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Anisa Khalifa: In 2018, the US Supreme Court ruled that states could legalize sports gambling.

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Unidentified Anchor: It ruled unconstitutional a 25 year old law that had barred most states from legalizing sports betting.

Anisa Khalifa: Since then, 38 states have taken the plunge, including my home state of North Carolina, where the consequences have been lucrative.

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Unidentified Anchor: Sports betting apps, they made more than 105 million dollars in April. That translates to nearly 19 million dollars in taxes collected by the state.

Anisa Khalifa: Upstarts and even established media companies like Disney-owned ESPN have flooded the market. And in many places, you can even gamble from your phone. That ease of access means you don't have to go to the casino anymore. But all of this also has a human toll.

Jason Quick: In about three to five years, we're going to see an onslaught of people who have lost their houses, lost their jobs, lost their marriages because of problem gambling.

Anisa Khalifa: I’m Anisa Khalifa. This is The Broadside, where we tell stories from our home in North Carolina at the crossroads of the South. This week, the rapid spread of online sports gambling, and how it's changing the game for both fans and players.

Jason deBruyn: Let's see. What was it on Tuesday? On Tuesday I won $21 on the Hurricanes. So right at even for the week…

Anisa Khalifa: Jason deBruyn is the Supervising Editor for Digital ¹ÏÉñapp at ¹ÏÉñapp. He’s also a sports fanatic who loves soccer, Carolina Panthers football — and March Madness.

Jason deBruyn: So I've been a sports fan my whole life. And one fun aspect of sports is just, you know, trying to predict what's going to happen.

Anisa Khalifa: Yeah. And I know you always do really well on the company bracket. Or I've noticed I'm like usually not even participating because I don't know anything.

Jason deBruyn: Yeah. Right. And so, I mean, that's just part of sports culture.

Anisa Khalifa: Despite his predictive powers, Jason has never really had more than a casual interest in betting on sports. But that changed last year when North Carolina became one of 30 states in recent years to legalize online sports gambling. He got… a little obsessed.

Tell us about this tracking of your bets that you've been doing. So you have, like, listeners can't see it, but there's, he's got this, like, spreadsheet open in front of him.

Jason deBruyn: Yes. Uh, so longtime ¹ÏÉñapp listeners might remember that I'm the former data reporter here. Um, and so I have done a lot of data work and I knew that I was going to be placing a lot more bets. And I was like, all right, let's really track this. Let's see how we're doing. And so my spreadsheet is split up here into soccer, NBA, college football, college basketball, NFL, major league baseball, NHL, and totals.

Anisa Khalifa: That already is making my head hurt.

Jason deBruyn: And this is going to make you, this is gonna be terrible. In the NFL one, I've placed 282 bets.

Anisa Khalifa: Wow.

Jason deBruyn: Um, this season and that's just on the NFL, but I'm happy to say that the total I'm up $213.76 on this NFL season. Mostly, this is gonna get people like really mad at me, mostly betting against the Panthers.

Anisa Khalifa: Jason!

Jason deBruyn: I know, I know, I know, I know. Well, I saw early on, I was like, look, the Panthers stink. They're gonna stink. Might as well at least make a little money off them, right? So, yeah. That accounts for the vast majority of me being up on the NFL is betting against the Panthers. I know that's terrible to say.

Anisa Khalifa: You betrayed your own people.

Jason deBruyn: I did.

Anisa Khalifa: You made money.

Jason deBruyn: I did betray them.

Anisa Khalifa: While his stat-tracking might be a bit intense, Jason’s foray into online sports betting isn’t unusual. A recent study showed that 1 in 5 Americans now have a sports betting account. And the money here is mind-blowing. In the nine months since legalization, North Carolinians placed nearly 5 billion dollars worth of bets. Nationwide — the number in 2024 was a staggering 150 billion dollars. For many governments, the opportunity to tax revenue generated by sports gambling is just too good to pass up....

Jason Quick: It wouldn’t surprise me if in a few years all 50 states legalize gambling.

Anisa Khalifa: Jason Quick is a senior writer for The Athletic. He’s covered the NBA for 28 years…

Jason Quick: …but lately I've been branching out and doing more stories that focus on the human connection between sports and people.

Anisa Khalifa: And right now, that intersection is dominated by the sports gambling gold rush. Jason says two companies are currently leading the charge.

Jason Quick: Oh, definitely FanDuel and DraftKings, um, with, Online gambling. They're the big fish and they are, you know, swamping the airwaves, be it radio, television, you know, print ads trying to lure people in.

(MONTAGE OF SPORTS GAMBLING ADS)

Unidentified Narrators: He's fast. Download the DraftKings sports book app at just $5 to get, customers get a profit boost every NFL game day. Get up to a $1500 new customer offer and bonus bets when you sign up now. Let's go, North Carolina. America's number one sports book is coming to North Carolina on March 11th.

Anisa Khalifa: Yeah. I mean, I remember when, um, gambling was legalized in North Carolina last year, and it was like every single podcast that I listened to had ads for like sports betting, sports gambling. It was constant.

Jason Quick: They're luring people in. With kind of the same technology and same mechanisms that Vegas uses with slot machines with various colors with sounds and with wording that kind of make you not think that you're gambling money.

Anisa Khalifa: And then what about big sports networks like ESPN, for example? How do they interact with this new sports gambling, uh, sort of ecosystem?

Jason Quick: That's been a really interesting development. As of late, they're incorporating it into their broadcasts. I mean, ESPN, if you look on, uh, NFL, their pregame shows, they have segments about betting.

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Kenny Smith: Here are tonight's betting odds, brought to you by FanDuel's sportsbook, the number 1 sportsbook in America, Charles, don't say anything…

Jason Quick: TNT with the NBA. They have their talking heads Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith have a little segment of this is what we would recommend today. So it's become a part of the mainstream everyday broadcasts.

Anisa Khalifa: So sports betting, I mean, this new form of it is certainly something we haven't seen before, but sports betting in itself is nothing new, right? As long as we've had sports, people have been making bets, um, and gambling on them. So what makes this different?

Jason Quick: Well, it used to be, you had to go to a casino or know a bookie to place a bet. Now it's on your phone. You can do it. From your couch on your break at work, during a meeting at work, you can hide it from your family easily by just going to the bathroom and taking your phone with you and placing bets. So it's a mobile and accessible tool. And that's why I think it has exploded. It's so easy to do it.

And also you don't have to have ready cash like you do in a casino. This with your phone, Or with your computer, you have funds that are, you know, wired from your bank account and so you have ready money there, you know, you don't have to go to the bank and have actual money in your hand and I think that's another tool that makes it dangerous for some people.

Anisa Khalifa: Is there something in particular about sports gambling that makes them feel overconfident about betting on games? What is that?

Jason Quick: That's what it is about sports because most sports fans. are fanatics. They follow their teams. They follow their leagues. They feel like they're well informed. Other gambling, you know, like roulette or blackjack, it involves a great deal of luck and just happenstance and chance.

These guys feel no. I know the Kansas City Chiefs. I know their defense. They're not going to give up. More than 20 points. So I'm going to bet the under, uh, but that is why sports gambling is so big and so popular and so dangerous because people feel like they're not gambling. They feel like they're making informed decisions and informed predictions on what is going to happen.

Anisa Khalifa: You recently wrote an astonishing account of one man's experience with these apps. Who is Jordan Holt?

Jason Quick: Yeah. Jordan's a really relatable guy. He's a former Marine. He lives in Yuma, Arizona. He's 42 and he. Was terrified of gambling because one day back in the mid 2000s, he went to an Indian casino after work and just wanted to play some blackjack with buddies and, uh, have a good night. And he figured he'd be willing to bet about 200 bucks. Well, he ended up losing about 2000. And it brought him to tears. He went to his girlfriend and said, I'm an idiot. You know, I just lost a bunch of money. So he thought he was, uh, done with gambling. He didn't gamble for like the next 15 or so years. And then online gambling came to Arizona.

It's one of the states that passed online gambling and he resisted and resisted, but his friends kept saying, come on, look, it's easy. If you join, I get 50 bucks and you get 50 free bucks. And the next thing you know, he was, uh, placing little bets and he was winning. He ended up doing all right at the start, but then he wanted more. And he started play some bigger and bigger bets and started this slippery slope that, uh, long story short, In 15 months, in a span of 15 months, he lost 110,000 dollars and nearly lost his marriage.

Anisa Khalifa: That's a crazy amount of money. So for Jordan, what was really his rock bottom?

Jason Quick: Well, there were a series of them. Uh, you know, he kept having to take out loans and the first big loan he had was, uh, 50,000 dollars. And he had to, that's when he knew he had to tell his wife just how deep he had fallen. And so they took out a loan and he told her that, okay, I'm done. I'm quitting. But he didn't, he kept dabbling. It kept making even bigger bets and he was nearing the end of his money.

