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Episode: How sports gambling blew up

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:30:15

Episode Shownotes

Sports gambling isn't exactly a financial market, but it rhymes with financial markets. What happens on Wall Street somehow eventually also happens in sports gambling. So in the 1980s, when computers and deep statistical analysis entered the markets, it also entered the sportsbooks and changed the world of sports gambling

in ways we see every day now.On today's episode, we have a story from Michael Lewis' new season of his podcast Against The Rules. We hear from a bookie who was able to beat the odds using statistical analysis, and the other bookie who managed to beat those odds, using an even more subtle science: behavioral analysis. Plus, how it's harder than ever to win against the house, and why those offers of free bets in TV ads are maybe not such a good idea.This episode was hosted by Michael Lewis and Mary Childs. Our version of the podcast was produced by Emma Peaslee and edited by Martina Castro. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Full Transcript

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00:02:17 Speaker_07
In 2018, there was a Supreme Court decision that completely, totally, wildly changed the way Americans engage with one of their favorite pastimes, sports. The decision removed the federal ban on betting on games.

00:02:33 Speaker_07
So now you can be sitting at the bar with your friends watching the Philadelphia Eagles, go birds, and pick up your phone, open an app like DraftKings, and bet all your money on the Eagles winning, or losing. And this is really new.

00:02:48 Speaker_07
It's this huge sea change. And it's the subject of a recent episode of Michael Lewis's podcast, Against the Rules. Hi, Michael Lewis.

00:02:57 Speaker_15
Hello, Mary.

00:02:58 Speaker_07
Thank you for joining us. This is such a fascinating phenomenon that kind of didn't exist six years ago.

00:03:04 Speaker_15
This is what drew me to the subject in the first place. It's like what an incredible social experiment we're engaged in without anybody paying it much attention that sports gambling goes from being, I mean, not just illegal, it's a taboo.

00:03:17 Speaker_15
It's like Pete Rose can't be in the Hall of Fame because he gambled on sports. All the commissioners of the sports league say sports gambling is evil. Anytime a player gets near it, they're tossed from the game.

00:03:28 Speaker_07
And now, all of a sudden, 39 states have legalized sports gambling. And the sports leagues themselves are encouraging it.

00:03:36 Speaker_15
They go from being, you know, really loudly hostile to sports gambling to this is the future.

00:03:43 Speaker_07
Do you want to do the thing? Do you want to say it?

00:03:45 Speaker_15
You mean introduce your show?

00:03:46 Speaker_07
Yeah.

00:03:47 Speaker_15
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Michael Lewis.

00:03:54 Speaker_07
And I'm Mary Childs. Today on the show, Michael Lewis' show about the power of being the house and beating the dealer. About how the world of sports betting got more and more complicated and how that changed who wins. Michael, what will there be?

00:04:09 Speaker_15
There will be two characters, one from the distant past in Vegas and one from the current modern world of sports gambling, each of whom figured out how to get an edge in the game.

00:04:19 Speaker_07
And we will learn how this world has evolved to a place where I might lose my life savings taking advice from an ad on TV.

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00:05:12 Speaker_07
Today we are hearing from Michael Lewis all about the evolution of sports gambling. The story starts in the old-school world in the 1970s in Las Vegas, Nevada, the only state where people could legally gamble on sports.

00:05:26 Speaker_07
We're about to meet a person who will discover that he can outsmart the system and become one of the biggest players in sports gambling.

00:05:35 Speaker_12
I always had an interest in sports. My father coached me in swimming, coached me in tennis. That's Michael Roxborough. Everyone just calls him Roxy now. But my world changed when I found out you could gamble on it. I became no longer a fan.

00:05:49 Speaker_12
I became interested in gambling.

00:05:51 Speaker_15
He grew up in the 1950s in Canada in a nice upper middle class family. He's now Zooming with me from a home in rural Thailand with the AC blasting in the background and a straw fedora on his head.

