

Garcia, who retired last year, was speaking with me via Zoom from Dubai, where she now lives with her husband. She told me she likes how safe the city feels. More than a decade of death threats from deranged bettors can make you appreciate high-tech security systems and heavily policed streets.

Athletes are no strangers to wrathful comments, of course. But the rise of legal, normalized betting has coincided with an increase in harassment. More than a third of men’s Division I college-basketball players say they’ve received abusive messages from gamblers, and 21 percent of gamblers themselves cop to lashing out at athletes in person or online. The trend makes sense: When a player underperforms, he’s not just letting down his teammates and fans. He’s costing gamblers money. In the adrenaline spike of a tough beat, a bettor loses perspective; the athlete becomes a subhuman extra in the gambler’s personal drama.

Tennis is among the most gambled-on sports in the world. And because it’s primarily an individual game, the frustration of losing bettors lands directly on the players themselves rather than on coaches or whole teams. Garcia, who hosts a podcast called Tennis Insider Club, said players trade tips on how to deal with the abuse. They call law enforcement and hire private security; some of them rely on AI-powered software called Threat Matrix, which monitors and assesses the credibility of menacing messages across platforms.

A few have taken to mocking the misdirected rage. After Gaël Monfils lost in the first round of the Stuttgart Open last year, he posted a “special message” on Instagram for the gamblers who were filling his DMs with racist insults. “Really? You’re still betting on me?” deadpanned Monfils, who at 38 was one of the oldest players on the tour. “You write in that I’m shit. I know I’m shit! We both know I’m shit!”

But even the most easygoing athletes realize that the desperation of a losing bettor can lead to scary places. In 2024, during a fourth-round women’s match at the U.S. Open, in New York City, the official X account for the U.S. Tennis Association received a DM: “I’m inside Louis Armstrong with a bomb that will go off at 1 pm est.” As experts worked to determine the credibility of the threat and the NYPD quietly swept the arena for explosive devices, tournament officials considered evacuating the stadium. Eventually, the message was traced to Strasburg, Pennsylvania, where a 20-year-old man had wagered a large sum on the match. When his player fell behind, he tried to disrupt the match and void his bet with a bomb threat. He now faces up to five years in prison.

Before Garcia retired, she told me, she often found herself wondering if a losing gambler’s digital threat would escalate to physical violence. She told herself it was unlikely, but the possibility was always in the back of her mind. “You just hope that he will always stay in messages, and he will never go the next step,” she said. Her eyes drifted to some unseen point off camera. “You never know.”

Week Seven
Total gambled: $3,551.00
Down $567.23

I was surprised at how quickly and extensively the experiment was bleeding into the rest of my life. I was listening to gambling podcasts in the shower and spending my Sunday afternoons watching five football games at a time—one on my phone and four on the TV’s split screen.

I routinely stayed up past midnight scrolling through the apps, my face illuminated in the dark of our bedroom by brightly colored ads for “NO SWEAT BETS” and “SAME GAME PARLAYS.” I impatiently swiped away FanDuel’s “Reality Check” pop-ups, which notified me, in what I took to be a passive-aggressive tone of disapproval, that I was spending quite a lot of time on the platform.

It was now common for my family to catch me furtively tapping in wagers. On one occasion, my 10-year-old son discovered me on my phone in the kitchen pantry, where I’d gone to get snacks for the kids, and announced, “Dad is hiding again!” On another, Annie happened to glance down the pew at church just as I was sneaking a peek at DraftKings. “You’re addicted,” she stage-whispered.

My wife was no longer having fun with this stunt of mine. Having given up on the prospect of a big payday, she was now focused on the more immediately visible consequences of my gambling—like the fact that our 7-year-old daughter knew the difference between a point spread and a moneyline, and that our 10-year-old’s first question whenever I turned on a game was “Who are we betting on?”

Once, Annie overheard me enthusiastically explaining to our kids that if the third leg of my parlay hit, I would win enough money to erase all of my losses for the season. “But gambling is bad,” she shouted from the other room, “and people who do it eventually lose all their money, right?” Her tone of voice suggested that I was bound by marital covenant to endorse this position, which I promptly did.

“I can’t wait for your gambling experiment to be over,” Annie muttered one night as we drove home from a long weekend at my parents’ house. I had been up late the night before, sweating a Texans-Seahawks game that didn’t end until about 1 a.m., and I’d slept in longer than intended, leaving Annie to wrangle the kids by herself all morning. This had become, she noted, a regular occurrence in recent weeks.

“I’m fine with you sleeping in when you’re up late working, but …” Annie began.

“This is for work,” I insisted.

She scoffed. “You don’t have to watch every game you bet on,” she said. “You have no control over the outcome.”

The irrefutability of her point reduced me to indignant sputtering.

In truth, I was beginning to wonder about what Annie had said to me at church. 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?

I met Craig Carton at his Midtown Manhattan studio—faux brick, wood floors, klieg lights—near Madison Square Garden, about an hour before he went on air. Carton was a quintessential sports-media success story, having leveraged his bombastic New York morning show, Boomer and Carton, into a national following, as well as a book deal and a lucrative TV gig.

Now he spends a lot of his time talking to gambling addicts.

Carton hosts a weekly call-in show on WFAN called Hello, My Name Is Craig, in which he interviews recovering gambling addicts. The guests’ stories are invariably bleak. The Wall Street trader who maxed out 15 credit cards and started stealing jewelry from his parents to cover his losses. The father of two whose wife left him when she found out he hadn’t paid the mortgage for two years. The Little League umpire who got so deep in the hole that he decided he would try to win it all back in one trip to Atlantic City or else kill himself.

Carton, a bald, wiry guy with a raspy New York accent, toggles between empathy and razzing his guests—routinely interrupting a confession to bark, “Heard that one before!”

He’s hard on them because he’s been there. “I’m not a therapist,” he told me. “But I can talk to a gambler the way a nongambler can’t. You can’t bullshit me—anything you’ve done in the gambling world, I’ve done times a hundred.”

The story of Carton’s own descent into ruinous gambling addiction is typical: He started out playing low-stakes blackjack and placing modest bets on sporting events. But little by little, the habit consumed him. He began gambling so much that casinos would fly him out to Vegas on private jets and comp his meals and hotel rooms. As his bets got bigger, the losses became harder to conceal. He borrowed, refinanced, moved money around, and lied about it all, until federal agents showed up early one morning in 2017 outside his Tribeca apartment and arrested him for securities and wire fraud. Prosecutors accused him of siphoning millions from a ticket-resale business, and misleading investors, in order to pay off gambling debts. What Carton remembers most vividly from the morning agents handcuffed him to a bench outside his building was the look on his wife’s face when she saw him.

Carton went to rehab in Arizona, spent a year in prison, and, when he got out, started counseling compulsive bettors and speaking at schools about the dangers of gambling addiction. He is overbooked. Since 2018, when the sports-betting ban was overturned, internet searches for phrases like Am I addicted to gambling? have spiked by 25 percent, and calls to gambling helplines from young men have surged. Gamblers Anonymous has reported young men showing up in droves across the country, and one survey found that nearly one-third of 11-year-old boys had gambled in the past year. (The CEO of FanDuel’s parent company, Flutter Entertainment, has spoken enthusiastically about the growth potential provided by the massive, exploitable market of Americans soon to come of age.)

Experts estimate that only about 2 to 5 percent of gamblers will develop compulsive behaviors. But as Carton likes to point out, that small percentage becomes a very large number when tens of millions of Americans suddenly have casinos in their pockets.

Gambling addiction is similar to other addictive disorders, but there are key differences. It’s easier to hide, at least at first—the addict doesn’t have glazed eyes or slurred speech, and no one can smell it on him. Plus, the compounding financial pressure of the habit can quickly turn a private vice into a full-blown crisis. One in five compulsive gamblers will attempt suicide in their life, a higher rate than for any other category of addict.

Executives at the major online sportsbooks are quick to trumpet their commitment to “responsible gaming.” But that purported commitment runs up against an economic reality: As much as 90 percent of the sportsbooks’ revenue comes from less than 10 percent of their users. Their apps seem clearly designed, much like TikTok and Candy Crush, to keep users scrolling and tapping in a hypnotic stupor. If your account is nearing empty, DraftKings will offer a “reload bonus” of gambling credits to entice you to deposit more money; if you’ve gone a couple of days without making a wager, you might get a push alert from FanDuel offering a “no sweat bet,” promising to refund a loss with site credits to be used for more gambling.

When I asked Christian Genetski, the president of FanDuel, about accusations that online sportsbooks prey on problem gamblers, he dismissed the idea as “a bit of a trope.” He said his company goes out of its way to identify and slow down users who exhibit reckless or addictive behaviors. Bettors who start spending more time or money than usual on the app will receive a notification alerting them to the anomaly—hence the Reality Check alerts I had impatiently dismissed. If they disregard too many of these notifications, FanDuel will impose limits on their gambling, and may even shut down their accounts. (An executive at DraftKings told me it has a similar policy.) “We don’t want any revenue from someone that has a gambling problem,” Genetski told me, noting that the platform’s biggest spenders are not necessarily the ones with unhealthy habits. Genetski said that it’s in FanDuel’s long-term interest to keep users gambling at a sustainable rate. “If people are burning out because they are spending beyond their means, they’re not going to be customers for very long.” (“Loss smoothing” is the industry’s term of art for this tactic; gamblers call it “the slow bleed.”)

When Carton sits down with a gambling addict, his first suggestion is to fill out a “self-exclusion” form. Most states that have legalized gambling allow you to submit a document to the government that prohibits online sportsbooks from taking your action for a defined period—the gambling equivalent of Odysseus binding himself to the mast so he can withstand the temptation of the Sirens. (The strategy isn’t fail-safe: After Carton filled out his own self-exclusion form in New Jersey, he received a letter from a brick-and-mortar casino in Atlantic City. “It said something to the effect of ‘We see that you’ve self-excluded from online gaming. Feel free to come in anytime. We’d love to have you.’ ”)

Many of the young men Carton works with started out betting on football games with their dads. The dad, craving a Sunday-afternoon bonding experience, would open the account, make picks with his son, and then split the winnings—while covering the losses himself. “You’re creating these little mini-monsters in gambling who have no idea that there are times you lose, and the money is real,” Carton told me.

Listening to him talk, I became aware of the troubling parallels to my arrangement with The Atlantic. When I mentioned this to him, he chuckled ruefully. “You’re in harm’s way, that’s for sure,” he said.

I asked him, hypothetically, what warning signs a new gambler should watch for, and he rattled off a list of questions. Are you going to sleep and waking up thinking about your bets? Are you staying up late to watch West Coast games with teams whose rosters you know nothing about? Are you “chasing”—making reckless new bets to win back the money you lost? Are you placing bets on your phone in the bathroom so your family doesn’t see you gambling?

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

Week Eight
Total gambled: $5,321.00
Down $132.40

On October 23, the FBI announced the arrests of more than 30 people in a pair of interlocking gambling schemes. The indictments alleged a yearslong mob operation that drew on insider information to manipulate NBA games and win bets. Terry Rozier, while playing for the Charlotte Hornets, was said to have tipped off associates that he would leave a game early with a foot injury, enabling bettors to place more than $200,000 on “under” prop bets for his points, rebounds, and assists. The implicated included NBA players and a retired Hall of Fame point guard turned head coach. (They have pleaded not guilty.)

As I watched the FBI press conference on CNN, my phone pinged with messages from friends and sources who knew about my sports-betting experiment, including one from the governor of Utah: “Really relieved your name didn’t come out in that gambling ring.”

That evening, I had made plans to check out a real-life sportsbook in Washington, D.C. I invited along two friends, Steve and Ryan, who had been following my gambling rumspringa with deep amusement, and were eager to see me in action.

Neither their wives nor mine expressed interest in joining us. This had become something of a pattern since my experiment began—whenever I started talking about gambling with a couple, the woman would almost invariably tune out or recoil, while her husband leaned in attentively, eager to hear more. Neuroscientists have sought to explain this phenomenon. Men are, on average, less psychologically affected by financial loss than women, and more prone to optimism (rational or otherwise) about their financial future; this combination naturally leads to more risk-taking. There are complicated brain-chemistry factors involved that have to do with testosterone, and dopaminergic systems, and kappa-opioid receptors, all of which seem to add up to a Jim Gaffigan joke about how men are morons compared with their wives. Whatever the reason, the gender split is undeniable: Men make up about 70 percent of sports bettors in America and, according to one study, 98 percent of online sports bettors who qualify as “problem gamblers.”

Our plan was to watch the Chargers play the Vikings, along with a couple of NBA games, at the Caesars inside Capital One Arena. But the place was smaller than anticipated and depressingly empty, redolent with the smell of cleaning chemicals, secondhand smoke, and dissatisfaction with life choices. “This feels like the DMV,” Ryan said. We decided to take our business across the Anacostia River to the MGM National Harbor casino, in Maryland.