And so in January he came up and he said, I'm going to make one last Hail Mary, he called it. And it was a 12 team parlay. And that means there's 12 different bets. He makes that form into one bet. And the advantage of parlays is they pay out big. The danger of them is, if one thing goes wrong, you lose it all.

Anisa Khalifa: So he needed all 12 of his predictions to come true in order to get that payoff.

Jason Quick: Yes.

Anisa Khalifa: Wow.

Jason Quick: And so in January, he made a 12 leg parlay and as he got off work, he noticed that 10 of them had already hit.

Anisa Khalifa: We did the math. Jordan’s bet was so improbable that it had less than a 10th of a single percentage point chance of paying out. But here he was, within inches of a lifeline, turning 200 dollars into twenty thousand. When we return from the break, we find out what happened with Jordan's Hail Mary parlay, and look at the long term consequences of legalized sports gambling in America.

At the start of his evening commute, Jordan Holt won the 11th game out of 12 in his longshot bet, setting up what would become the most stressful drive of his life.

Jason Quick: So as he's driving home. He's got one leg left to win 20, 000 off a 200 bet. That game is the Boston Celtics who are the best team in the NBA — they went on to win the NBA championship — against the Milwaukee Bucks and he needed the score to go over, I believe it was 240-some points.

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Unidentified Sports Announcer: Boston winning last night to go 18-0 on their home floor.

Anisa Khalifa: Reporter Jason Quick says this was a pretty reasonable wager. The game featured two of the highest-scoring teams in professional basketball.

Jason Quick: But as it turned out, the Celtics had one of their worst games of the season. Again, this is the NBA champions and they went, I think like a five or six minutes spell without even scoring and he needs points.

Unidentified Sports Announcer: A resounding victory, the Milwaukee Bucks even up the season series. And a 33…

Jason Quick: So he's just. He's going crazy. He's in the driveway of his house and he learns that they didn't hit the number. He lost all of his money. And so he goes, he's walking into his house going, how am I going to tell my wife that I did it again? I lost all of our money again. And uh, so he had to face the music and all hell broke loose. And that's kind of one of the side effects of problem gambling. Um, is the lying and the hiding and the secret life you have to lead. And I think that's what was really eating at Jordan throughout this whole process. He was leading a secret life.

Anisa Khalifa: Right. And it's kind of a hallmark of this type of addiction, right? Is that the, that you end up in these cycles. I mean, understanding that it is a disease, like, was he able to get help? Um, is he doing better now? Are they doing better now?

Jason Quick: Yes, he's doing better. He goes to, uh, three Gambler's Anonymous, uh, meetings a week. And it's interesting, I talked to a Gambling Anonymous representative and they said they have seen an onslaught since online gambling has been legalized. They have seen their age demographic shift greatly. It used to be a 40 year old would be the youngest person in their room. Now it's 20 year olds.

Anisa Khalifa: Wow.

Jason Quick: Because of sports and the online appeal to young people and in the phones. So we're seeing a shift and this is just the beginning. They're bracing for a huge, huge onslaught of people with problem gambling characteristics.

Anisa Khalifa: That's shocking. I mean, what struck me reading your story is that people can want to stop and get help. I mean, Jordan wanted to stop and get help, but there are these mechanisms, right? That kind of keep pulling them back in and keep enticing them. Can you tell me about these enticements? So when people like Jordan try to pull away and stop betting in the apps, what happens?

Jason Quick: Multiple times he tried to quit and when he would go even three days without placing a bet, that's when he would get an email. Hey, Jordan, we noticed you haven't bet. Here's 200 to play with. And then he would get, well, I can't pass that up. And the next thing you know, he's back on another, another bender making, making bets. So he felt he was trying to, multiple times trying to quit, but that's when they would send out, you know, emails and offers. That lure is so great for someone who has this addiction, that they have no chance.

Anisa Khalifa: When we talk about the human toll of gambling, a lot of times we think about people like Jordan, right? But there's this weird twist to this story that's been playing out in a really public way. How has this started to impact players?

Jason Quick: Well, I mean, uh, It's broad. From one standpoint players are now feeling the heat from jilted gamblers. I'm around the NBA a lot. I speak a lot to players and you see them now post online, I don't care about your parlay bet. Because fans are lashing out at them, that you cost me this much money by not scoring enough points or you cost me my parlay because you didn't score enough points.

