Chapter 1: What inspired McKay Coppins to explore sports gambling?
Last year, when Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins wanted to do a story about sports gambling, he and his editor started out with the usual angles. We ticked through all the obvious, you know, approaches, right? Like you should talk to people who struggle with gambling addiction. You should talk to the executives at the big online sports books. And then one of them had another idea.
I can't remember if it was my editor or me who first said, well, maybe you should try it a little bit. Part of it is that because I was a sports fan, if you are a sports fan, if you watch sports in the year 2026, you are just constantly bombarded with gambling advertising. Every game you watch is just an onslaught of ads for online sportsbooks.
Head to the DraftKings Sportsbook app to claim your free bet now. If you listen to sports podcasts like I do, all the sponsors are, you know, FanDuel, DraftKings.
Chapter 2: How did McKay navigate his Mormon beliefs while gambling?
The Bill Simmons Podcast brought to you by FanDuel Sportsbook. And almost through like cultural osmosis, I started to pick up some of the kind of sports betting language, you know, like I started to hear about point spreads and money lines so much that I was like, man, what is the deal with this? Now yours will be the opposite. You are plus three and a half. Because that's not the odds.
That is the spread. I just had this feeling that gambling was becoming so culturally ubiquitous that it couldn't help but change our culture, right? It was definitely changing sports and sports media, but it felt like it was having a bigger effect on the country than that. And so I wanted to look into it. I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic.
Sports betting is everywhere, despite basically only becoming legal in most of the U.S. in the past eight years. And it just keeps growing. Just to give you a sense, in 2017, Americans legally wagered $4.9 billion on sports.
Chapter 3: What were McKay's initial experiences with sports betting?
Last year, that number was $160 billion. McKay was about to add to that pile by experimenting with sports gambling himself. There was just one problem. McKay is Mormon, so gambling is against his religion. And they were like, well, what if we came up with this workaround? So you asked Jesus. So I went and presented it to God.
Well, no, actually, I asked my bishop, which is a pretty strange experience. His bishop gave a tentative yes, but only because of a technical workaround that he and his editor came up with. McKay would not be staking his own money. For the entire run of the upcoming NFL season, McKay would be staking the magazine's money. The Atlantic gave one of its staff writers $10,000 to gamble with.
And I will say, I did not ask for $10,000. And if, by the end of the season, he came out ahead, he could split the winnings 50-50. I went into it thinking, my eyes are wide open. I'm already skeptical of the sports betting industry. I have never had any interest in gambling whatsoever. This will be kind of a fun gimmick for the story, but that's about it, right?
My wife also, when I told her I was going to do this, had sort of the same feeling. Like, oh, well, that'll make the story funny.
Chapter 4: How did McKay's gambling habits affect his family life?
And I thought maybe it would be like one section of the story because it wouldn't really amount to much, but it would be like a fun little detail. I feel like this is where we cue the cliffhanger music, whatever that cliffhanger music is. Now for a break. We'll tell you what happened next after. So talk about your first few bets. Like, how did you get going?
Well, the very first night I set up my DraftKings account was the first game of the NFL season. It was on a Thursday night. I remember excusing myself from the family dinner table. I have four young kids. I knew they were going to find out eventually what I was doing, but it still felt a little bit unseemly that I was going to start gambling.
And so I didn't want them to see me download DraftKings and ask what I was doing. So I went into my bedroom, I downloaded DraftKings and deposited $500 into my account and I was off. And that first night, I knew so little about sports betting that I was basically just punching in bets at random. But, you know, I think I made a
parlay bet that was kind of long odds for Saquon Barclay and Jalen Hurts to both score touchdowns. And at the end of the night, I was up 20 bucks. And I remember the next morning I told my wife, hey, I won 20 bucks last night. And she got so excited and she like high fived me. And we were immediately fantasizing about what we were going to do with all the winnings that I would make at the end.