00:06:03 Speaker_15
and the emotional feel of a man in a witness protection program, a placeless man.

00:06:08 Speaker_12
I decided that if I'm going to look at sports betting, I need to look at it statistically driven, data driven, not by visual or instinct or just watching a lot of games.

00:06:21 Speaker_15
Outcomes in sports were obviously far less regular and predictable than outcomes inside slot machines, or even at blackjack tables. But that didn't mean you couldn't learn stuff about sports that would allow you to make better predictions.

00:06:33 Speaker_15
Not perfect predictions, but better predictions than everyone else betting on games in the 1970s. Roxy had baseball in mind.

00:06:41 Speaker_15
The guys who booked baseball, legally in Nevada and illegally everywhere else, offered gamblers the chance to bet on not just who would win the game, but how many runs both teams would score. Roxy had an insight that seems obvious now.

00:06:55 Speaker_15
The number of runs scored in any baseball game depended on factors like the weather at game time and the size of the fields. San Diego's was a good example.

00:07:05 Speaker_12
You just could not hit the ball out of there. And then the Padres went and spent like an outrageous contract to sign a guy like Oscar Gamble. All he did was hit fly balls. And that park was a place where fly balls went to die.

00:07:17 Speaker_12
So you soon found out that general managers really didn't know anything about their own ballparks either.

00:07:23 Speaker_15
The idea that the people who run sports teams don't know what they're doing has probably never been a new idea. Fans have always thought that they know better. What was new is that someone in the stands was actually figuring something out.

00:07:36 Speaker_15
The effects of the wind and the humidity and the barometric pressure on a ball that was flying through the air.

00:07:41 Speaker_12
We started to start getting weather reports from all the cities to parse out which ones helped scoring or hindered scoring. And dimensions, right? I mean, just the length of the left field fence. Dimensions were important.

00:07:54 Speaker_12
And we found out a couple of the ballpark dimensional drawings were wrong. They had the North Pole wrong. well-pointed north, because we went out and did them ourselves.

00:08:08 Speaker_15
Roxy moves to Vegas full-time in 1975 to bet on sports. And just by taking into account the weather and the size of ballparks, he's able to make a killing, while trying to avoid the people who know a thing or two about actual killing.

00:08:24 Speaker_15
Were the Nevada legal bookmakers effectively run by the mob? They would have had a hand until about the late 70s. In that environment, was it dangerous to win too much?

00:08:39 Speaker_12
No, because actually what they would do is they could find somebody else who could take your bet and they can move it for more money someplace else in the country.

00:08:51 Speaker_15
The old sports gambling market inside the United States was shady, but it had its unwritten rules. And one was that they always took your bets. If you bet a lot, they eventually moved the lines. These betting lines were all set in Vegas.

00:09:06 Speaker_15
For a very long stretch, they were actually set in a single Vegas casino, the Stardust. The bookie at the Stardust set the odds, and everyone else just followed his lead.

00:09:17 Speaker_15
There was a bank of payphones outside the Stardust that were said to be the most profitable in the country for the phone company, because sports gamblers used them to relay the odds to the illegal bookies and bettors across the country.

00:09:28 Speaker_15
Communications back then was just with a phone call. That was the only communications there were. In the late 1970s, the Nevada Gaming Control Board tossed the mob out of Vegas and out of sports gambling. And pretty soon, Roxy became old news.

00:09:44 Speaker_15
By the early 1980s, everyone knew that the weather and the size of ballparks had big effects on baseball scorers. And Roxy never found another systematic edge. And his life became a bit of a mess. He'd been arrested for violating the Wire Act.

00:09:58 Speaker_15
He'd taken crazy risks as an illegal bookmaker, and he'd run through two marriages. Is a gambling business hard on relationships?

00:10:06 Speaker_12
It's arrogant. Why? It just sort of takes over your mood and your personality. I don't know anybody who's ever been in gambling who thought they were a better person for it.

