Schmuck of the Week: You, the Bad Sports Gambler

The insanity of football season has officially begun, as marked by galaxy-brained takes defending Deion Sanders on some websites, which means that a lot of men are about to lose a lot of money. I know this because I am one of you, as I am in the prime gambling demographic of men aged 18 to 39, albeit towards the far end of the range, and I have lost more money gambling on sports than I can remember. I’m going to explain how not to be a bad sports gambler, this week’s Schmuck of the Week, where our first subscriber-only offering returns back to its home behind a paywall. It may seem like a big ask to subscribe to what seems like common wisdom, but I promise that the experience I paid for in more ways than one will provide a better return on your investment than any of those plus-odds bets open in your other tab will. Sports gambling is perhaps America’s most predatory industry, which is really saying something.

Last year, Americans wagered $119.8 billion on state-sanctioned sports betting, equivalent to the market cap of giants like Citigroup and Charles Schwab. One study found that 20 percent of American men are in or have gone into debt over sports gambling, and the NCAA conducted a poll that indicated 63 percent of on-campus students recall seeing betting ads, and noted that “This is a higher rate than that found in the general population or those that commute/virtually attend college.” Men’s Health found that the average gambling debt by a man addicted to gambling was between $55,000 and $90,000.

This is a serious problem that disproportionately harms young men by design.

Sports betting is hard, so difficult that a 58 percent winning rate for a professional gambler is akin to being an oracle. That seemingly slightly above average performance is about as good as it reasonably gets for the best gamblers in the world, yet every single gambling advertisement out there suggests that any Joe Schmo could become rich if they have the foresight to see that 3rd string wide receiver scoring two touchdowns.

Like every year since my teenage brain turned on, I will be gambling on football this fall. I already have with an emotional hedge against my beloved Buffs last night, who I figured may sleepwalk through the first half and let a feisty North Dakota State team cover the spread. However, unlike some of my earlier years where I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, I will not schmuck it up and take gambling from a fun activity I can handle to a world where my financial stability rests on where a fifty-year-old referee spots a ball on 4th and 1.

This is a really dangerous activity if you are not careful. The gambling industry has become so powerful so fast that it has cast a Pete Rose-esque pall over sports, as a better player than Pete Rose in Shoehi Ohtani found his bank account at the center of a federal gambling investigation. NBA Champion Michael Porter Jr.’s brother Jontay Porter is banned for life by the NBA for influencing betting lines on his own personal stat line. The deal sports leagues made with the devil is evident everywhere, and they want you to make it with them too.

Which means that the only person who can protect you from being a schmuck is you. You press the buttons on your phone. You watch the games. You form the thoughts that become the basis of your bets. You must create a structure for all that to operate within where if you run out of fun money, that is OK and you don’t have to bet any more or worry about Big Karl coming by later during halftime of Sunday Night Football to shatter your kneecaps.

As someone who has gone through losing more than I can afford before, it’s not fun. You don’t really like yourself and the restrictions put on your life by your lack of finances can take your mind to some dark places. Not to mention that it destroys your love of the game. Football is supposed to be a fun thing we watch while we all collectively deny the fact that everyone involved has accepted that irreversible brain damage is a part of this endeavor. You’re not running a business from your couch every Saturday and Sunday morning, you’re bullshitting with your friends and betting on your ego.

Gambling can be healthy so long as the basis for it is competition, and not wealth and riches. I promise you, you’re not getting there, and to the not nice 69 percent of respondents to St. Bonaventure’s survey saying they either break even or make money gambling, please, come back to reality. Your families miss you. DraftKings would have declared bankruptcy by now if that figure was true.

So to leave you with something worth paying for, in our first subscriber-only Schmuck of the Week since the first one, I will end with some knowledge I have personally paid for both in gambling losses and in a finance degree.

1. If gambling stops being fun, stop gambling.

2. Parlays and other longshot bets have long odds for a reason. Think of them the way VC’s think of investing in startups: by making ten small bets and hoping that one will make it all profitable. Don’t look at it as bunch of big longshot bets at +2000 odds, but a handful of small, correlated bets that all amount to about +500 odds that you think has value on a situation you anticipate happening. With taking risk, try to hit doubles and the home runs will come.

3. Gamble/invest in what you know: everyone has better betting and investing instincts than they think they do, but lack the discipline to stay focused on it and want to piggyback the shiny new thing of the week. Keep it simple and have fun. Don’t be a schmuck and ruin it for yourself.