Wanna Make a (Sports) Bet?
Render unto Caesar your gambling addiction.
I spent a lot of time in New Orleans in the late 2010’s.
It’s a city that occupies a tier of its own. Whether it be the food, the music, the historic architecture, uniquely charged atmosphere, or just the colorfully robust yet distinctly laissez-faire culture that seems to permeate the city from top to bottom, it’s about as close as one can get to visiting a different country without ever leaving the United States. It’s not a place I would live, mind you - the crime rate is appalling, and even if it wasn’t, the miserable heat, oppressive humidity, hurricanes devastating the coast like well-oiled clockwork, and desolate surrounding scenery of swamps, swamps, and more swamps are all deal-breakers. It really beggars belief that, of all places, the French decided that this bowl of land below sea-level was an adequate place to build a city, let alone the city from which their colonial empire would hinge upon. Did I mention that yellow fever and other tropical diseases pretty much genocided the city’s population about once every other decade? Because it did.
But it’s definitely a place I enjoyed my time in, and one I’m eager to visit again. You’ll never get more booze for less money than good ol’ Nawlins.
Last time I was there, though, I recall seeing a certain face staring back at me from billboards, signs, posters, and even buildings. I found myself looking up at the same baleful gaze of this seemingly omnipresent figure as he looked down upon me from the sides of high-rises and apartment blocks.
Like Jorjor Well’s1 Big Brother, J.B. Smoove was watching me from every just about every flat surface throughout the Big Easy.
Mister Smoove is a comedian who’s carved out a respectable niche for himself as the comic relief black guy in a good many television shows and movies. Personally, whenever I think of him, I think of his iconic turn as Larry’s roommate in Curb Your Enthusiasm.
I think he’s a pretty funny guy. But why was his face seemingly inescapable in the Crescent City?
Well, this particular trip coincided with the rechristening of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, which was to shed the title of Germany’s most over-rated automobile manufacturer so that it might bear the name of the legendary sporting venue’s new overlord - or perhaps Emperor - Caesars Entertainment2.
Caesars Entertainment, most well known for their flagship casino, Caesars Palace3 in Las Vegas, Nevada, had been making viae into the Big Easy. Or so it seemed, as the company was already well-established within New Orleans, albeit under a different name. In 2005, the original Caesars Entertainment, which can only be differentiated from its current iteration by the suffix of Inc., was acquired by Harrah’s Entertainment. In 2020, for reason’s unknown to me, Harrah’s would claim ownership of the Imperium Romana and rebrand under the Caesars name. I mean, I kind of get it; Caesars, apostrophe notwithstanding, has a little more name recognition than Sulla’s or Trajan’s. It certainly flows better than Elagabalus’s4.
This would culminate this year when the long-planned renaming, rebranding, and renovation of Harrah’s New Orleans location, in the heart of downtown, into property of the good Caesar.
Even though the location’s reformation into a proper and respectable outpost of the Roman Empire began in 2024, this was all announced in 2021, right around the same time that the Superdome came to bear the mighty Caesar’s name. And also right around the same time that Caesars was making an aggressive marketing push to make sure that everyone know that their new sports-betting service was open for business.
Personally, if I was in Caesars marketing department, I would have tapped this guy to do ads announcing this development.
Ian McNeice is still alive, so they really have no excuse. But HBO’s Rome was almost two decades out of the cultural memory by that point, so J.B. Smoove would have to suffice.
However, this development was not a result of Caesars Entertainment suddenly opening a sports-betting department. Rather, in true Roman fashion, they simply acquired the British gambling company, William Hill, and slapped their name on it.
Despite headquartering across the pond, William Hill was already well-established in America. In 2013, they first dipped their toes into the American sports-betting market by buying three sportbook chains in Las Vegas. At the time, sports-betting was only legal in the state of Nevada, but as various states began to revise their gambling laws, the company eked from one shining sea to the other like an infestation of black mold.