I approached the counter, eager to show off my newfound gambling prowess to my friends, and confidently told the bored-looking woman in a blazer that I wanted to “put $100 on the Thunder minus 7.5.” I whipped out my debit card, feeling particularly proud of this bit of lingo I’d picked up. “Cash only,” the woman responded, without making eye contact. Chastened, I shuffled over to an ATM that charged me a $9.75 withdrawal fee.

We settled into recliners facing a wall of massive TV screens. I had expected the sportsbook lounge to be more glamorous, more fun, than the apps I’d been using—a classic sports bar on steroids. But the communal experience I craved was curiously absent. Everyone seemed to be paying attention to different games, or rooting for different sub-outcomes within the games. I tried to bond with some guys nearby who, like me, had money on the Chargers. But they were preoccupied with a prop bet, and barely noticed when Justin Herbert completed a perfect 27-yard touchdown pass to Ladd McConkey with 45 seconds left in the first half.

Gambling had made us all care much more about the games, but it had also atomized us—taking the last and purest expression of American monoculture and turning it into a hyper-individualized, every-man-for-himself portfolio of micro-bets.

The Chargers game was a blowout, but the Oklahoma City Thunder went into double overtime against the Indiana Pacers, and I stayed late with Steve to watch the end. My 7.5-point cover looked out of reach until the final seconds of the game, when the Pacers, down six, tried to foul Thunder center Chet Holmgren. Two free throws would have won me the bet, but the referees ignored the foul, and the game ended. Shouts of indignation rang out from disparate quarters of the lounge. I buried my head in my hands while Steve cackled at my misfortune.

“Tough beat, buddy,” he said.

Seeking company in my misery, I pulled up X, where I found a stream of outraged gamblers accusing the referees of fixing the game, perhaps with the aid of the NBA commissioner.

“Clearly they had money on Indiana,” one wrote.

“Disgusted.”

“Adam Silver must resign.”

I am not usually prone to paranoid thinking. But to my surprise, I found myself wondering if these venting gamblers were right. The morning’s indictment lingered in my mind. Had the refs rigged the game? Were league officials involved? What about players? How deep did this thing go?

The NBA gambling ring exposed in October was only the beginning. In November, two MLB players pleaded not guilty after being indicted for manipulating pitches to help bettors. In January, federal prosecutors accused 39 college-basketball players across 17 Division I teams of taking bribes from gamblers to underperform. (The indictment alleges that the scheme began with rigging Chinese professional-basketball games, then spread to the NCAA.) That same month, the Ultimate Fighting Championship canceled a bout after reports of suspicious betting activity.

Taken together, the proliferating scandals have posed the most significant threat to the credibility of organized sports in the U.S. since Shoeless Joe Jackson got paid to help fix the 1919 World Series. One recent poll found that 65 percent of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes; in another poll, 70 percent of respondents agreed that sports betting “lessens the integrity of the game.”

Gambling apologists argue that the recent revelations are proof that new laws are working—offshore sportsbooks and black-market bookies never coordinated with law enforcement to flag suspicious bets the way FanDuel and DraftKings do now. The cheating isn’t new, this argument goes; it’s just getting discovered and prosecuted more frequently.

Even if that’s true—and some researchers are skeptical—fans’ teetering confidence could become an existential problem. It’s easy to start questioning the legitimacy of what you’re watching on the field or the court, especially when the leagues and the gambling-subsidized sports media both have such clear conflicts of interest. (In October, while ESPN was covering the gambling-ring indictments, producers scrubbed the screen of references to its own online sportsbook.) If trust in the integrity of the game disappears, then interest is likely to follow. Every sport risks becoming professional wrestling—an entertaining spectacle that everyone knows is bogus.

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.

Week Thirteen
Total gambled: $10,941.00
Up $156.16

A couple of days before Thanksgiving, I called Nate Silver, who was preparing to leave for a poker tournament in the Bahamas. He asked me for a gambling status report, and I informed him that I’d been following his advice—diligently shopping for lines, mostly sticking to point spreads. Three months in, I had wagered about $11,000 on 117 bets and was right about even. I didn’t think this sounded like something to brag about, but Silver set me straight. If I could sustain that kind of performance over the long term, he said, it would place me in the top 5 percent of sports bettors.

“So, a moral victory?” I joked.

“I’m serious,” he insisted. This NFL season had been a particularly “weird” one, he said—injuries galore, untested quarterbacks, and no dominant favorites steamrolling the rest of the league, among other anomalies. I had noticed that the FanDuel-sponsored sports podcasters I listened to most often—Bill Simmons, Cousin Sal, Joe House, and the rest of the Ringer crew—were all under .500 with their recommended picks for the year.

Silver didn’t want to reveal how much money he’d personally wagered on NFL games, but he said if it were 100 “units,” he was down about two-tenths of one unit. “You’re beating the lines,” he told me. He sounded almost impressed.

My family and I spent Thanksgiving in Florida, where my parents and siblings teased me relentlessly about my new gambling vocabulary. I laughed along with them, acknowledging the strangeness of the reporting project I’d embarked upon. I also shared their revulsion when we saw a dystopian FanDuel ad depicting a family gathered around a Thanksgiving table, each member staring at their phone, accompanied by the tagline “Bet together like never before.”

What I didn’t tell my family was that I was experiencing my first bout of gambling withdrawal. Upon arriving in Orlando, I had discovered that none of my regular apps worked. Florida allows online sports betting only through an app called Hard Rock Bet, whose servers are on Native land—the result of a 2021 compromise between gambling lobbyists and the Seminole Tribe.

When my brother put on the Chiefs-Cowboys game, a barn burner that came down to the final minutes, I noted with some alarm that I could barely muster any interest. The dopamine system in my brain had been hijacked; I needed money on the game to care about it.

When we got back to Virginia, I reflexively reached for my phone and opened DraftKings as soon as I woke up in the morning, a junkie reaching for his fix. Silver’s encouragement had filled me with irrational confidence. Could it be that I was actually good at gambling? Exceptional, even? A sports-betting savant who had discovered his talent only in middle age? This was not exactly what Silver had said, but I could read between the lines.

That night, the Patriots, my favorite team, were playing the Giants on Monday Night Football, and I spent all day putting together what I thought was the perfect play. The Pats had been on a good run, and the Giants were only 2–10. But New England was dealing with multiple injuries, and I thought the 7.5-point spread was a little rich. I decided to violate one of Silver’s key guidelines and bet $350 on a parlay: the Patriots to win outright, and the game’s point total to be under 50.5. I figured, given my performance, that I’d earned the right to break some rules.

Before the game, I showed the parlay to my 10-year-old son, explaining my logic as if I were a physicist explaining a particle accelerator. The temperature in Foxborough was forecast to be 29 degrees at kickoff, I told him, and teams always score less in the cold.

“You’re, like, a betting genius now,” he said. I felt, briefly, the swelling pride of a father who has impressed his son.

Paul Tonko does not cut an especially imposing figure. He has white tufts of hair that flare over his ears, and a rumpled, curmudgeonly affect that calls to mind a disapproving grandfather. But the 76-year-old congressman from New York is one of Washington’s few prominent crusaders against the sports-betting industry. It’s a lonely job.

Tonko came to the cause four years ago, when he saw that the social-media feeds of his younger aides were filled with ads for sports-betting apps. The marketing, he thought, bore a striking resemblance to the cigarette campaigns from a generation earlier—glossy, predatory, and calibrated to hook the young. As a co-chair of the Addiction, Treatment, and Recovery Caucus, Tonko says he recognized immediately that the industry needed more regulation. “They’re delivering a known addictive product,” he told me, sitting in his office overlooking the U.S. Capitol.

When he began working on a bill that would ban certain kinds of advertising for sportsbooks, he was surprised by the energy around the issue. He was urged on forcefully by parents whose sons had gambled away their tuition money, and by politicians and experts in the United Kingdom and Australia who wished that they’d cracked down on the industry earlier. Key players in the fight against Big Tobacco told him that online gambling was the next major public-health crisis, and volunteered their help.

The only place Tonko struggled to find support was in Congress. When he brought up the bill with colleagues, they would listen politely and then waffle when asked to sign on. They seemed to regard sports betting as an insignificant problem—a nice pet issue for Tonko, maybe, but not something worth spending time or political capital on.

Maybe the hurdle was generational: The average House member is about 60 years old, well outside the DraftKings target demographic. But Tonko suspects that at least some of the resistance has to do with money. In the years since the Supreme Court paved the way for state-by-state legalization, sports-betting companies have mounted a lobbying blitzkrieg in statehouses across the country.

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.

When I asked Tonko how confident he was of the bill’s passage, he seemed to slump into his sofa. “It’s an uphill battle,” he admitted. “The industry’s got megabucks. So I don’t kid myself.”

But he noted that his colleagues do seem to be growing more interested in the issue. As the hazards of ubiquitous gambling become harder to ignore, Tonko expects political support to grow. “Give it time,” he said; three years from now, things might be so bad that Americans will be clamoring for regulation.

This, it seemed, was his best-case scenario.

Week Fourteen
Total gambled: $11,841.00
Down $74.60

The tailspin began on a Thursday night, with a Lions-Cowboys game. I had bet on the Cowboys, who were 3.5-point underdogs, to cover the spread—and in the fourth quarter, a win looked within reach for me. Quarterback Dak Prescott was driving toward the end zone in pursuit of a touchdown that would have pulled the Cowboys within three. But with less than four minutes left and the Cowboys on the 11-yard line, a controversial offensive-pass-interference call ended the drive and my hopes for a backdoor cover. “That call is gonna be talked about,” the announcer boomed.

It was almost midnight—the Christmas tree was glowing nearby, my father-in-law was dozing on the couch, and I had just lost $500. I noticed that I was grinding my teeth.

I had endured plenty of tough beats up to that point, but the fluky nature of this particular loss made something inside me snap. Despite all of my research—my monastic study of the lines, my careful hunt for small edges, my righteous avoidance of the high-risk suckers’ bets that the apps were constantly pushing on me—I had been burned by a bad call from a random referee. I became determined to win it all back.

My first move was to bump up the size of my wagers. When I’d started out, I put no more than $100 on most games; now I was betting up to $500—impatiently swiping to deposit more money when DraftKings or FanDuel told me I was out of funds. Months of diligent recordkeeping were abandoned as the flurry of action caused me to lose track completely of how much I had bet, and on what. Uncertain of what remained of my $10,000 stake from The Atlantic, I routinely woke in the middle of the night, panicked that I was inadvertently dipping into my own savings.

On tilt—this was one of the terms I hadn’t known before my foray into betting. It describes the emotional distress that causes a gambler to make unwise decisions. Over several frenzied days in December, I disregarded every rule Silver had taught me—throwing money at random prop bets and constructing multi-leg parlays like I was a mad scientist mixing volatile compounds in a lab.

Point spreads and moneylines ran constantly through my head, mingling with the omnipresent Christmas carols to create a strange backbeat to the holiday season. Every festive family outing became an opportunity for me to gamble. While my wife and kids ice-skated, I sat in the minivan, our toddler napping in his car seat, as I put together a six-game parlay (lost $80). While my daughter practiced for a Christmas choir performance, I stayed outside the church, chewing my fingernails as I watched a Chiefs-Chargers game on my phone (lost $400).

One Sunday evening, we hosted a small Christmas party, where Steve and Ryan asked me how my gambling was going. I tried to adopt the same wry, self-aware tone that had so amused them when I began the experiment. But I was too keyed up to stay in character. Instead, as I rattled off betting lines in rapid succession, explaining my strategy to get back in the black with ever larger bets, I saw them exchange looks of concern.

“So you’re chasing,” Steve said.

I laughed, too loudly, and then slipped into the pantry to check the Seahawks-Colts score on my phone.

I had put a lot of money on the Seahawks to cover a two-touchdown spread. But while our guests filtered out in a blur of hugs and Merry Christmas es, I watched miserably as Seattle eked out a measly two-point win with a field goal in the dwindling moments, losing me $450.

When the house was empty, I collapsed onto the couch and started doing the math in my head. The flames were low in the fireplace; Bing Crosby was playing over the speakers. I had lost more than $2,500 in 13 days.

Week Eighteen
Total gambled: $20,511.00
Down $3,605.77

Four months of burying myself in gambling apps had apparently made me twitchy in ways that were perceptible to my colleagues. The editor in chief, concerned for my mental health, suggested that I log off for a bit and touch felt.

I landed in Las Vegas on a Sunday in early January and headed to the Bellagio, where I met Tom Nichols, the colleague that my editors had selected as my chaperone. Tom, a professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College and a blackjack obsessive (who knew?), came to Vegas several times a year, and was eager to teach me his ways.

He led me across the casino floor as I scampered behind him taking notes—the sage professor, goateed and clad in a black oxford shirt, explaining slot machines and table games to his earnest pupil. In my notebook, I wrote down, “Always tip the dealer” and “Forget roulette, that’s a Eurotrash game.”

Tom’s main piece of advice was to never gamble on the Strip. The corporate casinos had gotten too greedy, he explained: The odds were bad, the table minimums too high. Besides, the real Vegas wasn’t in places like the Bellagio.