At the end of the season, we're going to replace the KitchenAid mixer that needs to be replaced. Maybe we could even put new shelves up in the pantry. We had all these big ideas. Maybe I was secretly a sports betting savant and we didn't know it. So at some point you realize you're not a savant or maybe you're not a savant and you get in touch with Nate Silver, which is hilarious.
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Chapter 5: What insights did Nate Silver provide to McKay about sports betting?
Just say who Nate Silver is. Well, I had this idea that I needed like a gambling guru. Right. I was going to need somebody to hold my hand through the process and at least give me the kind of best practices of the sports better me. Nate Silver, I would describe him as America's most famous statistics nerd, right? He started FiveThirtyEight.
He was known for calling the outcomes of elections based on his proprietary polling model and a few years ago pivoted to gambling. He cites a midlife crisis and general fatigue with politics. And he wrote a book about gambling, a very good book. He had always been a poker player. And I basically called him up and I was like, hey, Nate, I don't know what I'm doing. Do you want to be my guy?
And he was happy to do it. Although I will tell you, my very first call with him was pretty humiliating because I beforehand sent him all my bet slips for the first week. and got on the phone with him and he kind of pulled them up as we were on the phone and just immediately he started to react in real time as he was looking at them and he just says okay oh oh no
And then started laughing at me, which is how I learned that it's possible to be emasculated by Nate Silver. Right, right, right, right, right. What was he noticing? Well, you know, he said I was making a bunch of mistakes, and one of them was that I was only using DraftKings.
And what he said is, you know, the basic reality of sports betting, and I think this is important to note because I have met so many people who, when I told them I was now getting into sports gambling, they'd say, oh, I know a guy who made millions as a sports bettor. And, like, if you're just really good at it, then you can make a lot of money.
And I just wanted to spell that a little bit because the first thing Nate Silver told me was, It is incredibly hard to make money as a sports gambler. And to do it, you have to exploit microscopic edges, right? He said, you know, you should be shopping for lines, the best betting lines on any given game across multiple books. You can't just use DraftKings.
You need a bunch of different books because all the lines are a little different. You need to steer clear of parlays and prop bets. Prop bets are like individual like outcomes within a game. Parlays are they have longer odds.
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Chapter 6: What emotional challenges did McKay face during his gambling journey?
They'll pay out more money, but it's only if multiple different outcomes hit. So like the Chiefs to win and the Chargers to cover the spread or whatever. But what it boiled down to was like you have to understand that like sports betting successfully is a grind. And then he told me, and this was a shocking revelation for me. Well, actually, what I asked him was, I'm starting out with $10,000.
What would be a good season? You know, if I get to the end of the season, how much would I have to win for this to count as a victory? And he was almost like...
confused by the question because he said oh if you win one penny you're in the top two percent of better my god he said he was like even i who in my lifetime have made hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling if i break even betting on the nfl i'll count that as a win It was kind of this revelatory moment where it was like, oh, everybody loses money gambling. You can't really win.
And I knew that intellectually, right? The house always wins. This is like the one thing everybody knows about gambling. But what's kind of amazing in retrospect is that I didn't really believe him. Like, I heard him, but I was like, but I could be in that 2%. Okay, so you leave this Nate Silver conversation with maybe what we can both agree is false confidence.
And you start to go deeper in, what did you start to notice about yourself? Like what happens? Well, I started out following his rules that he gave me. Right. Basically, what he said is if you want to be a good sports better at the beginning of every week, sit down in a quiet place, look over the lines, do some research on the line, the betting line.
So, you know, the chiefs are favored to beat the bills by two points. Right. You basically, for every game, a bunch of different sportsbooks will have similar but not identical lines. So you look through all the lines. You decide which games you like, which lines are most enticing. You should look at injury reports.
You should look at weather forecasts, other factors that might affect the outcome of the game. And then you should...
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Chapter 7: How has the legalization of sports betting changed American culture?
When the games are still several days away and you're not acting out of emotion or chasing your losses, you should make your bets in kind of a sober frame of mind. And stick to them. And stick to them, right.
