An unhealthy fixation with financial speculation pervades American culture generally and sports particularly.
In the midst of the compounding stress that I experienced on Election Day, I periodically checked in with friends by phone and text to get their thoughts on what we might be in for. Of my friends monitoring probabilities of election outcomes as the polls began to close, some had predictably turned to the New York Times’s dreaded election needle and FiveThirtyEight’s projections. But other friends had turned to a site that few had heard of during the 2020 election. Its sleek infographics and wide array of colors suggested the visual styling of data journalism outlets and polling aggregation sites. And yet, the website was anything but that: it was instead a cryptocurrency-powered betting site by the name of Polymarket.
Billed as the “world's largest prediction market,” Polymarket allows users to place bets on all sorts of predictions: not just who will be elected president but also when SpaceX starships will launch, whether Bitcoin will pass $100,000 by the end of 2024, and which actor will play James Bond next. The site infamously took bets in 2023 on whether the doomed Titan submersible would be found, and by what date. In just the month of October 2024 alone, Polymarket handled $2.5 billion in bet volume. Think of a bet on a mainstream event, from sports to pop culture to politics to science, and you can probably find a way to bet on it on Polymarket or similar sites like Manifold, Insight Prediction, and Metaculus.
The thing about betting markets, especially one like Polymarket with such a high volume, is that the odds set using predictive models tend to be quite accurate. This intuitively makes sense: otherwise, Polymarket itself would be fleeced over and over again by more sophisticated bettors and forced to pay out en masse. (Think of all the brilliant minds out there who could be solving fundamental problems in biomedical research or mathematical physics. Many more than you might expect are actually working as oddsmakers for betting sites in order to make sure these betting lines are accurate or are trying to beat the markets on the other side.) And so, as I watched Polymarket’s probabilities for Trump’s election climb higher and higher after the sun set on the West Coast, a certain form of dread sunk in, despite the fact that the New York Times election needle was still calm. The source of this dread was not just the crystallizing reality that Trump was going to win, but the realization that I had come to find this out by consulting a cryptocurrency-based betting market, and one that had received billions of dollars of bets on the election’s outcome to boot. It was a sobering moment, to say the least.
Though this was already obvious before the election, I’ll state the even-more-so painfully obvious here: we live in a society consumed by gambling. Everything has been turned into a market to bet on, where the allure of profits and thrill are always just around the corner. If betting’s ubiquity demands a thorough treatment, so too do its purveyors—those who champion it not just as another activity but an all-consuming lifestyle that brings with it an insidious form of politics.
If you’ve watched any professional sports over the past few years, you’ll surely have noticed the encroachment of sports betting into even fair-weather spectatorship. Sports commentators and websites now regularly report on the lines on sporting events (i.e., whether a certain team will score X more points than its opponent). Interruptions for analytics and visualizations are often thinly-veiled opportunities to provide updates on bets and offer more statistics that sports fans might bet on. Advertisements for sports betting websites like DraftKings and FanDuel are everywhere, both virtually and in person. Just consider the fact that DraftKings has invested in billboards and signs in sports venues across the country: a “HEY, BETTOR BETTOR!” sign greets Cubbies fans arriving at the closest metro stop for games; a “BET LOCAL” ad sits out front of Fenway Park. The sign-up deals for these sites offer hundreds of dollars in free play when creating an account and placing a first bet. “Looking for action? You came to the right place,” the DraftKings website tells us. The saturation of gambling ads and sports coverage through the lens of betting has been, to say the least, extremely detrimental to the viewing experience—unless, of course, you are betting.
Illustration by Nick Sirotich
How popular is sports betting? Pew Research reported in 2022 that just under 1 in every 5 adults in America had placed a sports bet in the last year, approximately three-quarters of whom placed a bet in an official way (rather than an office pool or among friends, for example). According to the American Gaming Association’s Commercial Gaming Revenue Tracker, Americans bet $119.8 billion on sports in 2023. Betting is so entrenched that professional athletes routinely receive hate messages from bettors who lost money due to their play, even if their team won the game. It seems to me that sports spectatorship is increasingly taking a backseat to gambling, where sports are merely a tool for generating things to bet on: how many points will be scored, who will score first, or whether the coin flip will be heads or tails.