He took me downtown to Fremont Street, where showgirls wandered past buskers beneath a canopy of LED screens. We passed a bar with a sign that read DRINK BEER THROW AXES, and a restaurant, the Heart Attack Grill, that offered free meals to anyone over 350 pounds and displayed customers’ weight in giant neon numbers. Tom let out a contented sigh. “America is already great,” he said.

Tom loves Las Vegas—the kitsch, the unsavory history—and seems almost protective of it. Too many people think of casinos as depressing, predatory places, he said, filled with dead-eyed senior citizens sucking on oxygen tanks as they pump their Social Security checks into slot machines. But what he loves about casinos is not so much the gambling per se as the sense of community it generates.

Tom’s favored casinos (the Golden Gate, El Cortez, the Plaza) were decidedly grimier than the Bellagio—the synthetic air-freshener-and-cologne scent replaced by the stench of beer-soaked carpet and secondhand smoke. But they were also surprisingly friendly places. At one blackjack table, we met two chain-smoking blond women in their 60s from Green Bay, one of whom ribbed me for refusing to hit on 16 while the other proudly recounted her second wedding, where the guests wore Packers jerseys. At another table, a young Black guy with facial tattoos was playing $100 hands and had developed a rollicking alliance with the white-haired geriatric at the other end of the table. “I see you!” he shouted in celebration whenever the old man got a blackjack. Tom, meanwhile, developed a running bit with the dealer about their “dysfunctional marriage.”

There was something quaintly American about the scene: strangers from different parts of the country, of different races and generations, chatting, drinking, joking, commiserating. Yes, everyone was slowly getting ripped off, but at least they were getting ripped off together. Compared with the solitary swiping of the sports-betting apps, the blackjack table was almost Rockwellian.

But as I followed Tom around town for three days, I began to appreciate Vegas for another reason: As a venue for vice, it is inherently self-limiting, a kind of containment zone for sordid behavior. Even for someone who didn’t partake in booze or strip clubs, it was an exhausting place to spend time in. The sensory overload wore me down after a while—the smells, the noise, the permanent neon twilight, the intentional assault on my circadian rhythm. I was never quite sure what time it was, only that I had probably stayed too long.

Las Vegas struck me as a monument to a truth that America once knew and had somehow chosen to forget: If gambling had to be legal, it should be contained to remote cities in the desert that make you feel a little bad about yourself.

Before leaving Las Vegas, I was determined to meet with Sean Perry, a professional sports bettor with nearly half a million followers on Instagram. Perry belongs to a new, influencer-age breed of “handicappers”—people who sell picks to recreational gamblers, claiming inside information or proprietary analytics models.

I had come across Perry’s Instagram profile months earlier, when my algorithm began to identify me as a degenerate gambler. Scrolling through his posts, I didn’t find much sports analysis—but I did find the fruits of his purported success: the private-jet selfies and Lamborghinis in his driveway, the yacht off the Amalfi Coast, the 21 Hermès handbags he presented to his girlfriend for their six-month anniversary. “Sports betting,” Perry likes to tell his followers, “is the highest-paying job in the world.”

I was fascinated by the fantasy that Perry was selling—and, if I’m being honest, a part of me was intrigued to learn his secrets. But interviewing him turned out to be trickier than anticipated. Perry was a moving target, constantly bouncing around the Strip from one sportsbook to another.

The first time we met was on Sunday afternoon at the Bellagio. He arrived with an entourage: his mom, his girlfriend, a leashed English bulldog named Ripple, and a muscly bodyguard named Ron. Perry was surprisingly quiet, even awkward, in person, mumbling as he introduced himself and generally avoiding eye contact. “I’m gonna record a little intro if you want to watch,” he muttered as he handed Ron his phone.

But once the camera blinked on, Perry’s face lit up. He pulled $100,000 in cash out of his Goyard backpack. “If you’ve got a house, sell the house!” he exhorted his followers. “If you’ve got a car, sell the car! I’ve got a guaranteed winner for you.” He marched up to the counter—his bodyguard still recording—and plunked down the wad of cash on the Ravens to beat the Steelers in that night’s game.

I was so mesmerized by the performance that I got in line behind him and put down $300 on the Ravens myself. (I’d never bought my wife 21 Hermès bags.)

Before I could ask him any questions, Perry—displeased with the size of the TV that was showing that afternoon’s Las Vegas Raiders game—decided to change his plans. He and his squad were headed to Allegiant Stadium, the Raiders’ home field, to watch the game in person. He promised to text me a meetup spot later, but I never heard from him. And when the Ravens ended up losing that night with a missed 44-yard field goal, I was glad that I hadn’t sold my house.

For three days, I chased Perry up and down the Strip. He would text me plans to be at one casino or another, and then flake at the last minute. One afternoon, he DMed me on Instagram: “I’ve got a major play lined up, ready to move when you are. How much do you usually bet on something big?” I didn’t see the message until it was too late—and good thing, because it turned out to be another loser when the Montana State Bobcats failed to cover the spread against the Illinois State Redbirds in the Football Championship Subdivision title game.

One reason to doubt the betting prowess of handicappers like Perry, who claims to make tens of millions a year gambling, is that the professional sportsbooks are carefully designed to prevent such success stories. When a gambler starts to win too consistently, the books will place limits on how much he can bet. A true sharp will be effectively banned by every sportsbook in the country before too long.

Once that happens, a game of cat and mouse ensues: The sharp might hire someone else to place bets on his behalf—on any given day, the Las Vegas Strip is teeming with “runners” who carry backpacks stuffed with $100 bills—but this strategy has its own risks. Betting in another person’s name violates the terms of most sportsbooks, and depending on how the transaction is executed, it could be considered fraud. To avoid detection, some sharps will “prime” their accounts—placing scattershot bets to make themselves look like reckless gambling addicts and prompt the sportsbooks to increase their limits—before moving in for the kill. Although the tactics are always evolving, one element of the sportsbook business model remains constant: to take as many bets as possible from bad gamblers, and as few as possible from good ones.

On my last day in Vegas, I finally caught up with Perry at Circa, whose sportsbook features a 1,000-seat theater, a 78-million-pixel Jumbotron, and half a dozen rooftop swimming pools from which gamblers can watch games and place bets. Circa, widely considered the largest sportsbook in the world, is the closest thing that sports betting has to Mecca.

Perry walked in alone—it was a weekday afternoon, and the place was mostly empty—but he was clearly dressed for another Instagram stunt. He wore wide-leg, diamond-studded jeans; a $350,000 Rolex; and two massive, bejeweled chains that read SPW (“Sean Perry Wins”). As soon as he saw me, he thrust a phone into my hand and asked me to get ready to film.

I followed him to the counter, where he placed a $100,000 bet on an NBA game. The ticket writer typed something into his computer, and then informed him that the book could take only $3,000 from him.

Perry, elated, told me to press record. “I just got limited by the biggest sportsbook in Vegas!” he declared. He was feigning outrage, but in fact, this was a badge of honor for a handicapper like him—proof that the sportsbooks were scared of his gambling facility. I pointed out that the man at the counter had cited a player injury as the reason bets on the game were limited, but Perry waved me off. “If you walk to that window right now and try to bet the 100K, they would 100 percent have accepted it.”

When he was done preening for the camera, we retreated to a quiet row of empty seats. I asked him how closely he resembled his social-media persona. “What do you think?” he scoffed. In real life, he told me, he didn’t wear bling or gaudy watches. “I put on a character when I’m on the internet,” he explained. “You have to—that’s how you get views. That’s how I make money.”

Did he ever worry that his followers might take him literally when he tells them to sell their house for a bet?

“They know I’m trolling,” Perry insisted.

I pressed him. “Sometimes people are degenerate,” he conceded. “They’ll go all in on a single play and lose money. The truth is, that’s not my fault.” Perry said that he employs a team of data analysts who pore over statistical models. One of his clients, he claimed, had made $8 million following his picks; another had made $13 million in four months.

No single bet is guaranteed, he told me. But if you stick with him over time, “it’s impossible to lose money.”

Week Nineteen
Total gambled: $22,386.00
Down $4,257.67

Upon my return from Vegas, the editor in chief asked for an update on my losses. I admitted that I was down about $4,000 but assured him, like an underwater debtor talking to his loan shark, that I was going to win it all back—the NFL playoffs were coming up. He reminded me that this was the magazine’s money I was playing with. “The future of The Atlantic depends on you,” he said. “Pick wisely.”

What I didn’t mention to him was that I was no longer gambling just on sports. I was now experimenting with prediction markets.

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.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that the casinofication of America is taking place while the Oval Office is occupied by a former casino operator. Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission opened investigations into whether Kalshi and Polymarket were flouting federal regulations. But the government scrutiny ended when Trump returned to office. Polymarket hired a former Trump adviser as its first Washington lobbyist and added the president’s son Don Jr. to its board; Kalshi also brought on Don Jr., as a “strategic adviser.” The investigations were quietly closed, and the companies began to scale up rapidly.

But the great gambling experiment that we’ve embarked on is bigger than the current president. The prediction markets represent the logical end point of the sports-betting explosion: Everything in American life—politics and culture, art and war—becomes a Las Vegas table game, tantalizing in its promise of profit, rigged against regular people, destined to demoralize and crush those who play.

In 1907, a Unitarian minister, writing in The Atlantic, warned against “speculation.” “The long and costly experience of mankind bears uniform testimony against gambling,” Charles F. Dole wrote. “It is a dangerous or unsocial form of excitement; it hurts character, demoralizes industry, breeds quarrels, tempts men to self-destruction.”

From the December 1907 issue: Charles F. Dole on the ethics of speculation

Not every consensus of the past is worth clinging to, of course. But 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?

The Super Bowl
Total gambled: $28,206.00
Down $4,787.70

Despite my assurances to the editor in chief, the playoffs did not go well. For complicated reasons involving point spreads and, possibly, divine punishment, I somehow managed to correctly pick the winner in 10 out of 12 games through the first three rounds while still losing money.

As the losses piled up, I took solace in my beloved Patriots’ improbable postseason run. I had grown up in Massachusetts at the dawn of the Brady-Belichick dynasty; now I was sharing in the joy of New England fandom with my son, who perched next to me for every game. When quarterback Drake Maye scrambled through a blizzard for a game-clinching first down in the AFC championship—my son and I jumping up from the couch in a frenzy of high fives and enraptured whoops—it felt a little like destiny.

It also felt like an opportunity: When the line opened that night for Super Bowl LX, the Patriots were 2-to-1 underdogs against the Seattle Seahawks. I had what I thought were sound analytical reasons to believe the sportsbooks were underestimating the Patriots. But I was also seduced by the allure of a big, go-for-broke win, the chance to dig out of the hole I’d dug myself into.

If I put everything I had left on the Patriots moneyline and they won, I would end the season up about $5,000. Not life-changing money, but enough to put that new KitchenAid mixer in play.

Nate Silver did not endorse this plan. My fanatical faith in the Patriots didn’t factor into his model, and he calmly walked me through the many reasons it favored the Seahawks. “You’re gambling, McKay,” he said disapprovingly.

I spent some time perusing the Cheesecake Factory–size menu of available Super Bowl bets. It turned out you could gamble on essentially every second of the event, from the length of the national anthem (the smart money was on less than 116.5 seconds for the whole song but more than 3.5 seconds for how long the singer would hold the last note on brave) to the coin toss (it had been tails eight out of the past 12 games) to the color of the Gatorade poured on the winning coach’s head (the chalk bet was yellow/lime, but red would pay out 15 to 1).

In the end, I put $4,735 on the Patriots to win the game, and spent about $700 on a smattering of long-shot parlays and prop bets that ranged from plausible to preposterous.

The Super Bowl was a disaster. After the Patriots got shut out in the first half—which I spent shouting at the TV and anxiously shoving tortilla chips into my mouth—our guests decided they needed to “get the kids to bed.” By the time Maye threw a hope-killing fourth-quarter interception, I had retreated into my phone, watching despondently as the live odds for a Patriots comeback got longer and longer until finally the TV screen filled with confetti.

As I toggled between gambling apps, my son sullenly turned off the TV and announced that he was going to bed. He was suffering the first sports-fan heartbreak of his young life; I was checking on my prop bets. The rest of my family soon followed him, leaving me to wallow alone. Before going to bed, Annie forwarded me an email from our bank alerting us that a card had been declined. Apparently, in my last frantic flurry of pre-kickoff bets, I had unwittingly overdrawn the checking account I had set up for my gambling. “The end of an era,” she wrote.

Was it? That had been the plan, of course. My adventure in sports betting was supposed to conclude with the Super Bowl, when I no longer had journalism as an excuse and my employer’s money to gamble with. But was I really going to let my grand gambling experiment end like this?