00:10:17 Speaker_15
That's interesting, because when you think about why a person would drift into gambling in the first place, it would be because you think it might be an easy way to make money.

00:10:25 Speaker_12
Yes.

00:10:26 Speaker_15
And it ends up being a harder way to make money.

00:10:29 Speaker_12
It does. What did they say? It's a hard way to make an easy living.

00:10:33 Speaker_15
People said that. Roxy now knew it. So in 1982, he quits gambling. He creates a company called Las Vegas Sports Consultants. This new company will effectively replace the Stardust Casino in setting the odds for all major sports contests.

00:10:50 Speaker_15
Roxy's just better at it. And pretty soon he's selling his odds to all the sports bookies, including the Stardust. This makes sense to everybody in Las Vegas.

00:11:01 Speaker_15
Hiring Roxy to set the odds in sports is like hiring the first card counter to guard the blackjack tables.

00:11:06 Speaker_12
So I said, you know, I'm going to try this for a couple of years, but I'm not sure if it's going to work because it wasn't a given that every hotel was going to have a sports book. It was a rather limited business.

00:11:18 Speaker_12
But that was one of my better decisions because it turned out to be a massive business.

00:11:23 Speaker_15
Sports gambling isn't exactly a financial market, but it rhymes with financial markets. What happens on Wall Street somehow eventually also happens in sports gambling. And Wall Street's about to undergo dramatic change.

00:11:35 Speaker_15
First computers and then the internet will allow the markets to become a lot more complicated and the bets a lot more complex. The world's about to speed up and a new kind of person with a different kind of education is going to enter it.

00:11:48 Speaker_15
Old school traders with high school degrees are about to be replaced by PhDs from MIT with computer models, who as kids thought they'd grow up to be professors, not traders.

00:11:58 Speaker_15
On Wall Street in the late 1980s, smart old school guys served as a kind of bridge between the two cultures. In sports gambling, Roxy was that bridge, but it took a while for anyone to cross it. We're here to see Rufus Peabody.

00:12:19 Speaker_15
We're in the right place. We're still in Vegas, but far from the Strip. The real action is no longer on the Strip. The real action is basically invisible.

00:12:32 Speaker_15
But here, on the 17th floor, with a sweeping view of the distant casinos, Rufus Peabody lives and works.

00:12:42 Speaker_13
Rufus Peabody is who crossed Roxy's bridge. I never was a bettor as a kid. I didn't know anything about sports betting. You didn't feel a little twinge of desire? None.

00:12:53 Speaker_13
Most people that got their start, they started losing and then they learned how to win. But I was never a bettor. I never grew up betting, like, besides NCAA tournament pools. I was always good at those. But for me, it was a game.

00:13:05 Speaker_15
Rufus grew up outside of Washington, D.C. always loved sports, thought he might like to be a sports journalist. But even when he was a kid, his mind took him places that journalism usually doesn't.

00:13:16 Speaker_13
So it was this team won 82 to 64, but why did they win? Basically, I kind of wanted to report on the why it happened.

00:13:23 Speaker_15
You wanted explanations.

00:13:24 Speaker_13
I wanted explanations.

00:13:25 Speaker_15
In 2004, Rufus graduated from high school and went to Yale. He was still obsessed with figuring out why. He studied statistics and built models that predicted the performance of athletes and the outcomes of sporting events.

00:13:40 Speaker_15
Not because he wanted to gamble on them, just because it was cool to figure out stuff that even people who run sports teams don't know. He wanders around Yale looking for someone to teach him more.

00:13:51 Speaker_14
Rufus wants to do a thesis on, if I remember correctly, behavioral biases and the baseball betting market. He's who Rufus found. His name is Cade Massey. He's a professor of organizational behavior. Was it interesting? Oh yeah, absolutely.

00:14:08 Speaker_14
I mean, what's not interesting about trying to find psychological mistakes that people make with like, you know, hundreds of thousands of observations of real money being bet. And he found mistakes.

00:14:19 Speaker_14
I mean, he was finding profitable strategies right off the bat. Rufus just kept asking questions about the behavior of sports gamblers.

00:14:27 Speaker_15
He still wasn't placing bets himself. He was just working with this professor to build a model to predict college football scores. They pitched it to the Wall Street Journal and the journal agreed to publish their college football picks of the week.

00:14:40 Speaker_14
It was just how they would bet were they to bet on college football. And he would then post our picks of the week. We're just posting them because we were working with the Wall Street Journal.

00:14:48 Speaker_14
So post them on Tuesday or Wednesday and then he would watch as the prices started moving on his screen. Oh my God.

00:14:55 Speaker_15
Which is to say the sports gambling market would see their picks and move in response.

00:15:01 Speaker_14
Because the market figured out that their picks were that good. Within a year or so, we quit posting college picks because it was getting too much in the way of what he was trying to do. Because he wanted to bet it himself.

00:15:13 Speaker_15
Because he wanted to bet it. I mean, it was bound to eventually occur to Rufus that if he could predict the scores of college football games, then he should just bet on them himself. But it's funny how he got there in his head.

00:15:24 Speaker_15
Roxy Roxborough had started as a gambler, who then set out to find some kind of edge to bet. Rufus Peabody started by finding these edges and kind of stumbled into gambling, and then found Roxy.

00:15:40 Speaker_15
During Rufus' junior year at Yale, he read an article in ESPN about Roxy's sports analytics company, Las Vegas Sports Consultants. Roxy's company wasn't used to getting resumes from Yale juniors.

00:15:54 Speaker_15
but they gave him a summer internship anyway and showed him their world from their offices right next to the Las Vegas airport.

00:16:01 Speaker_13
They would bet on what plane was most likely to land next, right? And this is like sort of pre-internet days or pre like being able to see flight plans and stuff like that.

00:16:09 Speaker_13
And so it was like, okay, American Airlines is like six to one, like, you know, Southwest is two to one, whatever. What people didn't realize though was Roxy actually had a contact in the control tower. And so Roxy won. He made money off of these bets.

00:16:29 Speaker_13
But he didn't make enough to draw suspicion. That was the key. But he would occasionally hit the Japan air at 301, right? Or whatever.

00:16:41 Speaker_15
Roxy's crew would bet on everything. Rufus wasn't like that. He didn't even think of what he wanted to do as gambling. But he did want to understand this other world, this world where people bet on anything that moved.

00:16:56 Speaker_07
Rufus wanted to see if he could take things a step further than Roxy had ever gone and use people's own biases against them. That's after the break.

00:17:12 Speaker_03
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00:18:43 Speaker_07
We are about to hear what happened in the aftermath of the 2018 Supreme Court decision that opened the door to legalizing sports gambling, the world we live in now, where online sports betting companies like DraftKings and FanDuel are dominant.

00:18:57 Speaker_07
They are the new house. But back before all of that, Rufus Peabody was going to take a step in that direction, using more powerful tools and better information to refine the odds.

00:19:10 Speaker_07
And he tells Michael Lewis about some new ideas he had about how to use all of that.

00:19:16 Speaker_13
A bookmaker can make more money. Let's say if they know the public's bias, they can make more money setting a line somewhere between the true price and the price the public thinks. That's the way to maximize.

00:19:26 Speaker_15
There's no reason you should understand what Rufus just said there. But let me try to explain it because it tells you a bit about how this old school sports gambling world works. The line is just the odds or the point spread.

00:19:38 Speaker_15
The true price is what the odds would be if you somehow knew every possible relevant bit of information about some upcoming game.

00:19:48 Speaker_15
Of course, no one ever knows everything, so there is in reality never a perfect true price, just some number that the smartest and best-informed bettors agree on.

00:19:58 Speaker_15
Say they agree that the Packers should be eight-point favorites over the Cowboys, but most of the gamblers are Cowboys fans. And the Cowboys fans think the Cowboys are only three point underdogs.

00:20:10 Speaker_15
Rufus was asking if he can entice the public to make more stupid bets if he set the line not at the true price of eight points, but at, say, five points. Because Cowboys fans will think the Cowboys are better than they actually are and bet even more.

00:20:24 Speaker_13
I said, theoretically, you can make more money setting a line somewhere between the true price and where the public thinks the price is.

00:20:31 Speaker_15
Rufus Peabody, recently of Yale, is no one's idea of a hustler. He's too sweet-natured and even-tempered, and way too open to telling other people about the stuff he's learned.

00:20:42 Speaker_15
He finishes up at Yale and moves back to Vegas to work full-time at Las Vegas sports consultants. But now Rufus thinks he might have an edge, and people in and around Roxy's firm think that maybe he's right.

00:20:54 Speaker_15
The Super Bowl was my first big break, Super Bowl 2009.

00:20:57 Speaker_13
The Pittsburgh Steelers played the Arizona Cardinals. I had made a friend with a professional sports better, a guy that bet baseball. And he loaned me $10,000 to bet. I had my own $10,000 to $12,000.

00:21:11 Speaker_13
My boss, Kenny, unbeknownst to everybody else, invested $40,000 in me and gave me a 20% free roll on it. Meaning that if it wins, you take 20% of the profits. But you suffered another losses. Correct.

00:21:27 Speaker_13
And so I ended up with close to $60,000 bet on the Super Bowl. And so I basically was pretty leveraged. Yeah. And I remember being like, if this game doesn't work out, you know, I gave it a shot. All right.

00:21:40 Speaker_13
And what is causing you to have such conviction about a game? Oh, nothing. It wasn't conviction about the game. It was betting the props.

00:21:47 Speaker_15
The props. Short for proposition bets. Rufus wasn't betting the whole game, but pieces of the game. His pro football model spits out odds for all this weird stuff that Vegas bookies are now offering bets on.

00:22:00 Speaker_15
The odds that Steelers running back Gary Russell will score the game's first touchdown, for example. Rufus has vast troves of data to mine. He can do stuff with it that Roxy would never imagine.

00:22:13 Speaker_15
He could do stuff that even the people who run the Pittsburgh Steelers would never imagine doing. I mean, even Gary Russell likely has no idea that you can calculate the odds that he will score the game's first touchdown. But Rufus can.

00:22:27 Speaker_15
His model puts those odds much higher than the bookies' odds. So in Rufus's mind, it's a great bet. He makes dozens of similar bets, bets where his model tells him that the bookies are giving him better odds than they should.

00:22:40 Speaker_13
I still remember going, it was like Harrah's, Caesars, the Rio. I ended up getting down like $200 at a time, like $5,000 positions on a few things that were really good. And so I was diversified. Within the game. Within the game.

00:23:01 Speaker_13
I wasn't betting on the outcome of the game, but I still, to this day, have never watched that game. I was too nervous. How did you experience the game if you didn't watch it?

00:23:10 Speaker_13
I went to this little par-3 course that's open at night right south of the airport, and I played the par-3 course twice until I felt like the game would definitely be over. And then I went grocery shopping.

00:23:26 Speaker_13
And I didn't have a smart, this is pre-smartphone. I went grocery shopping and then I went home and cooked myself dinner. And then and only then did I open my computer and check and see how the game went.

00:23:38 Speaker_13
And were you just going through your prop bets seeing what happened? First I looked at the box score and I saw the first score was Gary Russell one yard touchdown run. I was like, ah, right.

00:23:48 Speaker_13
And it turned out out of like $56,000 bet, like I profited like 23,000 on it.

00:23:56 Speaker_15
Rufus figures out how much he's won. Then he physically retraces his steps to the many casinos that had taken his many bets, still driving an old Honda Civic. You had all these little tickets. You have to cash them. Each one individually.

00:24:10 Speaker_15
So you must have had a hundred tickets.

00:24:13 Speaker_13
Yeah, probably.

00:24:14 Speaker_15
He just drives around Las Vegas, and the money piles up.

00:24:19 Speaker_13
And I remember having like $30,000 on that front seat and being like, oh my God, so much money. In cash? In cash.

00:24:30 Speaker_15
After that, lots of people in Vegas wanted to lend money to Rufus and take a cut of his bets. Rufus, for his part, was still sitting in his office in Las Vegas Sports Consultants.

00:24:41 Speaker_15
But pretty soon he was directing an army of people to lay bets in sports books across the city. sports books that got their odds from Las Vegas sports consultants. Rufus was in effect betting against the lines created by Roxy's firm.

00:24:56 Speaker_15
Roxy himself had moved on at this point, but he watched what Rufus was doing, and he admired it.

00:25:02 Speaker_12
He came to boot camp one time, madam. Even after one lunch, he said, this guy's thinking at a higher level than other people. And I learned a lot from him, not because he was divulging his secrets, but he was just thinking at a higher level.

00:25:17 Speaker_15
To get his edge, Roxy had used weather reports. Rufus was using the spin rates on pitchers' curveballs.

00:25:25 Speaker_13
I try to drill things down to their root cause. I try to figure out why things happen in a baseball game or a golf tournament. What makes a player good? It's not just their score. Like, what are the things that are driving their score?

00:25:38 Speaker_13
Which of those are repeatable? Which aren't? And right now, you have all this, like, computer vision, that type of data available now. And with a lot of these sports, I mean, we're now talking about bat speed.

00:25:49 Speaker_13
measuring bat speed and looking at aging curves for bat speed.

00:25:53 Speaker_15
Rufus had become the card counter at the blackjack table, only it was richer than that. He was generating new insight about why things happened in sports. A blackjack dealer knows where the card counter gets his edge.

00:26:06 Speaker_15
The sports bookie couldn't really tell where Rufus was getting his, which made Rufus and what he was doing even more unsettling. And did the M at any point say, we're not taking your bets? The M Casino was one of Rufus's favorite sports books.

00:26:21 Speaker_13
No, they had, their whole thing was, we're going to take all comers. We want to be, we want a lot of volume. We think we're better than people.

00:26:30 Speaker_15
Then comes the Supreme Court decision of 2018. 23 states soon legalized sports gambling. Rufus now has the M Casino, and a lot of others, right in his pocket. And Rufus, of course, stands to make a killing. The bigger the markets, the more he can bet.

00:26:58 Speaker_15
But as it turns out, that's not how it's going to go down. This ecosystem is going to change in ways Rufus didn't predict. And he began to sense it in late 2020.

00:27:09 Speaker_13
So I would drive up to New Hampshire to bet at these kiosks initially. And then once there was mobile betting, I had an account on DraftKings.

00:27:20 Speaker_15
Rufus had a girlfriend in Massachusetts. Massachusetts hadn't yet legalized sports betting, so he needed to cross state lines to use the betting app on his phone.

00:27:29 Speaker_15
The drive took him like 45 minutes, but it was actually easier than running all over Vegas trying to get cash down. He and his process were built for this new type of casino. He could bet on golf basically all day long. Until one day, he couldn't.

00:27:44 Speaker_13
One week I lost $30,000. I got a phone call to tell me that they were cutting my limits on golf.

00:27:51 Speaker_15
He'd lost $30,000 and DraftKings stopped taking his big bets. By the way, we've reached out to DraftKings and so far they have declined to talk with us.

00:28:00 Speaker_15
Anyway, it was clear to Rufus back in 2020 that this was definitely no longer his old sports gambling world.

00:28:07 Speaker_13
Because I had bet enough, it spurred them to actually go in and look at the stuff I'd been betting and how I'd been doing. Books are not limiting people just because they win. They're limiting them because they think they're going to win in the future.

00:28:20 Speaker_15
Rufus used data to predict what athletes were going to do. DraftKings was using data to predict what Rufus would do. When they looked at the data, they saw that after Rufus placed his bets, the odds nearly always moved in his favor.