The reductio ad absurdum of this inversion of priorities has led to sporting events that seem to have been contrived primarily with betting in mind. The recent Netflix boxing match pitting Mike Tyson against Jake Paul was “the most bet-on fight in combat sports history, by far, including any and all UFC fights” on the platform BetMGM, according to MGM Bets. In featuring a past-his-prime 58-year-old fighting an online influencer, the event offered a third-rate version of the sport that few boxing fans actually wanted to watch. Instead, each punch thrown by Tyson and Paul was an opportunity for a different wager. With the statistical breakdown after each round reporting how many punches each boxer had thrown and how many punches had landed, ungodly amounts of money were won and lost. Just look at what ESPN decided to quote in its coverage of the betting: “‘[It] was unbelievable for business,’ John Murray, executive director of the Westgate SuperBook in Las Vegas, told ESPN. ‘Casino was packed. Bets flying in all day. I was stunned.’”
Like many Americans, I’ve spent an enormous amount of my life watching sports (my love of the Baltimore Orioles is an affliction that haunts me every year). And like many Americans, I grew up watching SportsCenter before school and Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption in the evening. Over the past few years, I’ve lost the ability to watch ESPN coverage for any sustained period of time. The infiltration of sports betting is extremely depressing, and, worse, the media empire has largely succumbed to a style of frat bro-driven sports pseudojournalism popularized by Barstool Sports.
Created by Dave Portnoy as a free weekly Boston-area publication in 2003, Barstool Sports has grown into a digital media company valued at $606 million in 2023. The company has an enormous online presence, with 41 million followers on TikTok and 17 million followers on Instagram. It has also launched a slew of incredibly successful podcasts like “Call Her Daddy” (distributed by Barstool Sports until 2021) and “Bussin’ with the Boys.” The latter is hosted by NFL players Will Compton and Taylor Lewan, who were recipients of a high-profile shout-out by UFC founder Dana White during his cameo at Donald Trump’s presidential acceptance speech in November. (White himself is a massive gambler, stating earlier this year, “I gamble almost every night…My goal before I die is to bet a $1M hand.”) Notably, Barstool Sports helped to raise the profile of ex-NFL punter and still-bro Pat McAfee, whose talk show gained notoriety under the Barstool brand (McAfee famously gave quarterback Aaron Rodgers’s anti-vax views a platform). McAfee left Barstool Sports and soon joined ESPN, where he dominates airtime in lieu of actual sports journalists (prominent NBA journalist Zach Lowe was fired by the network a few months ago). “The bros like their Bud Light and DraftKings, not their newspapers, and they love them some Pat McAfee. You can understand why,” wrote Indianapolis Star sports columnist Gregg Doyel last year. Dave Portnoy himself is an alleged sex pest, and Barstool Sports has come under fire time and time again for detestable rape jokes. Unsurprisingly, Portnoy, who goes by the moniker “Stool Presidente,” endorsed Trump for president in the weeks leading up to the election.
How does this relate to betting? Barstool Sports is quite simply obsessed with this vice. Dave Portnoy himself talks incessantly about the bets he places (as one example, he bet $600,000 on the University of Connecticut Huskies to win the 2024 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, leading to this deranged sentence from betmassachuetts.com: “Dave Portnoy was bullish on Dan Hurley and the Huskies ahead of March Madness on MA betting apps, and their second straight title yielded him a $2,760,000 payout”). Until 2023, Barstool ran its own sports betting site, Barstool Sportsbook; rather confusingly, this site was split off from Barstool Sports when it was under the ownership of the PENN group and has now become ESPN’s betting site, ESPN BET. “Breaking News: I’m proud to announce that Barstool has signed a multi year monster deal with @draftkings,” read Portnoy’s Instagram post announcing a deal with DraftKings in the aftermath, which received over 100,000 likes. “We're back to our roots. DK is once again the exclusive sports betting partner of Barstool Sports. The more things change the more they stay the same.”
Gambling is such an essential part of Portnoy’s brand that a 6,000-word New York Magazine feature on Portnoy from 2021 bore the title and subheading, “The Dave Portnoy Playbook: Staring down the sports-gambling gold rush—and sexual-misconduct allegations—Barstool’s founder bets on the culture war.” In the immediate aftermath of Portnoy’s sexual assault allegations, first published by Business Insider, Portnoy is portrayed as more or less consumed by betting, with the New York Magazine article ending as follows:
He also got back to the gambling. Ten days after the Business Insider story, Portnoy spent a Sunday afternoon hanging out at the Barstool Sportsbook house in Hoboken, where he and other Barstool personalities regularly livestream themselves sitting in recliners for hours on end while they gamble on sports. Barstool would only hit its projection of $200 million in revenue this year if Portnoy kept up his appearances, and the central concern on the stream today wasn’t the controversy swirling around him but a $500,000 bet Portnoy had placed on the Green Bay Packers. There wasn’t much sense from Portnoy that he was going to dramatically change his approach to work or life anytime soon. As for the Packers, they started off slow, leaving Portnoy’s bet in doubt well into the fourth quarter. But Green Bay eventually took control and won in a blowout. Portnoy walked away with half a million dollars.