I slept poorly that night—tormented by the loss, moral dissonance, and Walmart-brand ranch dip—and woke before the sun came up. Sitting at my desk, I made a final tally of my wagers. I’d had an astonishingly bad night, even worse than I’d realized. Of my 22 Super Bowl bets, I’d won exactly two: that Patriots receiver Mack Hollins would score a touchdown, and that Ricky Martin would perform with Bad Bunny in the halftime show.

The season was over. I had lost $9,891.

Staring at that number, I thought about all the people who had placed their first-ever bets on the Super Bowl. Some 68 million Americans had been expected to gamble on the game, and 70 percent had picked the Seahawks. I knew how they were feeling this morning—the thrill of a win, the sudden appetite for more, the hubristic belief that they just might be savvy enough to make money at this.

But I also knew how easily that joyful naivete could curdle into delusion and compulsion. 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.

My family was still asleep upstairs; the gray winter light seeped through the cracks in the blinds. I thought about the advice that every addiction counselor gives to a problem gambler, and I opened my laptop. In the Google search bar, I typed the words Virginia self-exclusion form.

Aston Villa’s Emi Martinez appears to be breaching FA’s gambling rules

2026-03-06T16:41:00.005+00:00

Aston Villa goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez appears to be breaching the Football Association’s (FA) rules regarding promoting betting companies.

According to a press release from ‘bplay’, a sports betting website in his native Argentina, Martinez became a brand ambassador more than a year and a half ago.

A post on the bplay website from June 2024 introduces Martinez as an ambassador, referencing a commercial in which the 33-year-old starred. A new campaign launched in October 2025 features Martinez and his brother, Alejandro, a professional motorsport driver, wearing each other’s kit. This was to represent, according to bplay, how “sport can unite even those who travel different paths”.

World Cup winner Martinez is featured prominently on bplay’s website and social media output, with the online sporting betting and casino platform founded in 2020 and a regulated operator in Argentina.

Under FA regulations, professional footballers in England are strictly prohibited from personally promoting, advertising, or endorsing betting activity that they themselves are forbidden from engaging in.

FA rules state that “an individual participant, when acting in a personal capacity, shall not be permitted to advertise or promote any betting activity that the Participant is prohibited from engaging in by Rule E8.1, E8.2 or E8.4.” Those rules prevent players from betting in matches, leagues or competitions they are playing in or can influence.

As well as tournaments in South America and Europe, the bplay website offers odds on the Premier League, FA Cup and the Europa League, three of the four competitions Villa have featured in this season.

In 2019, former Everton defender Yerry Mina was fined £10,000 and warned as to his future conduct after appearing in a TV advert in Colombia for Colombian betting company, Betjuego.

Villa’s current front-of-shirt sponsor is Betano, a UK sports betting and gambling site. The club signed a two-year deal ahead of the 2024-25 campaign, which will end this summer. That comes ahead of new Premier League rules coming into effect, which prohibit teams from having front-of-shirt gambling sponsors from the start of the 2026-27 season.

Following Ivan Toney’s suspension for betting offences, the FA has increased education given to players on gambling rules. This includes a short eLearning course for young players within academy systems, educating them on betting rules and its guidelines. Further mandatory awareness of the rules is raised through player workshops.

Prediction market trader 'Magamyman' made $553,000 on death of Iran's supreme leader

2026-03-05T12:16:00.000+00:00

An account trading under the username "Magamyman" made more than $553,000 placing bets on the prediction market site Polymarket about Iran and its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, just before an Israeli strike killed him on Saturday.

The trades drew scrutiny from members of Congress and critics of prediction markets, who say the platforms invite people with access to classified information to profit on lethal military operations. On Polymarket alone, half-a-billion dollars was traded over when exactly U.S. forces would drop bombs on Iran.

"It's insane this is legal," Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on X. "People around Trump are profiting off war and death," he said, adding he plans to introduce legislation "asap" to outlaw this kind of activity.

The White House denied anyone in Trump's orbit was behind the lucrative trades.

The Trump family, however, does have ties to Polymarket. Donald Trump Jr., the president's son, is an adviser to Polymarket and his venture capital firm 1789 Capital has invested millions into the controversial business. The Trump administration has dropped two federal investigations into Polymarket that were opened by President Joe Biden's officials.

It's the latest episode igniting debate about how government and military insiders can monetize state secrets.

In January, an anonymous trader made hundreds of thousands of dollars for placing suspiciously well-timed bets ahead of the arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. A month later, authorities in Israel charged two people for using classified information to place bets on Polymarket about upcoming attacks on Iran when the countries fought a 12-day war last June.

The millions flowing into the market related to the toppling of Iran's supreme leader were made on an overseas exchange operated by Polymarket, meaning it is outside the reach of regulators in Washington.

The Trump administration has granted approval for Polymarket to open a U.S.-based platform, but it has yet to fully publicly launch. Most American traders who use Polymarket access the site through a virtual private network that shields a user's identity and location.

Most prediction markets, which have surged in popularity in recent months, are federally regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The agency views this new-fangled form of betting a "futures contract," not a type of gambling.

Under U.S. commodity trading laws, making trades based on death and war are illegal, since those kinds of bets create a financial reward for violence, human suffering and geopolitical instability.

This constraint was on display over the weekend in the way another major prediction market, Kalshi, responded to a market tied to when Khamenei would be out, a prospect that attracted more than $54 million in trades.

When Khamenei's death was confirmed, those who placed bets on Kalshi on the leader's ouster expected a payout, but it never happened. Instead, trading on the market was paused while the company conducted a "further review of the situation."

Later, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour wrote on X that the company would be refunding fees collected on the Khamenei market.

"We don't list markets directly tied to death," Mansour wrote. "When there are markets where potential outcomes involve death, we design the rules to prevent people from profiting from death. That is what we did here."

In messages sent out to users who placed bets before and after the Iranian leader's death, Kalshi said it will issue partial refunds amounting to the last traded price before his death was confirmed, so it did not run afoul of U.S. laws prohibiting markets where people can profit from death and assassinations.

Kalshi's decision created an uproar among traders, who felt like they had been duped.

They were all the more infuriated having watched the company heavily promote the Khamenei market for days on social media.

"Getting rugged on a 100% correct prediction because of a fine-print 'death carveout' is wild," said a user who goes by "pepe" on the online forum Discord for Kalshi traders. "Centralized oracles will always bend to compliance over reality."

Others were less generous, deriding Kalshi's actions in the Khamenei market as evidence that the platform is "a scam."

Amanda Fischer, a former official at the Securities and Exchange Commission who now works at the financial reform group Better Markets, told NPR that Congress needs to act to stop "perverse incentives and chaos caused by betting on death and destruction."

She added: "Prediction markets are promoting opportunities to bet on events that can only be seen as a proxy for war or assassination. The confusion and outcry over how the Khamenei-related wagers would resolve underscores that this betting market shouldn't exist in the first place."

Tony Bloom Accused of Secret £600 million Gambling Syndicate Tied to Football Bets

2025-12-03T16:02:00.006+00:00

In a stunning development, Tony Bloom, owner of Brighton & Hove Albion, faces serious allegations regarding his involvement in a secretive £600 million gambling syndicate. This syndicate purportedly places bets on football matches using accounts linked to notable figures, including George Cottrell, a former chief of staff to Nigel Farage.

Bloom, a billionaire businessman and seasoned gambler, has been under scrutiny following a court filing by Ryan Dudfield, a former employee of Starlizard, a betting advisory firm owned by Bloom. Dudfield claims he is owed £17.5 million in profits from the betting activities that utilized Cottrell’s offshore accounts. The documents outline that the syndicate employed “exotic accounts” on behalf of Bloom, with Cottrell acting as a high-stakes gambler, often referred to as a “whale.”

Cottrell, who has a controversial history, was sentenced to eight months in prison in 2016 for money laundering, having attempted to assist undercover agents in laundering funds through the dark web. He is currently linked to a cryptocurrency-based betting business named “tether.bet.” Although Bloom has never met Cottrell, Dudfield claims he introduced them through a Starlizard employee in 2022.

The legal claim, accepted at London’s High Court, cites that Dudfield was asked to assess the identity of individuals placing substantial bets via the tether.bet platform, suspecting Bloom’s involvement. A subsequent meeting involving Cottrell, Dudfield, and a Starlizard representative supposedly solidified a profit-sharing agreement where 60% would go to Bloom, 33% to Cottrell, and the remainder to Dudfield.

Dudfield asserts that the syndicate engaged high-profile betting accounts, including those of well-known footballers and businessmen, although it’s believed no ex-footballers are direct members of the syndicate. He detailed a series of bets suspected to be tied to Bloom’s syndicate, particularly in Premier League matches, which raises further questions given Bloom’s previous exemptions from betting on such games due to an agreement with the Football Association.

Bloom’s involvement in the betting industry has been well-documented, particularly his ownership of Starlizard, which has operated with special permissions since 2014. These permissions allow him to conduct betting activities, provided he does not wager on Brighton or any Premier League matches involving knockout competitions. Importantly, all his betting activities are reportedly audited by a reputable accounting firm and the FA yearly, and he has yet to be cited for any violations.

Despite Dudfield’s claims, it’s expected that Bloom’s legal representation will firmly deny any allegations of improperly placing bets on Premier League matches. They are poised to challenge the assertions made in Dudfield’s claim set for court next month.

Poland Set to Raise Tax on Gambling Winnings to 15% in 2026

2025-11-05T12:55:00.005+00:00

Poland is set to implement a significant change in its gambling tax structure, with plans to increase the tax on gambling winnings to 15% starting in January 2026. This adjustment will apply to both land-based and online gambling platforms, covering a wide range of activities including slot machines, card games, and lotteries.

The new tax rate will specifically target winnings that exceed 2,280 zloty, which includes payouts from jackpots and tournament prizes. The Ministry of Finance estimates that this change could generate an additional 500 million zloty annually for the government. This move aligns Poland with a broader trend observed in several European nations, where gambling taxes have been on the rise.

Key Details of the Tax Structure
> Effective Date: January 2026
> New Tax Rate: 15% on winnings over 2,280 zloty
> Types of Gambling Affected: Slot machines, card games, lotteries, and online gambling services

Despite the tax increase, promotional offers such as free spins will remain unchanged, allowing players to engage in risk-free gameplay. This aspect is particularly appealing, as research indicates that nearly half of online gamblers in Poland utilised free spins in the past year.

Impact on Players

The introduction of the 15% tax is expected to have a profound effect on the behaviour of players, particularly those who participate in high-stakes tournaments. Under the current tax regime of 10%, players retain 90% of their winnings. However, with the new tax structure, net winnings will decrease significantly. For instance, a player winning 10,000 zloty will now take home only 8,500 zloty after tax.

Poland’s gambling tax has seen several changes over the years. Since 2018, a uniform tax rate of 10% has been in place, which replaced a previous tiered system that taxed winnings above 1,000 zloty at 12%.

The Polish gambling tax revenue has shown a steady increase, rising from 1.7 billion zloty in 2020 to an estimated 2.3 billion zloty in 2024. With the new tax structure, projections suggest that revenue could exceed 2.8 billion zloty by 2026.

Hundreds of Turkish referees found to place bets, says football federation head

2025-10-27T17:16:00.002+00:00

Hundreds of referees officiating in professional leagues have been involved in betting activities, Turkish Football Federation (TFF) President İbrahim Hacıosmanoğlu has revealed in what he described as a sign of “corruption” in Turkish football.

Speaking at a press conference on Oct. 27, Hacıosmanoğlu said that an internal investigation, supported by data from state institutions, found that 371 of 571 active referees had betting accounts, while 152 were actively placing bets.

“Among them are seven top-tier referees, 15 assistant referees in the same category, 36 lower-division referees and 64 assistant referees,” he said.

According to the findings, 10 referees placed more than 10,000 bets each, with one individual wagering 18,227 times.

A total of 42 referees were found to have bet on over 1,000 football matches, while some made only a single wager.

Hacıosmanoğlu noted that the disciplinary board would immediately begin proceedings in line with federation regulations. He said the federation had also shared its findings with FIFA and UEFA, signaling that the clean-up process would continue in cooperation with international football bodies.

The president said the federation’s review began by examining not only referees but also the TFF administration itself.

“We started with the referees, including myself and my board members,” he said, calling on clubs to follow the federation’s example.

“Just as we are cleaning our own doorstep, club presidents should start with themselves, their boards and their players and share the results transparently with the public,” he said. “If not, we will continue working with the relevant state bodies and release our findings regardless.”

While sports betting is legal in Türkiye under only one state-run system, referees, players and officials are prohibited from betting on any matches. Turkish football has previously faced allegations of match-fixing and illegal betting rings, particularly in lower leagues.

Teddy Sagi’s Ambitious Move: Listing Winvia Entertainment in the UK

2025-10-27T08:00:00.002+00:00

Teddy Sagi, the multi-millionaire entrepreneur behind Playtech, is making headlines once again with his latest venture. This time, he is set to list Winvia Entertainment, a prize draw company, in the UK. Teddy Sagi is a name synonymous with success in the gaming industry. Born in 1972 in Israel, Sagi founded Playtech in 1999, which has since become one of the largest online gaming software suppliers globally.