The tectonic shift in gambling laws first began to rumble in 2018. Prior to this, The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 had made betting on sports effectively illegal in most of the country. I say effectively as, obviously, Nevada, as it is with so many things, was exempt from these laws. Oregon, Delaware, and Montana were also exempt. Somewhat. Sports betting was legal in these states only through state-run lotteries, and not out-and-out betting at casinos.
As an interesting aside, there was one sport that was exempt from this blanket ban of gambling on sports.
The story of the relatively obscure sport from the Basque country of Spain is an interesting one worthy of a deep dive unto itself, but suffice to say, Jai Alai experienced a resurgence of popularity in the 1990’s because it was one of sports you could legally gamble on. Why? Jai Alai has a long tradition of being gambled on, reaching back to the sport’s introduction to the states back in the 1920’s. It’s not the sport itself so much as the method of gambling used to bet on it that spared it from this gambling ban; Jai Alai has long utilized a parimutuel betting system for gambling rather than fixed-odds betting. In short, when you bet on a Jai Alai game, you’re betting against other bettors, not a bookmaker, as one does with conventional sports gambling. It’s the same reason that horse and greyhound racing betting remained legal in spite of these laws, as well.
PASPA, as it became known, also left one caveat in place so that any state which, and I’m quoting here, operated licensed casino gaming for the previous ten-year period, was given a one-year window in which they could legalize sports-betting on a state-level. This criteria was met by just one other state aside from Nevada.
Despite being given this generous caveat, can you guess what New Jersey didn’t do?
New Jersey, which I can only assume realized the colossal amounts of cash they’d just passed up on, began to fight against PASPA almost immediately. It’d take some time to pick up steam, though. There’s probably a New Jersey joke to be made there, but I’m really not familiar with it enough to try and find one.
In 2009, they’d finally get their shit together and formally contest the ruling on the grounds of, How is it fair that four states have sports betting when we don’t? It didn’t take long for other states, bitter that they couldn’t cash in on their citizens’ crippling gambling addictions, to do the same. Powerful lobbyist organizations lined up behind them, including the very influential American Gaming Association. Even the mighty tribes of the Indian Gaming Association came forward to support the white men from Jersey, since PASPA had neutered their ability to conduct sports-betting even on reservation-based casinos.
Hilariously, the senator from Jersey who filed the lawsuit didn’t think he had the political oomph to actually push it through, so he politely requested then-Governor Chris Christie to throw his considerable weight behind it.
Christie, however, was, er… well, let’s just say he was in a bit of a low point in his often controversial tenure as governor, and hesitant to try and back a bill that he believed would be deeply unpopular and tank his already waning approval rating. To get a feel for the pulse of the people, Christie called a state-wide referendum to gauge public sentiment on the legalization of sports-betting.
It passed with overwhelming support.
Jersey, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved unable to wait for legislation to be passed at a federal level. In 2011, then-New Jersey senator and former NBA player Bill Bradley spearheaded an amendment to the state’s constitution that would legalize sports-betting. This started an agonizing series of appeals that would grind through the legal system right up to the highest court in the land, with Chris Christie begrudgingly hauling it along the whole way. This law was not just contested by the courts, but opposed by basically every single major sports league in the country. The NBA, the MLB, the NHL, the NFL, the NCAA - Hell, I imagine the PGA was even in on the action.
This, I find, puzzles most who look into this topic. Shouldn’t sports-betting be a boon to an organization like the National Football League?
Consider this - have you noticed that, for the past couple years, there have been a lot more talk of the NFL being rigged? Especially for one team in particular?5
That’s exactly why the NFL didn’t want sports-betting legalized; they don’t want the public speculating on whether or not they are rigging the games. Even if they might have been this whole time, sports-betting be damned.
By the time New Jersey’s case finally worked its way into the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court, Chris Christie wasn’t even the Governor of New Jersey. The honor of taking up this task fell on his successor, Phil Murphy, which is why the final nail in PASPA’s coffin was called Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association6. Without getting into the legalese, SCOTUS ruled that PASPA was a violation of the Tenth Amendment. You know, the amendment that says powers not given to the federal government are reserved for the states or the people?
That one part of the Bill of Rights that the federal government always seems to conveniently forget about when it comes to shit that actually matters?
Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association did not legalize sports-betting nationwide - it simply allowed each state to individually decide whether or not it was going to be legal. And if you give a governmental entity the opportunity to capitalize on new and lucrative income stream… do you really think they aren’t going to take it?
Within a month of PASPA being struck down, seven states railroaded acts legalizing sports gambling through their state legislatures. As of 2024, eight years after the decision was made, sports-betting is now legal in thirty-eight states.
In any state where there is no legislation or dead legislation regarding sports-betting, you can be certain someone, somewhere in that state is working diligently to make it happen.
In 2023, Americans nation-wide bet a collective total of $119.84 billion in sports wagers. This was a roughly 27% increase from 2022 that translated in an almost $11 billion of pure cheddar for sportsbooking services. Since PASPA’s repeal in 2018, in just eight years, Americans have wagered damn near half a trillion dollars in sport-betting alone. In less than a decade, sports betting in America alone has bloated into the single largest and most lucrative gambling market on the planet.
But this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Sports betting, despite its questionable legality, was already making a big comeback prior to PASPA’s untimely demise.
Even before PASPA was repealed by SCOTUS, the groundwork for sports-betting was already being laid down by Daily Fantasy Sports services, such as DraftKings and FanDuel.
Tell me - do your co-workers have a Fantasy Football team?7 Do they may or may not happen to have a big bucket of money they just happen to throw cash into at the beginning of the football season, and do they all just happen to look away when their fantasy league’s champion pockets it all because, otherwise, it would be unsanctioned gambling in the eyes of the law?
Well, these Daily Fantasy Sports services are basically that, only done via the internet. If that sounds like gambling… well, you’d be right, since participants are essentially wagering on the performance of real athletes against bookmakers - not making parimutuel bets - to support or harm their fantasy league standings, which in turn may gain or cost them real, cold, and hard cash.
But these services are not pitched as games of chance - that’s what made betting on fantasy football quote-unquote kosher. Because participants “draft” their own “players” to make a fictional team on which their winnings (or losings) will be determined, technically… it’s a game of skill. At least, that’s what the crowned heads of DraftKings and FanDuel want you to think
After all, that one guy at your pub trivia who’s apparently tapped into the Akashic Records to gain access to every single football player in known existence’s statistics and is the only person to ever get any sports-related trivia question right is using his acumen and skill to alchemize the most-mathematically sound fantasy team possible. Just forget that even the most iron-clad fantasy teams on paper can often fall apart in practice if even one athlete turns in a pitiful performance on the gridiron during an off-day8, which is… well, up to the whims of the fates, I suppose you might say.
Because of this supposedly skill based caveat, these betting services are available even in some states in which outright sports gambling is not legal.
With a tantalizing daily payout model that allows gamblers participants to be drip-fed a small chunk of change (and more importantly, dopamine) each day, it’s little wonder why these services exploded in popularity. Fantasy football was already a hobby that millions of Americans participated in every time football season rolled around. Add in a monetary incentive to participate? Oh - that was a model that was always going to make serious cash. Fortunes were only looking up for these services as smartphones became ubiquitous throughout the 2010’s, which allowed them to fashion apps that made the process simple, easy, accessible, and best of all, it was all right in the little paypiggies’ pockets.
This left DraftKings, FanDuel, and others very well-positioned when PASPA was struck down in 2018. They were already there, and they were ready to go. Hell, FanDuel and DraftKings themselves now host regular online casino services on top of sports-betting. Their already tremendous growth only compounded in the aftermath of PASPA’s fall. And, trust me - they aren’t alone. If you watch sports of any sort, from football to quidditch to underwater hockey, you will be inundated with ads for various sports-betting platforms. The studios, stadiums, and in some sports, even the athlete’s uniforms, will be spattered with their logos. DraftKings, FanDuel, and increasingly other platforms sponsor just about any YouTuber who make sports-centric content, and they all eagerly carp about how much money you stand to make if you use their proprietary code to get some pittance of a sign-on bonus that will doubtlessly get burned up ten seconds after you start placing bets. More and more, these platforms are creeping into every nook, cranny, and crevice of sports and the surrounding fandom.