In my mind, it is a depressing vision of a Sunday afternoon, and one that I suspect is all too common among American football fans (the size of the bets notwithstanding).
The rise of online fantasy football in the early aughts reflected a sort of garden-variety interest in betting (in the form of the office pool or $50 buy-in), and its defining lowbrow aesthetic was Hooters, reflecting a form of sexism that pervaded much of NFL spectatorship. Barstool Sports represents a massive amplification of this, where the bets are more than doubled down and the sexism has been dialed up by the same factor. Barstool Sports has been uniquely successful in advancing a brand of aggression, and it is beyond coincidence that it sees betting as one of its core lifestyle features, along with an explicitly retrograde politics.
An unhealthy obsession with financial speculation has, of course, suffused societies for centuries. One only needs to point to the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s. But the past few years have brought their own forms of financial speculation that have been rebranded as betting. Just consider the rise of the subreddit r/WallStreetBets. Self-described with the tagline: “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal,” r/WallStreetBets now has 17 million members and is littered with financial memes and message board-adjacent vernacular. It was responsible for the infamous GameStop stock manipulation of January 2021, in which redditors were encouraged to buy GameStop stock and hold it in order to execute a short squeeze (i.e., make the stock’s price rise rapidly). Endorsers of the short squeeze included Current Affairs foe and soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency co-leader Elon Musk. Convicted felon and pharmaceutical price manipulator Martin Shkreli posted regularly on the site. It is clear the site blurs with troublesome politics. “The GameStop pump, like Trumpism, QAnon, or Gamergate, is also a meme first and a political movement second,” wrote Ryan Broderick in The Nation.
Notably, stock trading writ large has seen a turn toward reckless speculation among the general public. Widespread interest in trading has been fueled by platforms like Robinhood, whose mobile app interface makes the experience of trading feel remarkably similar to a video game. Simply put: as with sports betting apps, it is remarkably easy to sink lots of money, by design.
Of course, WallStreetBets, the GameStop short squeeze, and a rise in day trading were just some of the manifestations of a broader form of speculation that dominated the early years of the pandemic. This speculation seems to be returning in full force with Trump’s reelection through perhaps the most insufferable means imaginable: cryptocurrency. I won’t spend much time on crypto here, given that Current Affairs Editor-in-Chief Nathan J. Robinson has already written extensively about it in pieces such as, “Why Cryptocurrency is a Giant Fraud.” But what remains important is that cryptocurrency was and still is both remarkably speculative and virtually indistinguishable from betting. As Annie Lowrey wrote in “The Three Pillars of the Bro-Economy,” “Day-trading, sports betting, and crypto are three floors in one bustling, high-stakes casino.”
This kind of high-risk speculation has pervaded hobbies as well. As I wrote in the pages of Current Affairs in 2021, even sports cards have exploded in value on the basis of enormous speculation, with card sales regularly eclipsing millions of dollars and hobby “enthusiasts” spending tens of thousands of dollars to open sealed packs of cards. Having spent a significant amount of time on sports card Instagram and online forums as a collector myself, I’ve observed that the median card hobbyist now seems to subscribe to more or less the same interests as the Barstool Sports fan and crypto enthusiast: Trump memes and sports betting schemes.
Just as Barstool Sports ushered in an era of unfettered sports betting as a certain kind of lifestyle trait, cryptocurrency and r/WallStreetBets gave way to the rise of the toxic “crypto bro,” whose primary affinities include not only crypto but generalized speculative betting, tacky generative AI art, Trump, memes, and sometimes, AI-generated Trump memes. What has come with these affinities is a kind of irony-poisoned politics, one largely of impatience and low impulse control: what matters is that there is something to speculate on, and one’s masculinity is related to the size of the bet.