Sagi’s journey is marked by several key milestones, including the successful IPO of Playtech on the London Stock Exchange in 2006. His ability to identify and capitalise on emerging trends has been pivotal in his career, and his latest venture with Winvia Entertainment is no exception.

The Vision Behind Winvia Entertainment

Winvia Entertainment aims to revolutionise the prize draw sector by offering a unique platform that combines entertainment with the thrill of winning. The company focuses on providing a transparent and engaging experience for users, ensuring that every participant feels valued.

Sagi’s vision for Winvia is to create a community where players can enjoy the excitement of prize draws while also having the opportunity to win substantial rewards. This aligns with the growing demand for interactive and engaging online experiences, particularly among younger audiences.

The UK has a robust regulatory framework governing online draws, which provides a level of security and trust for players. The UK Gambling Commission oversees the industry, ensuring that operators adhere to strict guidelines. This regulatory environment is conducive for new companies like Winvia, as it fosters consumer confidence and encourages responsible practices.

Winvia’s Unique Selling Proposition

Winvia Entertainment differentiates itself from traditional prize draw companies through its innovative model. The platform offers a variety of prize draws, ranging from cash prizes to luxury items, all designed to appeal to a broad audience.

Moreover, Winvia employs a transparent system that allows participants to track their entries and understand the odds of winning. This level of transparency is crucial in building trust with users the company says, especially in an industry often scrutinised for its fairness.

Community Engagement

Another key aspect of Winvia’s strategy is its focus on community engagement. The company plans to implement features that allow users to interact with one another, share experiences, and celebrate wins together. This sense of community is expected to enhance user loyalty and encourage repeat participation.

As Winvia Entertainment prepares for its listing in the UK, the company is undergoing a thorough evaluation of its operations and financials. This process is essential to ensure that it meets the stringent requirements set by the London Stock Exchange.

The listing of Winvia Entertainment is expected to have a considerable impact on the prize draw market in the UK. It will not only introduce a new player into the sector but also stimulate competition among existing operators. Looking ahead, Winvia Entertainment has ambitious plans for expansion. The company aims to diversify its offerings and explore international markets.

Inside info on LeBron James’ health part of NBA gambling charges

2025-10-27T00:30:00.001+00:00

Ex-player Damon Jones allegedly shared inside information about the health of James with gamblers seeking to profit.

Shortly after the first tip of the NBA regular season, a federal probe of illegal gambling rocked the sport on Thursday morning, including allegations that inside information about LeBron James was used for illicit profit.

Federal authorities arrested Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier early Thursday as part of a multi-year sports betting investigation. Rozier, a veteran guard, did not play in Wednesday’s Heat-Magic opener due to a coach’s decision.

Rozier’s arrest came after authorities probed an uptick in suspicious activity related to his performance in a March 2023 game against New Orleans. Then a member of the Charlotte Hornets, Rozier left the game prematurely with an apparent foot injury.

Separately, authorities also arrested Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups in Oregon. Billups’ arrest is tied to alleged involvement in an illegal poker game operated by organised crime figures. The investigation into the illegal poker games ensnared several members of New York criminal groups, including the infamous La Cosa Nostra network.

In total, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn indicted 31 defendants on Thursday across 11 states. The indictments centred on two major operations: an enterprise to rig illicit poker games at various locations throughout the nation and a sports betting scheme that allegedly used material non-public information to benefit from Rozier’s statistical outcomes.
How LeBron James is referenced in gambling case

A third NBA figure, former guard Damon Jones, was named in indictments connected to both the sports betting and poker investigations.

Jones, a former Cleveland Cavaliers teammate of James who remained close to him afterwards, allegedly attempted to profit from inside information about the NBA star in 2023. According to the indictment, Jones had knowledge that James was suffering from an injury and might not play for the Los Angeles Lakers in an upcoming game. That game took place in February 2023, two days after James broke the NBA all-time scoring record.

Joseph Nocella, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, stated at a Brooklyn news conference that several defendants turned professional basketball into a “criminal betting operation” by using private locker room and medical information to “cheat legitimate sportsbooks”.
Gambling allegations against Rozier do not involve James

Before Rozier signed a multi-year contract with the Heat, he played just 10 minutes in the aforementioned game against the Pelicans on 23 March 2023. At least six sportsbooks in multiple states flagged suspicious activity related to Rozier’s performance, ESPN reported.

One sportsbook took 30 bets in a period of 46 minutes, all of which resulted in wins for the bettor. While the NBA conducted an investigation of the activity, the league did not determine at the time that league betting rules were violated.

Prior to the game, Deniro Laster, another defendant, sold information on Rozier’s plan to leave the game early to multiple co-conspirators, prosecutors stated. Rozier, a close friend of Laster, has known the defendant since childhood, according to the indictment.

Before the game started, Rozier informed Laster of his plans to leave the game prematurely in the first quarter due to a “supposed” injury, prosecutors allege. Based on the information provided by Rozier, the defendants wagered “more than $200,000 on his under statistics”, according to New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

The information was allegedly transmitted to Marves Fairley, another defendant in the case. Fairley, a professional sports betting tout, has been mentioned previously in various media reports for his alleged involvement in the federal sports betting investigation. In exchange for the information, Fairley and another co-conspirator agreed to pay Laster approximately $100,000 from their expected fraudulent gambling winnings, according to the indictment.

“As the NBA tips off, [Rozier’s] career is already benched, not for injury, but for integrity,” Tisch stated.
Patel not mincing words on gravity of allegations

Around 29 March 2023, Fairley allegedly gave Laster tens of thousands of dollars in cash in exchange for the tip on Rozier, according to the indictment. From there, Laster apparently drove from Philadelphia to North Carolina for a meeting with Rozier at his Charlotte home. During the early morning hours of 1 April 2023, the two counted the money that Laster obtained from Fairley, prosecutors allege.

“Let’s not mince words, this is the insider trading saga for the NBA,” said FBI Director Kash Patel at the news conference.

Rozier is not alleged to have any relation to the gambling allegations that involve information about the health of LeBron James.

Jim Trusty, Rozier’s attorney, told USA Today Sports on Thursday that investigators previously told Rozier that he was a “subject, not a target” of the probe.

“Terry is not a gambler, but he is not afraid of a fight, and he looks forward to winning this fight,” Trusty wrote in a statement.
Poker investigation of Billups separate from betting

Billups, a five-time All-Star as a player who was the 2004 NBA Finals MVP, is facing charges of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy in connection with his arrest. The charges centre on his participation in an April 2019 poker game that prosecutors alleged was rigged.

In an attempt to attract unsuspecting victims into the rigged game, Billups and Jones acted as so-called “face cards” by using their celebrity status to bring players to the table, according to the indictments. The pair each received a portion of the ill-gotten proceeds for their participation in the scheme, prosecutors stated.

Four other defendants – Robert Stroud, Eric Earnest, Jamie Gilet and Sophia Wei – organised and participated in the rigged Las Vegas poker game, according to the indictment. As part of the scheme, the defendants defrauded the victims of at least $50,000. Stroud allegedly supplied a rigged shuffling machine that was used in the game.
NBA statement on gambling scandal

Thursday’s arrests come one day after NBA Commissioner Adam Silver called for enhanced regulation of sports betting. During an appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show” on ESPN, Silver advocated for restrictions on player props involving reserve players off the bench.

“We’ve asked some of our partners to pull back some of the prop bets, especially when they’re on two-way players, guys who don’t have the same stake in the competition, where it’s too easy to manipulate something, which seems otherwise small and inconsequential to the overall score,” Silver said. “We’re trying to put in place – learning as we go and working with the betting companies – some additional control to prevent some of that manipulation.”

Shortly after Thursday’s news conference in Brooklyn, the NBA issued a statement on the arrests. The league placed Billups and Rozier on immediate leave. The NBA has cooperated with federal authorities on the comprehensive probe.

“We are in the process of reviewing the federal indictments announced today,” the league said in the statement. “We will continue to cooperate with the relevant authorities, we take these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority.”

Last week, ESPN reported that the FBI has interviewed college athletes regarding an ongoing probe into suspicious betting activity in college basketball. ESPN cited documents that linked Fairley to a pattern of irregular activity on first-half college wagers. When reached by ESPN, Fairley denied the allegations. Nocella noted on Thursday that his office’s investigation does not pertain to college hoops.
Ongoing investigation involving Porter

Well prior to Thursday’s indictments, former Toronto Raptors centre Jontay Porter was convicted on federal wire fraud charges related to illicit sports betting and is scheduled to be sentenced in December. Porter conspired with a gambling syndicate to defraud a sports betting company by deliberately underperforming on a bevy of statistical categories in a March 2024 game.

The NBA later banned Porter for life. At least two of Porter’s co-conspirators, Ammar Awawdeh and Shane Hennen, were named in Thursday’s indictments. The investigation is ongoing, Nocella stressed.

Four Mafia organised crime groups, the Lucchese, Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese families, played a role in the poker scheme, federal officials said Thursday. In using sophisticated manipulation technology, the Mafia-backed poker scheme defrauded individuals of at least $7 million, according to prosecutors.

“The FBI will never turn a blind eye to any insider betting scheme within sporting industries – regardless of title or professional affiliation – to protect its integrity,” said Christopher Raia, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office.

Denmark passes extensive restrictions package including on live sports ads and FTP bonuses

2025-10-26T19:05:00.001+00:00

The ban on gambling ads during live sports broadcasts will start 10 minutes before games kick off and finish 10 minutes after they end.

The Denmark government has reached an agreement to ban gambling ads during live sports broadcasts and introduced a host of other marketing restrictions for the sector.

The measures are expected to be implemented no later than 1 January 2027.

On Friday, the Danish parliament passed its ‘Gaming Package 1’, aimed at preventing gambling addiction and strengthening the protection of children against gambling harms.

The package will introduce a whistle-to-whistle ban on gambling ads during live sports broadcasts, starting 10 minutes before the event and ending 10 minutes after the games conclude.

This will include bans on live odds being displayed across banners in stadiums and a restriction on the use of celebrities and influencers in gambling ads.

Package prohibits gambling ads near schools

Additionally, the package prohibits the use of “free money games” as welcome bonuses.

Gambling ads on public transport and within 200 metres of schools or other educational institutions will also be prohibited under new rules, while persons aged under 25 will not be allowed to feature in any gambling marketing.

Denmark’s Gambling Act will be amended to mandate age filters on social media ads to ensure content isn’t targeted at those aged under 18, while gambling addiction treatment centres will receive an additional DKK8 million ($1.2 million) in funding next year.

These centres will receive further funding of DKK3 million in 2027, DKK5 million in 2028, DKK2 million in 2029 and DKK3 million in 2030.

Denmark’s Tax Minister Ane Halsboe-Jørgensen said the measures should prove effective in curbing gambling addiction in the country.

“With Gaming Package 1: A More Responsible Gaming Market, the government, together with a broad majority in the Danish parliament, is taking an important step towards a more responsible gaming market,” Halsboe-Jørgensen said.

“The work does not stop here.”
Government’s ‘showdown’ with Danish gambling sector

Upon revealing the package of restrictions, the government said Denmark had faced issues with rising gambling addiction in the country.

It claimed nearly 500,000 Danish adults had experienced some extent of gambling problems in 2021, a figure that has doubled since 2016, with almost 30,000 experiencing serious gambling problems.

The government also stated 25,000 Danish children and young people have experienced some degree of gambling harm, with 2,600 having a serious gambling problem.

Halsboe-Jørgensen explained the agreement marked a shift in mentality in Denmark, with closer attention paid to restricting the gambling sector and the harms that can come from it.

“This is the beginning of a showdown with a gaming industry that has been allowed to take up too much space for far too long, so that entertainment does not turn into addiction,” Halsboe-Jørgensen said.

“This requires both responsible providers, stronger rules and a sustained political effort.”
Denmark regulator to be strengthened

The agreement will also seek to further empower Spillemyndigheden, the country’s gambling regulator.

Spillemyndigheden will be given the authority to block illegal gambling sites, with clearer principles and criteria for calculating fines and sanctions.

Certain administrative burdens will also be eased, such as the need for gaming providers to send a copy of decisions on closing gambling accounts to Spillemyndigheden.
Denmark gambling revenue on the increase

In August, Denmark achieved gambling revenue of DKK714 million, both a year-on-year and month-on-month increase.

Denmark’s sports betting and iGaming markets both posted double-digit growth when compared to the same month last year.

The nation’s self-exclusion scheme ROFUS reached 63,488 users by the end of August, with 41,362 of those having permanently excluded themselves from gambling.

Feds reveal mafia-linked gambling probe that led to arrests of Hall of Famer Chauncey Billups and NBA star Terry Rozier

2025-10-26T14:30:00.001+00:00

Winning is typically a good thing for the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers.

But six years ago, the scammers allegedly using Chauncey Billups as part of a sprawling criminal scheme to lure unsuspecting poker players to rigged tables believed he was winning far too much.

