For The Atlantic’s April cowl story, “Sucker,” employees author McKay Coppins stories from contained in the nation’s sports-betting epidemic, analyzing how playing has come to eat American sports activities and tradition. Previous to writing the quilt story, Coppins had by no means wager on something earlier than––he’s religiously prohibited from partaking in video games of likelihood––however he acquired particular permission from his Mormon bishop to gamble for reporting functions, and The Atlantic fronted him $10,000 to wager over the course of the 2025 NFL season: “The journal would cowl any losses, and—to make sure my ongoing emotional funding—cut up any winnings with me, 50–50. Certainly God would approve of such an association, my editors reasoned, as a result of I wouldn’t be risking my very own hard-earned cash.”
All through the course of the piece, as Coppins narrates his wins and losses, he considers the societal penalties of the legalization of phone-based playing for a era of Individuals, and for himself. As Coppins writes: “Virtually in a single day, we took an historical vice—lengthy considered soul-rotting and civilizationally ruinous—put it on everybody’s telephone, and made it as regular and frictionless as checking the climate. What may probably go mistaken?” Coppins enlisted the betting and data-analytics skilled Nate Silver to behave as his private playing guru, together with fellow Atlantic employees author and blackjack fan Tom Nichols, whereas additionally interviewing skilled sports activities bettors in Las Vegas; skilled athletes who’ve had their lives threatened by gamblers; lonely politicians making an attempt to stem the flood of legalized betting with some regulation; recovering playing addicts; and the president of FanDuel, one of many largest gambling-app corporations.
Coppins writes that ever because the creation of sports activities, people have discovered methods to lose cash playing on them. However all through most of America’s historical past, till just lately, playing was closely regulated and customarily discouraged. Now, he writes, “as a society, we’re making an enormously dangerous wager: that we will reap the rewards of a runaway playing trade with out paying any value; that the litany of social ills lengthy related to this vice—habit and impoverishment, isolation and abuse, dishonest and chasing and corrosive idleness—can, this time, be saved in examine; that, not like each civilization that got here earlier than us, we will beat the home. What are the percentages that we’re proper?”
Playing choices have solely grown in America with the rise of “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket. Stay-betting odds have been featured on the Golden Globes telecast and CNN’s election protection. Coppins writes: “In 2026, you possibly can gamble on how heat it’ll get in Los Angeles tomorrow, and the winner of the Grammy for Finest Rap Album, and the way a lot cash Avatar: Fireplace and Ash will gross, and the date of Taylor Swift’s marriage ceremony, and Time journal’s Particular person of the 12 months, and the opportunity of extraterrestrial life being found, and the way many individuals shall be deported from the US, and the prospect of Iranian regime change, and the possibilities that Donald Trump declares martial regulation earlier than his time period ends, and whether or not Jesus Christ will return to Earth this 12 months. In remarkably brief order, playing has permeated each nook and cranny of American life. (If this strikes you as apocalyptic, the percentages for the Second Coming presently stand at 23 to 1.)”
Coppins writes, “I had all the time advised those who I didn’t have an addictive persona, believing that to be so. Now I needed to think about a distinct risk: Possibly I had merely constructed a life with sturdy sufficient guardrails that I’d by no means needed to take a look at the premise. What would occur to me, I questioned, if these guardrails had been eliminated?” When Coppins positioned his first wager on an NFL sport final September, he calculated that he was up $20. By the tip of the NFL season in February, he’d misplaced almost $10,000, was inserting bets in his minivan whereas his household ice-skated, and was checking DraftKings in church. He concludes: “Once I’d began this venture, I had offered it to my bishop as journalism; in some unspecified time in the future, it had veered into obsession. And as clearly as I may see that now, within the chilly comedown from a brutal loss, I didn’t know the way lengthy that readability would final. As I scrolled via the apps, my eye was drawn to the March Insanity promotions—among the Closing 4 odds seemed intriguing. On Kalshi, in the meantime, the Oscars futures had been calling to me. The temptation to chase would by no means go away, it appeared. These fences that I, and the nation, had erected—those that had satisfied me that I wasn’t liable to habit and America that it didn’t want to fret about this explicit vice in spite of everything—all of the sudden appeared extra very important than ever.”
McKay Coppins’s “Sucker” was printed immediately at TheAtlantic.com. Please attain out with any questions or requests.
Press contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
(e-mail protected)
