🎲 An absolutely terrible gambling story

If you spend too much time online (which I definitely do), you may already be aware of the story about the Big Deal Magazine writer who started betting on sports for research and wound up dangerously close to becoming addicted.

The tale has an appropriately harrowing title:

This story made the rounds on social media about a month ago, with the reaction being generally positive. It was deemed “An Important Story on the Casino-fication” of America.

Well, I finally got around to reading the story this weekend when the actual magazine arrived.

It did stir some outrage in me.

Just not the type the author was going for.

It felt an awful lot like a casual drinker who takes part in Dry January and then writes a story talking about the challenge of sobriety. I’ll explain in a second right after we set the stage for the start of the regular season.

I’m not sure exactly how to take the statement that the Seattle Mariners released on Saturday on behalf of Randy Arozarena.

On the one hand, I suppose it’s a good sign that he said he’d apologized for suggesting some profane activities for the Mariners captain after he failed to shake his hand during the World Baseball Classic.

On the other hand, I can’t recall a situation in which a player issued a statement to indicate he had apologized. I certainly don’t recall a situation in which a player needed to issue a second statement to indicated he had apologized.

Now, I remain firmly of the opinion that it’s quite possible for baseball teams to be successful even with team members who actively loathe one another.

I’m not saying that is the case with Arozarena and Raleigh, but I find this whole thing to be weird as hell.

All right, back to the gambling story that got me steamed.

The premise is pretty simple. The reporter, McKay Coppins, gets $10,000 from his employer – The Atlantic – which he uses to wager over the course of the NFL season.

He describes how he feels while he’s doing this, noting behavioral changes.

He also takes occasional detours, interviewing people in and around various parts of the gambling industry.

In the end, the author loses pretty much all the money and winds up signing a self-exclusion gambling form because he believes his behavior has become compulsive.

The implication is that the widespread legalization of sports betting across America has opened the floodgates to compulsive, life-ruining behavior.

There are some real problems with this story, though.

I’ll start by naming two:

Legalizing sports betting has increased the number of people who are gambling on games. The fact it’s state-sanctioned may create the impression to some people it’s safe, but that brings me to my second objection.

Now I should probably offer a little background information so you can understand where I’m coming from.

I don’t bet on sports.

This is not a moral position of mine so much as a pragmatic one. I experience enough emotional volatility in my own head that I don’t feel it’s either wise or enjoyable to subject myself to additional moodswings that come from betting on games.

I am intensely interested in sports gambling, though. Some of this is because I find the industry and its growth absolutely fascinating. Some of that is because of how dependent sports media companies have become on it.

I have a number of friends who do regularly bet on sports games. I have exactly one good friend I would label as a successful gambler.

In general, I view sports gambling in much the same way I do cigarettes, alcohol and THC. They are products that many people enjoy without significant negative impact. For a not-insignificant-slice of the population, though, these products lead to problematic behavior that can have profoundly negative consequences not that individual and anyone in their vicinity.

While sports gambling is now legal in many states, how to balance the risks with the freedom of adults to partake in it is still being worked out. There are a number of questions that jump out to me.

Addressing these questions requires actual evidence-based, good-faith discourse about the subject, though. This brings me back to what bothered me so much about The Atlantic article, which I would describe as something between disingenuous and an outright crock of shit.

It purports to show the downside of legalized betting.

This would be more believable had he blown through the $10,000 The Atlantic gave him and started dipping into his own savings.

Instead, his documented betting history shows that he started out slow, and ramped up toward the end. Of the money he lost, roughly half came on the Super Bowl, which was the final event he gambled on.

He characterizes this as “chasing” his previous losses. Being the cynical bastard I am, I’m not sure.

He wasn’t just participating in this story, he was orchestrating it. And when I looked at his betting patterns, I wondered if this flurry of final-week bets was serving a specific narrative purpose.

Either, his bets would come through, in which case he would almost break even and then he’d right about how excruciating the whole thing had been before swearing off ever doing it again.

Or he’d lose – like he did – and this would become a cautionary tale of how corrupting sports betting can be and swear it off.

Now maybe this little experiment did ignite a streak of compulsive behavior in him. Perhaps I should be a little less judgmental and appreciate that he’s well-intentioned. 

But as I read the story this weekend I thought back to a very specific non-fiction writing class I took back when I was living in Seattle. One of the participants in the class had spent a week “living” on the street and was going to turn that into a story on what it felt like to be unhoused.

Now this fellow had slept outside, and he had stayed alongside people who were living on the street.

But for him, this was temporary. LARP-ing¹ in contemporary parlance.

While I don’t think this was his intention, it is actually insulting to people who are really in that situation because you are playing a role for a finite period of time and then saying you know what it’s like to be them.

It’s how I feel when someone talks to me about the difficulty of abstaining from alcohol for the month of January. 

Because next month will mark nine years in which I haven’t had a drink. For me, it’s not some experiment to see how it makes me feel. It’s not a tool to lose weight or to wake up feeling sharp.

It’s because once I begin to consume alcohol on a given evening, I can’t be trusted stop no matter how many pledges I’ve made or how many gimmicks I institute to limit the level of intoxication.

This doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t drink, though. It doesn’t mean booze should be outlawed.

It also doesn’t mean that a Big Deal Magazine Writer — who usually doesn’t drink by the way — should go and pound 12 IPAs and write through the hangover he had the next morning as evidence of what it’s like to be a drunk.