Billups was a “Face Card,” prosecutors said, a high-profile person who could help attract big-fish gamblers to ritzy card games in Manhattan, Las Vegas, Miami and the Hamptons. Billups, aided by equipment like a manipulated shuffling machine and an X-ray table, played on the “Cheating Team.”

In the middle of a game in Vegas in April 2019, the orchestrators of the plot realized they had a problem: Billups was winning too many improbable hands. The streak would surely draw suspicion, they said in text messages included in court documents unsealed Thursday. Billups needed to do something very few professional athletes enjoy: lose on purpose. That’s the only way the criminal enterprise could keep raking in cash.

It ultimately netted more than $7 million over six years.

Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and dozens of others were charged Thursday as part of two sweeping investigations: one into illegal sports gambling and the other into poker rigging schemes allegedly backed by the Mafia.

The extraordinary federal takedown led to the arrests of more than 30 people across 11 states on charges including wire fraud, money laundering, extortion, robbery and illegal gambling, FBI Director Kash Patel said at a news conference.

“The fraud is mind-boggling,” Patel told reporters, referring to the alleged wrongdoing as a “criminal enterprise that envelops both the NBA and La Cosa Nostra.” He said the schemes involved “tens of millions of dollars” in ill-gotten gains.

The web of alleged criminal activity was laid out in two federal indictments that read like plot summaries for Martin Scorsese crime epics. Officials say key roles were played in one case by members of the notorious Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese crime “families” — as well as defendants with nicknames like “The Wrestler,” “Juice,” “Big Bruce” and “Pookie.”

The indictments threaten to create a reputational headache for both the NBA, one of the marquee professional sports leagues in the country, and the booming but increasingly scrutinized sports gambling industry. In a statement, the NBA said Billups and Rozier would be placed on “immediate leave.”

In the first case, dubbed “Operation Nothing But Bet” by federal agents, prosecutors accuse six defendants of participating in an insider sports betting scheme that “exploited confidential information” about basketball players and teams, U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. of the Eastern District of New York told reporters at the news conference.

Nocella called that alleged conspiracy “one of the most brazen sports corruption schemes since online sports betting became widely legalized in the United States.”

Rozier was charged in that indictment. The former Charlotte Hornets player was arrested Thursday morning in Orlando, Florida, and he appeared in the city’s federal courthouse later Thursday. The indictment says he was also known by the nicknames “Scary Terry” and “Chum.”

In the second case, dubbed “Operation Royal Flush,” prosecutors accuse 31 defendants of a plot to rig underground poker games. The suspects allegedly used high-tech cheating gadgets to steal millions of dollars from games backed by four of the “Five Families” that have long ruled organized crime in the New York area.

The high-tech equipment described by Nocella included poker chip trays that secretly read cards with a hidden camera, special contact lenses that can read pre-marked cards and an X-ray table that can read cards facing down.

Billups was charged in that indictment, along with former NBA player Damon Jones.

It was not immediately clear where Billups was arrested, but he appeared Thursday in court in Portland, Oregon, where he lives. He was released on conditions that include travel restrictions, no gambling activity, a no contact order and standard conditions regarding firearms, according to NBC affiliate KGW. Billups coached the Blazers on Wednesday night in Portland.

Jones was arrested in Las Vegas. It was not immediately clear whether Jones had an attorney; calls and text messages to a phone number believed to belong to him were not returned.

“Your winning streak has ended,” Nocella said at the news conference, addressing the defendants in the “Royal Flush” case and appearing to enjoy the wordplay. “Your luck has run out. Violating the law is a losing proposition, and you can bet on that.”

Three of the defendants were allegedly involved in both cases, according to Christopher Raia, assistant director in charge of the FBI’’s New York field office.

The betting ring

The Charlotte Hornets were preparing to face off against the New Orleans Pelicans on March 23, 2023, and Terry Rozier had a plan. Rozier, at the time a starter for the Hornets, told Deniro Laster, a childhood friend, that he was going to “prematurely remove himself from the game in the first quarter due to a supposed injury and not return to play further,” prosecutors say.

Laster turned around and sold the tip about Rozier’s intentions to other defendants and co-conspirators, giving them a chance to “place fraudulent wagers based on the non-public information,” prosecutors say. Rozier was true to his word, they said, playing roughly nine minutes and 34 seconds before taking himself out of the game. The bets raked in thousands of dollars.

In their indictment, prosecutors accuse Rozier, Laster and four other defendants of participating in a “scheme to defraud” betting companies by “providing, obtaining and using non-public information relating to NBA games to place and cause others to place fraudulent sports wagers for profit, and to launder the proceeds thereof.”

The defendants and some of their co-conspirators had “access to private information known by NBA players or NBA coaches” that was likely to affect the outcomes of upcoming league games or certain players’ performances on the court, prosecutors said. Rozier’s choreographed exit from the Hornets’ March 2023 game against the Pelicans was just one example of that information-sharing system at work, they said.

Jones allegedly sold information on a prominent NBA player’s injury to bettors while he was an unofficial assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers in February 2023. He is said to have texted a co-conspirator that a certain player would be out when the Lakers faced the Milwaukee Bucks on Feb. 9, 2023. “Get a big bet on Milwaukee tonight before the information is out,” Jones said, according to the indictment.

When the game started that night, fans and viewers learned Lebron James was out with a sore left ankle and foot, according to a game recap from the time.

The poker games

The dozens of men (and one woman) accused of rigging poker games across the country over the last half-decade can’t be accused of using low-tech methods.

The defendants are said to have used “Rigged Shuffling Machines” that were secretly altered to read the cards in a deck, predict which player at the table had the best hand and relay that valuable information via interstate wires to an off-site operator. The operator then communicated that information by cellphone to one of the cheaters, referred to as the “Quarterback” or the “Driver,” who used “secret signaling” with other scammers at the table.

But that wasn’t the extent of the cheating system, according to prosecutors. The orchestrators also used electronic poker chip trays that could secretly read cards placed on the table, card analyzers with decoy cellphones that could surreptitiously detect which cards were on the table and playing cards with markers visible only to players wearing specifically designed contact lenses or sunglasses.

All that was in the service of what prosecutors characterized as a “complex fraud scheme to rig, or cheat at, illegal poker games in the Eastern District of New York and throughout the United States,” beginning in at least 2019. The suspects allegedly rigged card games at otherwise “straight tables” at locations across New York City, as well as Las Vegas, Miami and the Hamptons.

The defendants did that with the help of organized crime families, who “provided support and protection for the games and collected owed debts from the games in exchange for a portion of the illegal gambling proceeds,” according to the indictment. The victims, who were defrauded out of millions of dollars, had no idea they were playing against cheaters, it says.

Meanwhile, “members and associates of the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese Crime Families used threats and intimidation to assure payment of debts from the Rigged Games and the ‘square’ illegal poker games organized” by the defendants, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors estimate that the defendants caused losses to victims totaling at least $7 million.

The players

Rozier’s attorney said in a statement that he had “reached out to these prosecutors to tell them we should have an open line of communication.”

“They characterized Terry as a subject, not a target, but at 6 a.m. this morning they called to tell me FBI agents were trying to arrest him in a hotel,” said the lawyer, Jim Trusty. “It is unfortunate that instead of allowing him to self-surrender, they opted for a photo-op.”

“They wanted the misplaced glory of embarrassing a professional athlete with a perp walk. That tells you a lot about the motivations in this case,” Trust added. “They appear to be taking the word of spectacularly in-credible sources rather than relying on actual evidence of wrongdoing. Terry was cleared by the NBA, and these prosecutors revived that non-case. Terry is not a gambler, but he is not afraid of a fight, and he looks forward to winning this fight.”

Billups' attorney, Chris Heywood, said Billups will fight the charges and is not guilty of any wrongdoing. "Anyone who knows Chauncey Billups knows he is a man of integrity; men of integrity do not cheat and defraud others," Heywood said.

"To believe that Chauncey Billups did what the federal government is accusing him of is to believe that he would risk his hall-of-fame legacy, his reputation, and his freedom. He would not jeopardize those things for anything, let alone a card game," Heywood said.

"Furthermore, Chauncey Billups has never and would never gamble on basketball games, provide insider information, or sacrifice the trust of his team and the League, as it would tarnish the game he has devoted his entire life to," Heywood added.

The Miami Heat did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In a statement, the NBA said it was in the “process of reviewing the federal indictments announced today. Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups are being placed on immediate leave from their teams, and we will continue to cooperate with the relevant authorities. We take these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority.”

The Blazers said that the team was cooperating with the investigation and that Tiago Splitter will be the interim head coach.

Rozier, an Ohio native and 10-year NBA veteran, was picked 16th overall by the Boston Celtics in the 2015 NBA draft after having played college basketball for the Louisville Cardinals.

Billups has coached since 2021, following a widely lauded 17-season playing career that culminated in the sport’s highest honor: enshrinement in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame last year.

He entered the NBA in 1997 as the third overall draft pick. By 2004, his clutch baskets and on-court leadership were vital to Detroit’s NBA championship over the Lakers. The title run earned him the nickname “Mr. Big Shot” and the honor of being named the NBA Finals MVP, and it transformed his career. From 2006 to 2010, Billups was voted an All-Star five times.

After he retired in 2014, Billups worked as an NBA analyst for ESPN. After one season as an assistant coach with the Los Angeles Clippers, he was hired by the Portland Trail Blazers in 2021.

Thursday’s high-profile arrests come four months after another NBA star, Gilbert Arenas, was arrested and indicted after the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California alleged he was involved in helping operate illegal, high-stakes poker games out of a Los Angeles-area home he owned. Arenas has pleaded not guilty.

Investigations into gambling have extended to active NBA players in recent seasons, as well. Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors pleaded guilty in federal court and was banned by the NBA for life last year for violating the league’s sports gambling rules, with the league alleging that he had bet on NBA games and disclosed confidential information about his own participation to bettors. He is set to be sentenced in December.

Unibet Owner Fined £10 Million Over AML Failings

2025-10-26T14:04:00.002+00:00

The UK Gambling Commission has just announced a £10 million fine to Platinum Gaming Limited, see below for full announcement:

A gambling business will pay a £10 million penalty after a Gambling Commission investigation revealed Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and social responsibility failings.

Platinum Gaming Limited – which operates unibet.co.uk and uk.bingo.com – will also receive a warning and have to undergo a third-party audit to ensure it is effectively implementing its anti-money laundering and safer gambling policies, procedures and controls.

Social responsibility failures included:

- employing a customer interaction system which failed to identify a player as at risk of harm despite the player losing £5,000 within 24 hours of registration and going on to lose more than £16,000 in less than three months.
- not interacting with a consumer who lost over £31,000 within nine months, hit their monthly loss limit on six occasions, and demonstrated markers of harm associated with high velocity gambling.
- not identifying a consumer who exceeded their £2,500 loss limit within 16 minutes of registering their account as potentially being at risk of harm. The operator also failed to identify binge gambling.
- not interacting with a customer during a 23-day period in which they staked £73,000 and lost £4,100.

Anti-money laundering failures included:

- the Licensee’s money laundering/terrorist financing risk assessment failed to take into account customers whose account(s) had been closed by the Licensee due to money laundering or terrorist funding concerns prior to 2023. This enabled some customers whose accounts had been blocked to open new accounts and gamble.
- the AML policy in place at the time lacked clarity around the level of customer due-diligence and enhanced customer due-diligence measures conducted and how this was determined by the level of risk displayed by a customer.
- despite being covered in the Licensee’s risk assessment, there was no evidence that potential high-risk factors such as high-risk occupation, high levels of transactions through deposits and withdrawals and a high level of loss, had been considered when customer reviews were undertaken.

This is the second occasion Platinum Gaming have faced enforcement action – in 2023 they were fined £2.9m for social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures.

John Pierce, Commission Director of Enforcement, said: “While industry wide progress has been made in reducing unchecked high spending, the failings at Platinum Gaming are particularly disappointing. The case revealed serious shortcomings in customer interaction systems, including failures to identify and act on clear markers of harm. These included consumers losing thousands within hours or days of registration, repeatedly breaching loss limits, and exhibiting patterns of binge and high-velocity gambling without appropriate intervention.

“Significant anti-money laundering failures were also identified. These included gaps in the licensee’s risk assessment, which failed to account for previously blocked accounts linked to money laundering concerns, and a lack of clarity in the AML policy around due diligence thresholds. Customer reviews did not consistently consider high-risk factors, despite these being outlined in the licensee’s own framework.”

He continued: “Alongside the £10 million financial penalty this operator is required to conduct a follow-up independent audit and internal investigation – providing regular updates to the Commission. These added conditions are designed to drive meaningful change, reinforce accountability, and embed a culture of compliance.

“Senior leaders must take ownership of compliance outcomes and ensure lessons are embedded across the organisation, supported by structured reporting and board level oversight – and further regulatory activity will remain a possibility.”