The reason I saw J.B. Smoove every time I turned around in New Orleans was not because Caesars Sportsbook was heralding some glorious return of sports-betting - if anything, Caesars was late to the game, but they wanted everyone to know that they were there, and they weren’t going away. Even though you can find sportsbooking services at casinos across the country, the majority of sports-betting now takes place via the aforementioned mobile phone apps.
And make no mistake - this is a problem.
I am not a gambler. Sure, I enjoy a game of poker or blackjack, but even then, I’m too parsimonious to ever bet big or overstay my welcome at the table. I’m not unknown to toss a couple dollars at the lottery when the jackpot is sufficiently large enough to raise an eyebrow. I have never understood the appeal of slot machines, though.
The scant few times I decided to test my luck on a slot machine, I lost twenty dollars in thirty seconds and I was fit to blow that bitch up and everyone inside of it. Including myself
But I’d also be remiss to understand why it’s so appealing to so many people. Especially the most vulnerable. There’s an allure to the idea that, the next press of the button, the next card that’s turned - that’ll be the one that will change your life forever.
I even understand why slapping that slot machine button is basically the boomer equivalent of gooning - the flashing lights, the loud sounds, the splashy effects, it’s all meticulously crafted to viciously hijack your dopamine feedback cycle. Even the layouts and architecture of casinos are all carefully designed and arranged based on billions of dollars of research to keep asses in seats for as long as possible. Quite literally everything about the games and the places that house them are bespoke to engender frivolous spending, if not out and out addiction.
And online gambling, whether it be through poorly regulated online casinos or sports-betting apps, is no different. If anything, the way it’s pitched as making money off your favorite hobby is even more pernicious, in my opinion.
Here are some numbers crunched by Charles Lehman, writing for the Atlantic. For every one dollar bet on sports gambling, household savings are depleted by two dollars. In states where sports-betting is legal, household bankruptcies are increased on average by 25% to 30%.
The performance of sports teams have always translated, disturbingly, into increased rates of domestic violence. How bad do you think it’s getting when not just a team’s prestige, but cash is on the line?
The bulk of economic damage done by gambling has always disproportionately affected the most financially unstable and vulnerable elements of society. Sports betting in particular has become wildly popular with young men, especially those of a Caucasian persuasion. According to a study conducted by Birches Health in 2023, almost 40% of sports bettors are under the age of 35, almost 70% of them are male, and 51% are white. A more recent study shows that these numbers may have risen to be anywhere between 60% to a staggering 70%. Interestingly, the Birches Health study also reports that 44% of sports bettors make a salary of over $100,000 a year. While one may be tempted to think, Well, that’s fine, they have money to waste, let’s be honest here - a salary in the low six figures doesn’t go as far as it did even a decade ago, and all that money doesn’t mean shit if you’re pissing it away on whether or not the Montreal Boo-Hoo’s are going to get a slam dunk on the Salt Lake Paypigs. Take this case that made headlines in which a New Jersey mother sued DraftKings after her husband frittered away over a million dollars on their services; even though the man had a six figure salary, he resorted to maxing out credit cards, draining his children’s college funds, and even selling gifts they were given for Christmas and their baptisms to fuel his gambling addiction.
It also discredits the fact that well over half of sports bettors aren’t making that kind of money. Young men, who are in a period of their life where building wealth and acquiring assets are crucial for future success, are instead finding yet another black hole of addiction on par or worse than pornography addiction, video game addiction, and substance abuse.
Let’s look at some more numbers, if you don’t believe me. A study conducted by Southern Methodist University9 of over 700,000 sports bettors found that less than 5% withdrew more money from these gambling apps than they put into them. This scant 5% withdrew over $100,000 dollars, which, in effect, was a total floated by the other 95% of bettors. Worse still, the bottom 3% of bettors contributed - and lost - enough money to make up half of that amount. That means that, out of this pool of 700,000 betters, roughly 21,000 of them bet and lost a collective $50,000.