Unless something really dramatic changes, you know, the quarterback gets injured at practice or whatever, you should stick to them and not alter them once, you know, the game has started because that's the temptation, right? Yeah. So I stuck to that. I really tried to. For the first month or two, I was doing what Nate told me. But I was surprised by a couple things.
First, I was surprised by how emotionally... I reacted when games didn't go my way, right? The very first game that I bet on, 30 seconds into the game, the best defender on the Eagles got into something with a player on the Cowboys and spit on him and got ejected from the game.
And so you have these things that are totally out of your control that you couldn't have possibly anticipated that affect the outcome of the game, and it drives you crazy. And What surprised me was how it wouldn't just drive me crazy, but I would start to develop irrational hatreds for certain players based on their, you know, performance losing me money.
Okay, so you're angry, angry at the players. Did your family start to notice anything about you? So that was the other thing that changed. I was surprised by how quickly and extensively what was supposed to be this dumb little gimmick kind of took over my life. Again, I didn't want my kids to see me gambling all the time. They knew I was doing it for my story, but...
I was so obsessed with looking at the lines, looking at the prop bets that were available. I would often hide from them to place bets. So, like, I would slip away from the living room and go hide in the kitchen pantry to put bets in. And I remember— Oh, damn! One time. It's not like a vast pantry. It's like a closet that I'm hiding in.
I remember my 10-year-old son once went into the pantry because I had gone to get them snacks and then just stayed there and was on DraftKings. And he found me and he announced to the family, Dad is hiding again.
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Chapter 8: What lessons did McKay learn about gambling and its consequences?
My wife caught me looking at one of the betting apps at church, which I think is like doubly sinful in some way. I think also one of the early advantages or benefits of sports betting, which was I was so much more interested in the games, also meant that I was watching so much sports. My Sunday afternoons were completely consumed by watching like five NFL games at a time.
I would stay up super late watching the end of West Coast games. And then after that, I would spend another hour scrolling on FanDuel to see future bets. And that meant that I was then sleeping in later, which meant that I wasn't as present in the morning routine of getting the kids ready for school.
And I remember I knew I was in trouble sometime in October when my wife, who is pretty patient and supportive, said something like, I can't wait for this gambling experiment to be over. We kind of got into a little argument because she noted that I had been staying up super late watching these games that I was gambling on and I wasn't as available as I usually was helping with the kids.
And she was like, look, if you're staying up late working, I understand and I get it. And I very stupidly was like, this is for work. I knew you were gonna say that. I walked right into it and she just like rolled her eyes. She was like, you don't have to watch every game that you gamble on.
You have no control over the outcome, which is the kind of thing that like is obviously true and also so outrageous to a gambler because of course you're gonna watch the games that you gamble on. Like, how dare you? In a moment, things get even worse.
I was waking up in the middle of the night because I would have these nightmares that I had blown through the $10,000 and was now gambling with our own money and didn't even realize it. That's after the break. This is all funny, but I do wonder if there was ever a point when you felt like you lost yourself in some way? There was a stretch when I kind of went into a tailspin.
And it was right around Christmas of last year. And I think it started actually with another Cowboys game. Lions and Cowboys. I had bet the Cowboys to cover a three and a half point spread. They were the underdogs. And... In the fourth quarter, it looked like I might be able to win. Dak Prescott, the quarterback, was driving down the field about to score a touchdown, it looked like.
And then there was this controversial offensive pass interference call that was made that ended the drive, and I ended up losing a bunch of money. And this game ended, and... I couldn't believe it. Like, I couldn't believe that I had been burned by a bad call by a random referee. And it was like something snapped for me. I think because up to that point, I had tried to be pretty diligent, right?
Like, I was doing all the things Nate Silver said. I was monastically studying the lines. I was staying away from the sucker's bets, the parlays, and the prop bets. And I should have won that bet. But because of this bad, bad call, it just, like, drove me insane. And... I became determined. At certain points, I had actually been up for the season.
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