Paddy Power Plans To Close 57 Betting Shops

2025-10-16T14:33:00.003+01:00

The high street betting business is facing another significant shake-up as Paddy Power, has announced plans to close 57 of its betting shops. The decision, which affects nearly 250 jobs, has raised concerns about the future of retail betting in the UK and Ireland.

On October 14, Paddy Power’s parent company, Flutter Entertainment, confirmed the closure of 57 shops, which constitutes approximately 10% of its total estate of 608 betting outlets across the UK and Ireland.

Job Losses and Economic Impact

The impending closures will put around 250 jobs at risk, a significant concern for the affected employees and their families. The announcement comes at a time when the high street is already grappling with numerous challenges, including changing consumer habits and increased competition from online betting platforms.

Flutter Entertainment has stated that while the closures are not directly linked to the upcoming Autumn Budget, the potential for increased gambling taxes could further strain the industry. The company has expressed concerns that higher taxes may lead to job losses and reduced investment in the sector, ultimately pushing customers towards unregulated operators.

Betting Shop Closures

The announcement from Paddy Power is not an isolated incident. The betting industry has seen a dramatic decline in the number of retail outlets over the past decade. According to recent statistics, the total number of betting shops in the UK and Ireland has decreased by a third since 2017, falling from nearly 10,000 to just over 6,600.

Several factors contribute to this decline:

- Increased Online Competition: The rise of online betting platforms has significantly altered consumer behaviour, with many punters opting for the convenience of betting from home.
- Regulatory Changes: Stricter regulations and potential tax hikes have created an uncertain environment for betting operators, leading to a reassessment of their retail strategies.
- Changing Consumer Preferences: Younger generations are increasingly favouring digital experiences over traditional retail, prompting many companies to adapt their business models accordingly.

Flutter Entertainment’s Strategy Moving Forward

Despite the closures, Flutter Entertainment remains committed to its high street presence. A spokesperson for the company stated that they are continually reviewing their retail estate to ensure it meets the evolving needs of customers. The company aims to innovate and invest in areas that align with changing consumer trends.

Flutter has indicated that it will explore new ways to engage customers, potentially through enhanced in-store experiences or technology integration. This approach aims to attract foot traffic and retain customers who may otherwise turn to online alternatives.

The upcoming Autumn Budget, set to be announced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, is expected to address the taxation of gambling operators, the fear is that a large tax hike would affect gambling operators to close more betting shops as a consequence.

There is growing pressure from various political factions to increase taxes on betting companies, with some Labour MPs advocating for rates as high as 50%. While the government argues that gambling companies should contribute their “fair share” to the economy, industry leaders warn that excessive taxation could have detrimental effects on jobs and investment especially on betting shops.

Flutter Faces New Court Case In Australia Over Sportsbet

2025-10-13T10:54:00.009+01:00

The Australian gambling landscape is currently under intense scrutiny, with a new court case involving Flutter Entertainment’s Sportsbet. This legal battle, spearheaded by Kym Cavigan, a resident of Victoria, has raised critical questions about the responsibilities of gambling operators.

Kym Cavigan has initiated legal proceedings against Sportsbet, claiming that the company failed to prevent the use of stolen funds for gambling activities. The case stems from a scandal involving Andrew Marshall, an accountant who misappropriated approximately AU$280,000 from his clients, including Cavigan. Although Marshall has admitted guilt, Cavigan argues that Sportsbet had a duty to implement robust measures to verify the source of funds deposited by users.

This lawsuit highlights significant concerns regarding Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations within the Australian gambling sector. While Marshall’s actions did not constitute money laundering, the case underscores the necessity for gambling operators to conduct thorough checks on the origins of funds. The scrutiny surrounding Sportsbet is not isolated; earlier this year, Entain faced investigation for allegedly failing to meet AML requirements.

The ongoing legal challenges are occurring against a backdrop of increasing political pressure for reform in Australia’s gambling laws. It has been two years since the Murphy Report, which outlined 31 recommendations aimed at overhauling gambling regulations in the country. These recommendations included the establishment of a national gambling regulator, restrictions on advertising, and enhanced player protection measures.

Members of Parliament (MPs) are expressing growing impatience with the government’s slow response to the recommendations outlined in the Murphy Report. A particular focus has been placed on the Northern Territory Racing and Wagering Commission (NTRWC), which is often viewed as the de facto national regulator for online gambling in Australia. Critics argue that the NTRWC’s close ties to the industry, including accepting hospitality gifts, compromise its ability to regulate effectively.

The public sentiment surrounding gambling regulation is increasingly vocal. Independent MP Andrew Wilkie has taken to social media to voice his frustration, stating that the government has ignored the Murphy Report and obstructed efforts to hold gambling companies accountable. His comments resonate with a broader community concern regarding the impact of gambling on Australian society.

Recent statistics from the Australian Gambling Research Centre (AGRC) reveal that a staggering 65.1% of Australians engaged in gambling activities in the year leading up to October 2024. While lotteries accounted for a significant portion of this figure, the rise of online gambling has raised alarms about the associated risks, including increased gambling frequency and psychological distress.

As calls for reform intensify, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese faces mounting pressure to act on the Murphy Report’s recommendations. However, he has shown reluctance to pursue certain measures, particularly a blanket ban on gambling advertising. This hesitance is believed to stem from a desire to avoid conflict with betting and media companies ahead of upcoming elections.

Despite the current challenges, there is a sense that reform may be on the horizon for Australia’s gambling industry. The market, valued at an estimated AU$244 billion, continues to attract new entrants, including companies like XBet and NextBet. The competitive landscape is further complicated by a bidding war between local brand Betr and Japanese tech firm MIXI for PointsBet.

Entain Decides to Close the TAB Racing Club

2025-10-02T14:59:00.001+01:00

Entain has announced the closure of its TAB Racing Club in New Zealand, the decision marks a new strategy, focusing on its core wagering business and ensuring long-term sustainability. The TAB Racing Club, which was launched just a year ago, has garnered a membership of approximately 18,000 participants. However, the operational costs associated with the club, estimated at NZ$2.5 million annually, have been deemed unsustainable in light of Entain’s strategic priorities. The TAB Racing Club was introduced in 2024 as an innovative initiative aimed at enhancing customer engagement through exclusive racing experiences. Members enjoyed unique access to racing events, fostering a sense of community among racing enthusiasts. Despite its initial success in attracting a substantial membership base, the financial viability of the club has come under scrutiny. Entain’s decision to wind down the TAB Racing Club is primarily driven by financial considerations. The annual operating costs, which amounted to NZ$2.5 million, were increasingly viewed as a burden that could not be justified against the backdrop of the company’s broader strategic goals. Chief Executive Andrew Vouris described the closure as a “disciplined and responsible” move, emphasising the need to streamline operations and focus on areas that promise better returns. Despite the closure of the TAB Racing Club, Entain remains committed to the New Zealand racing industry. The company has reaffirmed its dedication through its longstanding partnership with TAB New Zealand, which spans over 25 years. This partnership continues to provide significant funding to the racing sector, ensuring that the industry remains robust and sustainable. The TAB Racing Club was introduced in 2024 as an innovative initiative aimed at enhancing customer engagement through exclusive racing experiences. Members enjoyed unique access to racing events, fostering a sense of community among racing enthusiasts. Despite its initial success in attracting a substantial membership base, the financial viability of the club has come under scrutiny. Entain’s decision to wind down the TAB Racing Club is primarily driven by financial considerations. The annual operating costs, which amounted to NZ$2.5 million, were increasingly viewed as a burden that could not be justified against the backdrop of the company’s broader strategic goals. Chief Executive Andrew Vouris described the closure as a “disciplined and responsible” move, emphasising the need to streamline operations and focus on areas that promise better returns. Despite the closure of the TAB Racing Club, Entain remains committed to the New Zealand racing industry. The company has reaffirmed its dedication through its longstanding partnership with TAB New Zealand, which spans over 25 years. This partnership continues to provide significant funding to the racing sector, ensuring that the industry remains robust and sustainable. Entain has pledged to honour all existing Racing Club experiences until the conclusion of New Zealand Cup Week in Christchurch this November. This commitment reflects the company’s intention to ensure a smooth transition for its members, who have invested time and resources into the club. As part of the winding down process, Entain has initiated a formal procedure to sell the club’s horses. This process involves independent appraisals to ensure that animal welfare is prioritised during the transition to new owners. The company aims to maintain a responsible approach throughout this process, reflecting its commitment to ethical practices in the racing industry. With the closure of the TAB Racing Club, Entain is realigning its focus towards its core wagering business. This strategic shift is designed to enhance operational efficiency and drive returns to the racing industry. By concentrating resources on its primary betting operations, Entain aims to improve customer experiences and innovate its product offerings. Entain’s commitment to enhancing customer experience remains central to its operations. The company says it is dedicated to providing a seamless betting experience, leveraging technology and data analytics to better understand customer preferences. This focus on customer-centricity is expected to drive engagement and loyalty in an increasingly competitive market. The closure of the TAB Racing Club provided a unique platform for engagement, its dissolution may lead to a gap in community-driven initiatives. However, Entain’s ongoing support for TAB New Zealand and its commitment to funding the racing industry are expected to mitigate some of these concerns. Entain’s decision reflects broader trends within the gaming industry, where companies are increasingly scrutinising the financial viability of their initiatives. Operators are compelled to make strategic decisions that prioritise sustainability and profitability. This trend underscores the importance of aligning business operations with long-term goals.

France’s Gambling Revenue Grows by 3.5%

2025-10-02T12:59:00.008+01:00

Gambling in France has shown a promising upward trend, with gross gaming revenue (GGR) rising by 3.5% year-on-year in the first half of 2025. The increase, amounting to €5.7 billion (approximately $6.7 billion), has been significantly influenced by the robust performance of the online sports betting sector. The national regulatory body, l’Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), reported that this figure surpassed the €5.5 billion recorded during the same period last year, excluding revenues from land-based casinos and gaming clubs, which were reported separately.

The online gambling sector has been a key driver of this growth, particularly in sports betting, which saw a remarkable 10% increase in revenue, reaching €961 million. This surge was supported by a 15% rise in stakes, totalling €6 billion. Notably, the number of unique player accounts also rose by 10% during this period.

Interestingly, this growth occurred despite the absence of major global sporting events in the first half of the year. In contrast, the same period in 2024 featured the early stages of the Euro 2024 football tournament, which likely contributed to higher betting volumes. Football continues to dominate the betting landscape in France, accounting for 52% of all online wagers, followed by tennis at 26%, basketball at 9%, and rugby at 2%. The remaining 11% of bets were placed on various other sports.

While online sports betting did very well, other segments of the online gambling market did not fare as well. Internet poker revenue experienced a decline of 4%, totalling €246 million. Cash game poker revenue was particularly hard hit, dropping by 15% to €47 million, although other formats remained stable. This overall decline in poker revenue occurred despite a 10% increase in unique players, which the ANJ attributed to effective cross-selling strategies.

In the realm of online horse racing, revenue remained flat at €174 million, with stakes increasing by a modest 1% to €795 million. However, the growth rate was slower compared to the previous two years, and the number of unique online horse racing players fell by 3% year-on-year.

The ANJ also released separate figures for La Française des Jeux (FDJ), which completed its acquisition of Kindred Group in October 2024. This acquisition significantly boosted FDJ’s revenue, which rose by 19% in the first half of 2025, reaching €4.4 billion. Sports betting remained the primary revenue source for FDJ, generating €3.5 billion, a 4% increase from the previous year.

The impact of the Kindred acquisition was particularly pronounced in the online betting and gaming segment, which skyrocketed by 458% to €703 million. However, international lottery revenue for FDJ saw a decline of 9%, amounting to €168 million during the same period.

The ANJ also provided insights into the performance of Pari Mutuel Urbain (PMU), which reported revenue of over €830 million in the first half of 2025. This figure represented a 2.6% decrease compared to the same period in 2024. PMU faced challenges in the first quarter, with revenue dropping by 4% and stakes declining by 5.5%. Although there was a slight recovery in the second quarter, revenue remained down by 1.3%, and wagers decreased by 3%.

North Macedonia moves ahead with unloved Gambling Law

2025-08-11T14:49:00.004+01:00

North Macedonian ministers and political parties are preparing for a parliamentary battle over the terms and adoption of a new Gambling Law.

Changes will radically reshape the sector, introducing long restrictions sought by Prime Minister Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova but drawing fierce opposition from industry groups and opposition parties warning of an ‘economic fallout’ for Europe’s youngest economy.

Last year, the newly empowered ‘nationalist coalition’, led by Davkova following her election in 2024, pledged to overhaul the Gambling Act as part of a broader anti-corruption and EU accession strategy. For the nationalist coalition, gambling reform is positioned as both a public health imperative and a political statement on transparency.

The draft legislation, approved by the cabinet in July and presented to the National Congress by Deputy Prime Minister Izet Mejhiti, is billed as a decisive step to curb the influence of the so-called “gambling mafia,” protect minors, and tighten market oversight.