Pretty dismal numbers, but, hey - that’s gambling, right? You win some, you lose some. Vegas wasn’t built by winners, y’know? It’s the land of shattered dreams for a reason. There’s still a chance that, if you play these games and lay down some bands on your favorite quarterback, you might be lucky enough to land in that top 5% of winners, right? Well, you aren’t looking at good odds to begin with, but if you look at how these services actually operate, you’ll find the chances of success aren’t just low - they’re almost statistically impossible.
If you read the fine print in the terms and services agreements presented by these sports betting services, you will find that it is explicitly stated that there is a certain threshold of success that can be met. Once you begin to win, these services can and will restrict the sizes of your bets. In simple terms, this means that if you do have that secret sauce to cook up a perfect fantasy team, or even if you just get lucky and draft a murderer’s row of players - they’ll just kneecap you and keep you from betting. And make no mistake: these companies are tracking every cent you put down. Diligently. They know who’s winning. They know who’s losing. Their serial offenders, repeat customers, and juiciest paypigs have employees who’s entire job is to track their spending, their winnings (or more likely, their losings), and, worst of all, keep them going, if need be. But we’ll touch on that later.
Frankly, this is ludicrous. Now, maybe this does happen and I’m just not frequenting casinos enough to know, but could you imagine sitting down at the poker table, winning a handsome sum, and being told by the dealer, Sorry, pal, but you won too much. Bet a dollar or bet nothing. At worst - so far as I’m aware - they’ll just think you’re cheating, take you to the back, and have Big Tony break your hand with a ball-peen hammer.
If you’re lucky.
The thing about gambling is that, ideally, it should be fair. When you sit down at a poker table, your odds of winning should be the same as every other player. But these services, by dint of their function, are not fair games. And most people who use them do not understand this, as they never meet with enough success to even have this problem. This is not a problem endemic to sports betting services - this is a larger problem among online casinos, which are not beholden to the same rules and regulations imposed by the various regulatory boards as in-person, brick-and-mortar casinos, and therefor have no compunction to keep their games fair in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, however, a rabbit hole unto itself, and a conversation for another day.
If you think that’s bad, let’s return to our erstwhile friend from New Jersey, mentioned above. It’s easy to write off his case as one of egregiously bad judgement. And, to an extent, it is; it was incumbent upon him to exercise restraint and self-discipline. According to his wife, however, the man was not just a victim of his own vices - his bad choices were aided, abetted, and actively enabled by DraftKings. I’ll let the article speak for itself.
Though the article goes on to list a variety of safety measures that DraftKings supposedly employs to ensure that this kind of abuse doesn’t happen, such as requiring W2 forms to verify the bettor’s income and other means to ensure that the money being spent is valid and not acquired by less-than-legal methods. According to DraftKings, if a bettor is gambling more money than they’re making, that bettor is supposed to be cut off. This case, among others, such as this case in which an employee of the Jacksonville Jaguars football team embezzled tens of millions of the organization's funds to fuel his sports betting addiction, demonstrates that these policies are loosely enforced at best or actively ignored at worst. Otherwise, this wouldn’t have happened.
Let’s call a spade a spade, here - what is happening now with sports betting, especially through daily services like DraftKings and FanDuel, are not just addictive. They aren’t just unfair. They’re actively predatory. As I believe I’ve made clear, this betting market is not shrinking. They’re not hurting for new gamblers. Year after year, these services have seen exponential increases in betting, bettors, and profit. Given the trends, I don’t think that will be changing any time soon.
The obvious question is this - what can be done about it? The metaphorical genie was released from it’s proverbial bottle in the aftermath of PASPA’s demise. It stands to reason that it can be put back in through legislation, but given that this racket has been making a lot of very powerful people a whole lot of money, I can’t imagine they won’t leverage every tool at their disposal to make sure the cash spigot is not turned off again. This is to say nothing that gambling itself has always been notoriously difficult to regulate. It’s a vice like any other - people are going to engage in it whether it’s legal or not, and I’m under no delusion that any amount of state intervention is going to root it out entirely.