If Polymarket’s betting market for the election recalled the New York Times’s election needle, or FiveThirtyEight’s simulations, it was not without coincidence. FiveThirtyEight’s creator and election predictor extraordinaire Nate Silver was hired this summer to work for Polymarket itself. Silver has an extensive background in gambling, having supported himself financially for many years by playing poker. A Sports Illustrated profile of Silver noted that “he made $400,000 over three years, and in his spare time began work on his baseball forecasting model” called PECOTA. It was on the basis of this that his career took off. “In 2003 Silver sold PECOTA to Baseball Prospectus for an equity stake, and every year afterward, until he left in ’09,” reported the profile. In other words, Silver made his name in baseball analytics, or sabermetrics—another form of predictive gambling that, as I’ve written about for Jacobin, reflects a certain encroachment of marketized and financialized logic into sports. It was from this vantage point of baseball that Silver turned to politics. Silver himself told the world this in a 2008 op-ed in the New York Post: “I created a Web site called FiveThirtyEight.com (named after the number of votes in the Electoral College) to try and apply the same scientific spirit that we've used in baseball to the political world.” Silver would later candidly tell us, “even my decision to start FiveThirtyEight… was an unexpected consequence of a law passed by Congress that ended my three-year tenure as a professional poker player.”
Silver’s popular books have been obsessed with betting in one way or another—for example, his profile in The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t of NBA bettor and former Dallas Mavericks Director of Quantitative Research Bob Voulgaris. His most recent book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything—which I’ve seen on display at bookstores across Seattle—goes all in on betting. Just consider the table of contents:
- Part 1: Gambling.
- Chapter 1. Optimization
- Chapter 2. Perception
- Chapter 3. Consumption
- Chapter 4. Competition
Two chapters of the book are about poker; Chapter 4 (“Competition”) is about sports betting. “This is also the most hands-on chapter,” says Silver. “I learned the ropes of the industry the hard way, in an experiment where I bet almost $2 million on the NBA in the 2022-23 season.” (It’s hard not to see this as a rationalized form of a gambling addiction.) Much of the second half of the book is about Sam Bankman-Fried, the one-time crypto billionaire and now-felon. On the Edge is so infused with betting that one heading of the Introduction reads: “So, Uh … What If I’m Just Not That into Gambling?” As the New York Times review of the book summarizes: “In ‘On the Edge,’ the election forecaster argues that the gambler’s mind-set has come to define modern life.”
Silver’s hiring by Polymarket is the logical conclusion to a 20-year obsession with statistical analysis and hunting for edge. Even as FiveThirtyEight became a proper journalistic outlet with staff writers, it is clear that Silver’s appetite for betting was being whetted. Of course, Silver’s professionalization of gambling reflects a broader shift among those with an education and background in quantitative methods and STEM. As I mentioned earlier, a surprising number of statistical minds are competing against each other in betting markets to gain edge. Of course, this mirrors a broader professionalization of quantitative trading on Wall Street—a sort of exodus from basic STEM research and applied engineering jobs to quant jobs supporting increasingly sophisticated trading strategies, whether low-latency approaches or machine learning and game-theoretic approaches to beat market competition. Indeed, the worlds of quantitative trading and sports gambling are essentially blurred: the trading firm Susquehanna just opened a sports betting desk, and, anecdotally, many traders take stints playing professional poker or the like in between trading jobs. Trading firms sponsor poker events with prize pools as a way to recruit college students for internships, and some even teach their employees poker as part of their training.
The self-evident point here is that financial markets themselves are uncannily similar to betting markets. They are glorified by writers like Silver and Michael Lewis, whose narratives serve to recruit STEM graduates into the world of financialized gambling just as Barstool Sports pulls college-aged men into sports betting. It comes as no surprise that Silver has relapsed into sports betting just as Lewis slipped into a blind infatuation with crypto in his most recent No. 1 bestseller, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. It is betting, all the way down. On the one hand, this world is perhaps more measured than Barstool Sports and crypto, in terms of its lifestyle traits. On the other hand, we find that this, too, is enmeshed with politics in a way that ultimately puts profits over people: just as crypto rallied after Trump’s reelection, so too did the financial markets, laying bare an uncomfortable yet important connection between politics and finance.
It is instructive to consider just how fast betting and new modes of speculation more generally have exploded in the United States. As the New York Times reminds us, “Six years ago, sports betting was illegal under federal law.” Limited to Nevada, Delaware, Oregon, and Montana in 2018, sports betting is now legal in 38 states and Washington, D.C. Cryptocurrency exploded in value only a few years ago; regulation has been limited, and what is in place will almost certainly be reversed under the second Trump administration (explaining in part why Bitcoin rose significantly in the weeks after the election). Polymarket is even younger. Though United States residents are forbidden from trading on Polymarket and the Department of Justice is investigating Polymarket for allowing U.S. users to place bets (the CEO’s phone was seized in a recent raid), I doubt Polymarket will wither over the next four years. If we are to do what a sophisticated bettor does—plot the data points and look at the line of best fit—what we extrapolate is that betting is growing at an alarming rate.
