Talkin' gambling again!

I continue to not be a fan

I’ve talked plenty about sports gambling here. I’ve taken a lot of positions on it: that it sucks, that it’s dumb, that it shouldn’t exist, that it’s a harbinger of the death of our society, that it’s a fool’s bargain made by sports leagues embracing short-term thinking at the expense of the long-term integrity of the sport, and that there shouldn’t be so much of it.

But here’s a new take from me: it’s bad. I bet you didn’t think I thought that, right? I love to keep my audience guessing!

Yesterday, Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter was officially banned for life from the NBA for betting on basketball. Officially, his infraction was “disclosing confidential information to sports bettors, limiting his own participation in one or more games for betting purposes, and betting on NBA games,” which all seems bad, because it is.

Porter, if you haven’t seen the story yet, not only bet on NBA games while he was an active NBA player, but he bet on his own games, even using proxies to place prop bets on his own counting stats, taking the under on days when he would end up taking himself out of the game. These bets were never paid out, of course, because FanDuel isn’t run by idiots, and they therefore know that literally the only reason to bet on Jontay Porter is if you’re Jontay Porter. It obviously was not in their interest to allow those bets to stand, so they voided the bets and informed the NBA, who wasted no time in permanently getting rid of Porter.

Sorry, just to be clear, that means suspending him for life, not murdering him. Shout out to anyone else who’s seen too many movie cliches in your lie.

From a rational point of view, this was clearly never going to be worth it. Porter was risking an NBA career — sure, a career on the fringes of the NBA, with lots of time in the G-league, but still an NBA career — for the sake of making online bets, which literally anyone could do. Yes, the money was presumably good when he won, but gambling companies have ways of tracking when someone is winning too much and putting a stop to it. Among those strategies is “Snitching to your employer,” which is what happened here.

But gambling is inherently irrational. Sure, we can all imagine a world where you put down $20 on some game you’re watching, then you win or lose some money, and move on with your life. But that’s not how FanDuel makes boatloads of money, and that’s not what Jontay Porter was doing. That’s not what Ippei Mizuhara was doing either, for the record (though his bets were somewhat less legal, they were at least not on the sport with which he was affiliated).

What FanDuel and DraftKings have created is an ecosystem where you should be making bad gambling decisions. This is why they are blanketing every website and commercial break and space between pitches with ads for gambling. They want you to gamble, and they want you to gamble a lot. They are using their money to change our cultural values in order to make more money. This is their business strategy, and it is working on every level.

It should not be surprising, then, that the same advertising meant to get you or me to gamble (obviously we won’t, because we’re very smart and can see through the pathetic glossy veneer of advertising that so many fall prey to due to their weak moral hey does anyone want to go to Wendy’s) is working on members of the exact demographic it’s targeted to. Porter is a young male who is right square in the target demographic for all these ads. Of course they worked. If they hadn’t worked on him personally, they would have worked on someone else very similar to him. That’s literally what the ads are for.

Now, I don’t want to make it seem like gambling problems are all entirely due to advertising. Obviously, Pete Rose wasn’t betting on the Reds because his TV was blanketed with commercials until he thought, “Well I could make some money here!” There will always be a demographic prone to gambling problems who make bad decisions and then have to play minor league baseball for a while because of a double super secret suspension from the NBA.

Just kidding! Jokes are fun! Anyway, I bet Michael Jordan wouldn’t be offended by it. He seems like a pretty chill dude, right?

But the constant stream of gambling ads and content and betting lines being a part of every sports broadcast and pregame and postgame shows going over the over/unders is absolutely having a cultural impact. The easy availability of easy prop bets made with bookies who won’t break your kneecaps for double crossing them (not an ideal solution, but a solution nevertheless) will only encourage bad decisions. This whole goddamn thing is heading down a path where gambling becomes the point of sports, which sounds like a pretty awful world to live in.

So what’s the answer? Short of each individual state going back to banning sports gambling, which is not going to happen, I don’t know. The promise of the Internet was that it would democratize access to everything, including the bad things that people don’t really need to access. Jontay Porter fell for it, and probably doesn’t even think that he did anything seriously wrong.

Sure, the prop bets weren’t great, but if he was going to have to leave the game early, why not make some money off of it? After all, he was doing something anyone could do, anyone would do, and judging by the numbers, an awful lot of people are doing right now. What could be wrong with that?