But this is something we cannot afford to pretend is not happening.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution. Even if I did, there’s precious little I could do to bring it to fruition. But what we can do is raise awareness about these service’s unfair and predatory practices. We can, at the very least, let others now that these services are not the equivalent of a harmless weekend trip to the casino where you blow a couple hundred on some slots or card games, go home, and the action is over and done with; they are leeches lurking in your phone, harvesting your data so they can calculate the most effective means of parting you from your money. They are exploitative, they are dangerous, and they are, more than anything, almost parasitic in nature; like any parasite worth its salt, it meets the most success when its victim is unaware of its presence. That’s why, if nothing else, people should be made aware of the nature of these predatory services. They should know that, when they lay down some cash on the next big game, they could be betting a lot more than a little pocket change.
Also known as George Orwell.
And, no - there is no apostrophe, implying that it is not one singular Caesar’s entertainment outfit, but rather entertainment for multiple Caesars.
No apostrophe is in the name, implying that that there is no particular Caesar which can claim ownership of the palace, nor Superdome, for that matter. What happened to rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s?
I imagine an actual Elagabalus’s would just be the Femboy Hooters meme made manifest.
It’s not that hard to understand why when you take into account the Kansas City Chiefs have squeaked by winning a small handful of points in the last seconds of each game, often helped along by very questionable referee calls, for pretty much the entire 2024 season.
Notice how the NCAA - the official regulatory board of all manner of collegiate sports - is the named parties. Remember how I said every major sports league was against this?
For non-Americans, or those of you who just don’t care about football, Fantasy Football, is a game where fans form a group, select real NFL players to form a fictional team, and compete to see who’s fantasy team comes out on top. Winners are calculated based on the performance of their selected players in the actual sanctioned NFL games that are played each week.
I may sound as if I’m picking on football, here, but fantasy leagues exist for every sport you can possibly imagine, and yes, these services have extended to accommodate.
Dallas mention.
You don't touch on exactly the sort of apps and games I've been curious about, but this is damn close to sating my curiosity on the inner workings of the various gambling game apps I see advertised all the damned time whenever my VPN decides to disconnect and I open something up on my phone.
I know you probably know the sorts of ads I'm talking about. They tend to be tailored in two or three distinct ways. You've got the colorful and noisy slot apps that show people landing absurd bonuses and make promises like, "All players guaranteed to hit a 20 trillion token bonus in the first ten minutes!" You've got the so-called "influencers" (fuck that term) recording videos of themselves definitely playing those games for real and talking about how they absolutely make four figures per day by just playing this game for three hours, you can make that money, too! Then you've got what I like to call the "buddies ad" approach; poorly acted ads of "friends" hanging out and noticing the hot new game their boy Chester's been playing that's totally changed his life, bro! Look how much money they're promising!
I think it was last October or November where I got curious enough to start trying to research exactly how these games that promise guaranteed payouts are said to manage that. I started looking it up for the gambling games and, naturally, got no hits other than the obnoxious mobile ads we already hate seeing all the time, or ads disguised as videos of people supposedly showing you how to hit your payday easy. I was also curious about the ones that promised an easy passive income just by fiddling with the app. As expected, I could find absolutely nothing explaining exactly how it is that sort of system is meant to work, what needs to be put into it by the users to generate that money, or any information on the legitimacy of how such "services" - I feel so wrong using that term that I genuinely did cringe writing it out, which should suffice to clarify exactly what my thoughts on these apps are - are able to offer these advertised payouts of thousands of dollars per day.
I know there's skeevy shit going on with all of these digital gambling halls, just like there's skeevy shit going on with the casinos. It's why I don't get involved with stuff like that and keep any betting I do to the level you described; the occasional hand of poker or blackjack, or occasionally tossing a twenty on the college brackets my coworkers run every once in a while for a laugh. Otherwise, I try to stay away from as much of that crap as I can. For the record, that includes gacha games.
And those same gambling apps will fight like hell to avoid any regulation.
Great article, YA! It's depressing how many people are seeking an escape and "easy" money. My oldest stepson is into the meme coin crypto market and yeah, he doesn't see how it's a Ponzi scheme with gambling on when someone is going to cash out. Hopefully some solutions will present themselves for the sports betting industry.