While often championed as a form of market and individual freedom, deregulation as a general phenomenon naturally comes at our own expense. We are remarkably bad at making decisions about how we might feel about something in the future. Betting is a prime example of this: it is very difficult for a person placing a first bet with a DraftKings sign-up code to understand how all-consuming and damaging a gambling addiction might be. Gambling, then, is a prime example of a structural problem that’s made worse by deregulation in its various forms, from advertising to making betting on a smartphone easier. Unfortunately, those who are pushing us to gamble the most—DraftKings, Barstool Sports, r/WallStreetBets, crypto influencers, Nate Silver, Polymarket—share one thing in common: they all profit when we bet, and thus, when we lose, again and again.
There are, of course, endless ways to pathologize the proliferation of betting, beyond the regulatory considerations. Marx spoke of alienation under capitalism that decouples one from one's humanity. Sites like Psychology Today lament the rise in “lonely single men” who have presumably too much time on their hands. News outlets regularly cover how goods and services are rapidly becoming unaffordable, which limits options for other activities and forms of leisure. I am less interested in apportioning fractional significance to each of these root causes and am more concerned with what betting as a behavior is bound up with—particular forms of masculinity and cynicism—and how they relate to the present political moment.
In an expansive n+1 piece titled “The Last Last Summer,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Joshua Cohen recounts his time as a teenager working as a coin cashier at Resorts, a casino in Atlantic City. The essay, written around the 2016 election, is from another time. In it, Cohen reflects on Donald Trump’s role in the decline of the gambling haven. Cohen reports some telling statistics:
In the 1980s and ’90s, the casinos with which Trump was associated comprised between a third and a quarter of AC’s gaming industry…. And then there’s the Trump Taj Mahal, which Trump built with the help of Resorts International in 1990 on financial footings so shaky and negligent that by the end of the decade he’d racked up more than $3.4 billion in debt, including business (mostly high-interest junk-bond) and personal debt which he handled by conflating them.
Cohen makes the case that Trump isn’t just a man hopelessly entrenched in a world of gambling but a politician whose very success is predicated upon the emotionality of placing a bet:
It’s this ambient scare that Trump’s put into the populace, and the way that his ruthlessly calculated vulture-swoops through the news cycle serve to moderate, or exacerbate, this emotionalism, regulating it like a professional thrill, that remind me more than anything of gaming: of what it feels like to put my money on the line. It’s as if Trump—this vanity candidate, famous beyond law—is offering all of us a wager: that he can inflame his rhetoric and press his luck without ever pressing it too far—without alienating all women and black and Hispanic voters, and without getting too many Mexicans, or too many Muslims, or even just some white Democrats, beaten up or killed.
At this point, enough ink has been spilled on Donald Trump the man and the criminal. What matters to me is the idea that beneath it all, Trump and MAGA are intimately connected with gambling—not just in an explicitly financial sense but in this deeper way that Cohen aptly picked up on almost a decade ago and which is amplified and rendered even more explicit with each new encroachment of betting into our daily lives. There’s probably not much sense in Monday morning quarterbacking the election at this point, but I find the Barstool Sports-ification of younger men, the erosion of their impulses via the thrills of cryptocurrency and r/WallStreetBets, and the growing seduction of Polymarket-like betting to reflect a deep-seated relationship between financial aggressiveness and, as hackneyed as it sounds, a profoundly toxic form of masculinity—one that Wall Street is both famous for and laid the precedent for. Fifty-six percent of men aged 18-29 voted for Trump in this election, up from 41 percent in 2020. This is, as USA Today proclaimed as part of a recent headline, reflective of the fact that “Gen Z Bros Love MAGA.” I imagine too many of them followed the election by monitoring Polymarket, not for the political implications of the real-time probability updates but rather for the bet itself—their votes cast as a perverted sort of skin in the game that gave way to surges of dopamine as the market resolved to Trump.
In his n+1 piece, Cohen goes on to conclude the section on Trump and gambling with the observation that:
Ironically enough, most of the more reliable sites that’ll trade US election action for cash are registered in the UK, the Bahamas, or elsewhere abroad, because America doesn’t quite approve of betting on politics – not because betting on politics is cynical, but because it’s considered a variety of sports betting, which is illegal in all but four of the states. America: a country in which even a noble law has to be justified through the drudgery of precedent and stupid technicality.
Here we are, eight years later, at a time in which this law on sports betting has long since been overturned by the Supreme Court, and betting on anything, even as an American citizen, seems more and more of a possibility within the next four years. Of course, this was always possible in financial markets through various market positions—but now, the bets might be made explicit. Perhaps the addendum to Cohen’s proclamation should read:
