How Betting Took Over Sports
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This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When I worked at The Washington Post early in my career, one of my colleagues had a little bit of a side hustle. Late in the week, in the fall, he'd go around the office taking bets on the weekend's football game, and then he'd relay those bets to a bookmaker. Now, a lot of us would put some money down, small bets, nobody was losing their shirt, but still, we had a sense that it was somehow illicit, something you did on the QT. Now, it sounds like I'm describing life hundreds of years ago, because these days we are absolutely inundated with ads offering same-game parlays and no-sweat bets. You just can't turn on pro football or listen to a call-in sports talk show without hearing the odds, without emphasizing gambling.
Wagering on the game now seems practically as important as watching it. How did things change so much and so fast?
Literally, I was watching the last World Series and right before the first pitch, they said, and by the way, here's a parlay you might want to consider placing.
Danny Funt has been reporting on the gambling boom for the New Yorker. We've seen some pretty startling headlines lately. The former coach of the Portland Trailblazers was arrested in part for allegedly providing insider information to gamblers. And then there was those two pitchers on the Cleveland Guardians who were indicted for rigging individual pitches. They were purposely throwing wild pitches to align with live bets.
How did sports betting move from clandestine office pools to ubiquitous app-based wagering?
They've all pleaded not guilty. Danny Fund's new book about the boom in sports betting is called Everybody Loses. So can you give me a sense in dollar terms of how big a business this is now?
About $150 billion are wagered every year. Just last November, New York set a record with more than $2 billion wagered in the state of New York alone. It's hard to wrap your head around those numbers. Who's gambling? Mostly young men. That's the target demo, 21 to 34. It's hard to know exactly how many people total are betting. I've seen like 30% is a good ballpark.
30% of that demographic?
No, of Americans, of age Americans.
30% of all Americans are laying down bets on what? What are the most popular things? Pro football?
Absolutely. The NFL is king. All the major sports. I mean, even in Colorado, where I used to live, when it was legalized during the pandemic, most sports were shuttered. And all they could bet on was Eastern European table tennis. And they continue to bet millions of dollars every month. I guess they got hooked on ping pong.
So from the title of your book, it's pretty clear that what your POV on legal sports gambling is, or am I getting this wrong?
That's fair. I hope you'll trust that I didn't have that title locked in as I started this. It was a realization of talking to hundreds of people, mainly in the industry, and seeing how they think about their customers, how they think about their business, left that impression that not only are we losing a staggering amount of money, as we were just talking about, but the credibility of sports, the integrity of sports, the independence of sports journalism, the list goes on.
Are you a gambler yourself?
Yeah, there's a stat that about half of people who bet, they admit that they're not honest about how much they bet and how often they bet. I'm in that demographic.
How would you describe the dimensions of your own activity?
Mostly when I'm watching a Lakers game, particularly when my wife is out of town and I've got nothing better to do. I'm trying to liven up a night alone.
So you're scared of your wife and you're a gambler.
Exactly, like a lot of people. It's a thing to do when you're bored and lonely. I'll be honest with you, though, just hearing again and again and again how impossible it is to win, how these sportsbooks do everything they can to prevent you from coming out ahead long term, I've backed off a lot in the last year.
Explain what a sportsbook is for the uninitiated, and then talk to me about how they do their work.
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