Key provisions include relocating casinos, slot machine clubs, and betting shops with gambling machines at least 500 metres from schools, banning gambling advertising, raising operator taxes and fees, and ending the practice of opening unlimited outlets under a single licence.

Supporters argue the reforms could cut gambling’s physical presence by as much as 70%, reduce youth exposure, and consolidate regulatory control in a market that has expanded steadily for over a decade.

Of significance to stakeholders, North Macedonia’s gambling sector is the country’s largest private-sector employer and hosts over 1,000 land-based venues—casinos, gaming halls, and sportsbooks — operating under a relatively accessible licensing regime with moderate fees. Between 2018 and 2022, state revenue from gambling rose from around €61m to €88m.

Yet the proposal has triggered a sharp backlash from industry associations, including ASOM and APIS, who warn of severe economic fallout. Critics say the bill embeds loopholes that allow certain betting shops to remain near schools, institutionalises exemptions for favoured operators, and most controversially creates a state monopoly over online gambling – viewed as a direct competition block against licensed businesses.

4H Agency, who have been following the Gambling Law’s progression since its inception, warn caution on proceedings: “This legislation is a double-edged sword. While it addresses legitimate concerns about problem gambling and organised crime, the creation of a state monopoly online risks driving players to unregulated platforms and undoing the law’s intended safeguards.

North Macedonia’s gambling regime is already one of the most complex in Europe, marked by fragmented authority, overlapping jurisdictions, and deep ethnic and political conflicts.

Industry leaders fear the new law could exacerbate these problems while wiping out over 10,000 direct jobs, jeopardising another 50,000 in supporting industries, and stripping €280m in annual tax revenue from the state budget.

The 4H Agency further cautioned: “Without a proper transition plan for affected workers and a robust enforcement framework, the law may inflict economic damage without delivering the promised social protections.”

Stakeholders have condemned what they describe as a rushed process with no formal public consultation or economic impact study. “This is not regulation; this is consolidation of control into the hands of a few,” ASOM said in a statement, calling for a full stakeholder review before the bill advances.

Observers warn that beyond the immediate compliance burden, the government will face a test of its ability to both enforce the new regime and safeguard state revenues.

In 2024 the previous parliament passed amendments to the Gambling Act, only for then-President Stevo Pendarovski to refuse his signature, demanding revisions. Now the balance of power has shifted, and the Davkova government has the political capital to push the changes through — though not without a fight.

If enacted in its present form, the legislation would mark the most radical restructuring of the country’s gambling sector in decades. It would also test whether the government can navigate the trade-offs between social policy, fiscal prudence and the realities of criminal enforcement in one of the Balkans’ most politically fragmented states.

Paddy Power & Betfair Report Data Breach On Customer Details

2025-07-09T15:20:00.005+01:00

Paddy Power and Betfair, have reported a significant data breach. The incident, disclosed by their parent company Flutter, while the breach did not involve sensitive data such as passwords or payment details says the company.

Flutter announced that a data incident had occurred, affecting a subset of customers from both Paddy Power and Betfair. The breach reportedly involved unauthorized access to personal information, including usernames, email addresses, and contact details. Although the company reassured customers that no financial data or identification documents were compromised, the breach still poses a risk of phishing attacks and identity theft.

Upon discovering the breach, Flutter said it took swift action. The company promptly informed relevant regulatory bodies, including the Gambling Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office. They initiated a thorough investigation, enlisting external IT security experts to assess the situation and enhance their security measures. Flutter has stated that the unauthorized access has been contained, and they are actively notifying affected customers.

The breach has impacted a limited number of customers, but the exact number has not been disclosed. Those affected have been informed via email, detailing the nature of the breach and the specific information that may have been compromised.

While the breach did not expose sensitive financial information, the leaked data could still be exploited. Cybercriminals may use the compromised information to launch phishing attacks, tricking customers into revealing more sensitive data.

In light of this incident, Flutter has emphasized its commitment to safeguarding customer information. The company is reviewing its security protocols and implementing additional measures to prevent future breaches. This includes enhancing their network security and conducting regular audits to identify potential vulnerabilities.

Flutter has pledged to maintain open lines of communication with affected customers. They are providing updates on the investigation and any further steps being taken to enhance security.

The breach at Paddy Power and Betfair is part of a broader trend in the gambling industry, where cyberattacks have become increasingly common. Just a month prior, the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) experienced a cyberattack that disrupted its internal systems.

The recent breaches serve as a wake-up call for companies in the gambling sector and beyond. Organizations must prioritize cybersecurity and invest in advanced technologies to protect customer data. The 2025 London Gaming Congress (LGC) highlighted the risks and dangers of cyber attacks and how companies need to be more pro-active as opposed to reactive.

High5Games Suspended In Connecticut Accused Of Illegal Operations

2025-03-19T09:35:00.005+00:00

The Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection (DCP) investigation into High5Games says that the company was running High5Casino, an online platform that lacked the necessary licenses to operate within Connecticut. Which has resulted in the suspension of operations across 13 states in the U.S.

Key Findings of the Investigation

> Unlicensed Operations: High5Casino was found to be accepting bets from Connecticut residents without proper authorization.
> Violation of Self-Exclusion Policies: The platform allowed individuals listed on Connecticut’s Voluntary Self-Exclusion List to gamble, directly contravening state regulations designed to protect problem gamblers.
> Fraudulent Practices: The DCP accused High5Games of misleading consumers into believing that their operations were legitimate and licensed.

The Legal Ramifications

The company is currently facing 1,065 criminal charges for operating an illegal gaming business. Each charge is classified as a Class A misdemeanor in Connecticut, which carries the potential for up to one year in prison and fines reaching $2,000.

Implications of the Charges

> Financial Penalties: If convicted on all counts, High5Games could face significant financial repercussions.
> Precedent-Setting Case: This situation marks the first instance in the U.S. where a sweepstakes online gambling operator has faced criminal charges, potentially setting a precedent for future cases.

The DCP’s findings indicate that approximately 1,100 Connecticut residents engaged with High5Casino, with many suffering significant financial losses. Specifically, 911 players reportedly lost over $900,000, while 108 self-excluded individuals lost nearly $300,000.

The DCP has emphasized the risks associated with unauthorized gaming websites, particularly regarding the security of funds and the fairness of games.

> Difficulties in Fund Recovery: The DCP warned that recovering funds from illegal platforms is challenging for consumers, underscoring the necessity of playing on regulated sites.

Connecticut has a stringent regulatory framework governing online gambling, allowing only two licensed operators: FanDuel, in partnership with Mohegan Sun, and DraftKings, which collaborates with Foxwoods Casino.

Denmark’s Gambling Market Revenues Rises to $1.02 Billion in 2024

2025-02-19T14:59:00.007+00:00

The Danish gambling landscape saw a rise in 2024, with the industry’s Gross Gambling Revenue (GGR) reaching DKK 7.27 billion, equivalent to $1.02 billion. The growth, representing a 6.9% increase from the previous year. The Danish Gambling Authority, Spillemyndigheden, released the data highlighting the various facets of this growth, showing the evolving gambling ecosystem in the country.

The online casino segment emerged as the driver of Denmark’s gambling industry in 2024, securing its position as the dominant force in the market. With a 48.6% share of the total revenue. This digital domain experienced a year-over-year growth of 14.7%, with revenues rising to DKK 3.53 billion ($500 million), a leap from the DKK 3.1 billion ($440 million) recorded in 2023.

Factors Driving Online Casino Growth

Several factors have contributed to the growth of online casinos in Denmark:

1. Technological Advancements: The continuous improvement in internet connectivity and mobile technology has made online gambling more accessible and convenient for Danish players.
2. Diverse Game Offerings: Online casinos have expanded their portfolios, offering a wide array of games to cater to various player preferences.
3. Enhanced User Experience: Operators have invested heavily in creating user-friendly interfaces and seamless gaming experiences, attracting and retaining more players.
4. Targeted Marketing Strategies: Effective digital marketing campaigns have helped online casinos reach a broader audience and convert casual players into regular customers.
5. Regulatory Support: The Danish Gambling Authority’s balanced approach to regulation has created a conducive environment for online casino operators to thrive while ensuring player protection.

Popular Online Casino Games

Within the online casino segment, certain games have emerged as clear favourites among Danish players:

> Slots: Dominating the online casino landscape, slot games accounted for an impressive 77-78.2% of online casino revenue. The popularity of slots can be attributed to their diverse themes, engaging gameplay, and potential for significant payouts.
> Blackjack: This classic card game secured the second spot, contributing 6.7% to the online casino revenue. Its blend of skill and chance continues to appeal to Danish players.
> Roulette: The timeless allure of the spinning wheel garnered 6.4% of the online casino revenue, showcasing its enduring popularity in the digital realm.

Florida Officials Ask for Tougher Anti-Gambling Laws as Concerns Grow

2025-01-24T07:34:00.006+00:00

Florida cops and gambling watchdogs are pushing harder for stronger rules to tackle the widespread problem of illegal betting across the state.

In a recent talk to the Florida House of Representatives’ Industries and Professional Activities Subcommittee, experts pointed out that the current laws do not do enough to stop these shady operations.

The Florida Gaming Control Commission (FGCC), prosecutors, and law enforcement officers showed a united stance stressing the need to change laws as reported by Florida Politics. Acting FGCC Executive Director Ross Marshman highlighted that illegal gambling takes money from licensed and tribal gaming establishments sending it to criminal groups. He emphasized that the absence of serious penalties allows illegal operators to succeed.

The hearings spotlighted how profitable illegal gambling can be often outweighing the risks for those involved. Chief Ed Cayenne of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office’s Homeland Security Division explained that misdemeanor charges and fines do not deter offenders enough. “These businesses just pay the fines and start up again because they make so much money,” Cayenne said.

Law enforcement officials also provided information about big cases, like “Operation Fool’s Treasure,” a joint effort that exposed a large illegal gambling ring across several Florida cities. The operation led to five arrests and uncovered complex schemes to launder money using illegal slot machines. Despite these wins, officials complained that many criminals face minor punishments because of weak laws.

Dan Singleton, who leads investigative services for the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, talked about how illegal these operations are. He told a story about employees often running away with money when police come with search warrants.

The testimony also highlighted the wider social problems linked to illegal gambling. Prosecutors and cops pointed out the connections between gambling dens and other crimes, like drug dealing, human trafficking, and violent acts. Assistant State Attorney Sara Hassler cautioned that these places make community problems worse bringing guns and encouraging criminal activity in areas already dealing with violence.

Officials are asking lawmakers to make penalties for illegal gambling more severe upgrading them to felonies. This would give them more power to seize assets and get search warrants. State Attorney Bill Gladson of the Fifth Judicial Circuit argued that felony charges would improve their ability to enforce the law.

The FGCC, set up in 2021, has made regulating the gaming industry and stopping illegal gambling a top goal. Yet, as unlawful operations keep growing, the need for stronger legal rules becomes more pressing. With the lawmaking session starting on March 4, supporters hope to see big steps forward in strengthening Florida’s anti-gambling laws.

Bookmakers List US Presidential Betting Odds for 2028

2024-11-07T12:01:00.002+00:00

With the latest round of elections now concluded in the United States, and Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, bound for the White House next year, sportsbooks have not wasted any time, listing the odds for the 2028 election.

Kalshi Already Posting Odds for Next US Elections

Anyone who is keen to get an early start for the next election cycle can do so right away, with bettors now racing to bet on who the Democratic and Republican nominees for the next showdown will be, and who will become the United States’ 48th president.

Prediction market Kalshi, which topped the Apple App Store downloads for Free Apps, has already posted contracts for the next presidential election cycle, with the platform listing Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as the favorite for the Democrats in 2028. Then again, he is most likely to run up against JD Vance, the man who is bound for the vice presidency in the White House next year.

Shapiro is followed by Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, who was long rumored to be one of the possible candidates for the presidency, although Democrats did lose a single electoral college vote in the state this election cycle.

Many popular names remain and are listed on Kalshi, with transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg still one of the possible picks, followed by Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, and slight chances given to former First Lady Michelle Obama as a possible contender for the presidency.

On the flip side, JD Vance is followed by the president-elect’s eldest son, Don Jr., who could also be tapped by the GOP for the presidency.

Proximity to Trump Raises Odds for Presidency

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a once outspoken critic of Donald Trump, is given only a 4% chance to be nominated by his party, compared to Don Jr.’s 15%, and JD Vance’s 59%.

The Republican field seems to be somewhat leaner, as there are not many options to run as of right now, with the majority focused on Trump’s immediate inner circle. In the meantime, the new administration’s appointees are yet to be announced.

Elon Musk, a tech billionaire with a penchant for infuriating people on X, a social media platform he bought, is most likely going to assume a spot in the new administration.

Many other names that were heard during the election cycle are also suggested by Kalshi as possible appointees, including Robert Kennedy Jr. an independent candidate and scion of the Kennedys, who could get a pew in the new administration, and so can the Democrat-turned-Republican, Tulsi Gabbard, a former US representative.

In the meantime, bettors are expected to cash in a tidy sum having bet on Donald Trump to win the Presidency.