Anisa Khalifa: That is just wild.

Jason Quick: It is. It really is. So there's, it's increased the hostility between fans and players. And this happens even live at games. Players have said that fans from the stands will yell at them that I need you to get two more rebounds for my bet. And players are just like, we don't care about your bet. You know, we're, this is our profession.

Anisa Khalifa: Wow.

Jason Quick: But then also this has extended to players. Players in the NFL have been suspended by the league because they are gambling on games. There's been a player in the NBA, Jontay Porter, was, has been banned from the NBA because he was betting on his own games. Speaking with professors and people who are deep into this dynamic, they think we're just seeing the start of this. Because problem gambling usually takes anywhere from one to three years to develop.

And so, because the legalization is so new, we have yet to see the patterns and the, the problems develop. But in about three to five years, we're going to see an onslaught of people really who have lost their, their houses, their homes, uh, lost their jobs, lost their marriages because of problem gambling.

Anisa Khalifa: You've been around sports as a fan and as a journalist for your whole life. Do you think that this is good for sports?

Jason Quick: That's a, that's a really good question. I mean, I do some, I dabble in it if, uh, you know, like for the Super Bowl, it's fun to be at a Super Bowl party and compare little bets with people. But I think if there was more guardrail set up, I would be more, uh, more accepting of it, but I, I think it's really dangerous. So I think my answer would be, no, I don't think this is good for sports. It's like the wild, wild West out there. And I think the industry is a little bit too predatory.

Jason deBruyn: All right. So I had like a big Cowboys parlay. That didn't hit, I had, Oh, here's a parlay. Saquon and Bijon both to have over 50 and Drake Lund to have 50 receiving. I had uh, Pitts and Goddard, two tight ends to both score a touchdown. Um, here's just a straight Eagles to win…

Anisa Khalifa: Just like Jason Quick, ¹ÏÉñapp's Jason deBruyn gambles for fun. Even if his spreadsheets are a little intimidating. And it’s important to point out that most people who gamble do not become addicted. But an estimated 1-2% of the US population are gambling addicts. It can sound like a small number, but that’s several million people. And it’s something that’s never far from his mind.

It seems like you've been really strategic about, you know, as you described, making sure you read the fine print and, you know, only choosing the bets that are going to be like most advantageous, but like for someone who's not able to do that or who doesn't know how to do that, could these types of quote unquote free money giveaways be seen as predatory?

Jason deBruyn: Yeah. I think, yes, and I think that's part of the big problem here, um, is that, you know, a lot of this is being marketed specifically maybe to people who aren't reading the fine print, who aren't taking a close look. And I think that very much can be seen as predatory, and really targeting people who, yeah, are in many ways more vulnerable than I am.

Anisa Khalifa: So, in general, how are you doing when it comes to sports gambling?

Jason deBruyn: Pretty well, I think. I have not — my swings are never that big, right? I, for me, a standard bet is 5 dollars, right? So we are not talking a lot of money. And yeah, it's, it's just a lot of fun.

Anisa Khalifa: How much money have you made?

Jason deBruyn: So if I look at my spreadsheet, I'm currently up like more than 2000 dollars. That's maybe why it's easy for me to have a bit of a cavalier attitude about it, right? Because I am up, if I were down 2000 dollars, would I have a different opinion? Possibly.

Anisa Khalifa: Should I ask you again in six months?

Jason deBruyn: You can ask me again in six months, see where I'm at. It's something I have also considered, right? Because like, I kind of went into this saying, I'm never going to go down too much, but if I'm up two grand, like, that's nice. So maybe I'm not the best person to ask at this moment in time, you know, I can be realistic about that. Um, but yeah, that's where I'm at.

Anisa Khalifa: Okay. We're good.

Jason deBruyn: Got any picks you want, you got any bets you want me to place for you? What you want? What you want?

Anisa Khalifa: No, thanks, but I hope you enjoy.

If you want to check out Jason Quick’s incredible reporting about gambling addiction in The Athletic, we’ve dropped a link in this week’s show notes. This episode of the Broadside was produced by me – Anisa Khalifa – and our editor Jerad Walker. Wilson Sayre is our executive producer. The Broadside is a production of ¹ÏÉñapp–North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR Network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend! Thanks for listening y'all. We'll be back next week.