00:28:35 Speaker_15
These were the bets of someone who knew things before the market knew them. And the new bookies were not like the old bookies. They only wanted to take certain kind of bets.

00:28:45 Speaker_15
Bets that were more like the bet you make when you press the buttons on a slot machine. Bets that if you made them often enough, you were sure to lose. The sort of bets a fan would make. the sort of bets Rufus Peabody never made.

00:28:59 Speaker_13
Refusing a bet wasn't a thing. It never was a thing here. Huh. Like, if you got kicked out of a casino, or if you couldn't bet there, it was because you did something wrong. Like, you violated the sacred bookmaker-better covenant.

00:29:16 Speaker_15
Being smarter than the market didn't used to get you kicked out of the market. But the market's changed.

00:29:24 Speaker_07
The market has changed. It's harder and harder to find an edge to beat the house, especially if the house keeps changing the rules on you or otherwise finding ways to overwhelm and outsmart you.

00:29:37 Speaker_07
And Michael Lewis says these companies are now everywhere.

00:29:41 Speaker_15
Anybody who watches sports knows you can't turn on your TV without being bombarded by ads from, you know, DraftKings and FanDuel. Every ad is like some celebrity.

00:29:51 Speaker_15
It's like back when crypto was, like Matt Damon was- It was, I was about to say, it's crypto. It's like, it's all over again. Some of the same people. And it's just so in your face.

00:30:00 Speaker_07
And when I see those advertisements on my television from FanDuel, et cetera, it does seem like I should do it, right? Like they are offering me this kind of free bet. They're offering me free money, basically, right? Shouldn't I just do it?

00:30:13 Speaker_15
No, you shouldn't just do it. No, you shouldn't just do it. And if you do it, you shouldn't do it the way they're trying to encourage you to do it.

00:30:20 Speaker_15
I mean, so if you listen to the bets where they're essentially trying to coach you into making the kind of bets that make them the most money, which is the kind of bets you're most likely to lose.

00:30:31 Speaker_15
And it's long shot parlay bets is what they're selling you on. It isn't like you're going to bet the Chiefs against the Raiders.

00:30:39 Speaker_15
It's no, you're going to bet the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes throwing for 300 yards and Travis Kelsey catching two touchdowns. And all of that has to come right or you don't win.

00:30:49 Speaker_15
And what they're doing is sort of nudging you into a land where your mind is not very good at judging probabilities and getting you to do the probabilistically stupid thing. And effectively, Americans are making stupider and stupider sports bets.

00:31:05 Speaker_15
And we've yet to hit the limit, like how much worse Americans will get at sports betting.

00:31:10 Speaker_07
Oh, that's interesting. I wonder how far they can push that.

00:31:14 Speaker_15
Well, we're about to see, right? It's like what will come with this is lots of social problems. You know, there are already these kind of natural experiments that are going on because some states have not legalized it.

00:31:25 Speaker_15
So, you know, you have Alabama next to Mississippi and one's legalized sports gambling and one hasn't. You kind of study the effects.

00:31:32 Speaker_15
And they're respectable papers that have shown that bankruptcies rise and savings rates plummet, where sports gambling has been legalized. So there will be these social problems going on, bubbling along while this industry booms.

00:31:49 Speaker_15
And at the same time, they'll be pushing the social problems because they'll be nudging Americans into doing dumber and dumber things with their money. So I guess you asked me, should you do this?

00:31:59 Speaker_15
Of course, if you can do it in moderation, I mean, I guess, you know... As famously, we are good as humans. As famously, we are good as humans.

00:32:18 Speaker_07
A huge thank you to Michael Lewis and to Pushkin Industries for sharing this episode with us. Michael Lewis's podcast is called Against the Rules. This season is all about the sports fan. And it's really fun.

00:32:30 Speaker_07
Our version of their episode was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Martina Castro. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Sina Alfredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Mary Childs. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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