All Bets Are On
It was inevitable. That opening from Love in the Time Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez is one of the most famous lines in literature. Too bad it’s taken, because it also works as a pretty decent intro to the news that the mingling of professional sports and big time gambling operations has quickly led to scandals. García Márquez’ inevitability refers to “the scent of bitter almonds.” The NBA’s current scandal is all about the scent of money. The league, like its professional counterparts, has historically worked to keep a distance from anything even remotely connected to betting. A few years ago, with the legalization of sports gambling presenting an irresistible upside, what was once kept at arm’s length has been fully embraced. “For the last seven years, anyone who cares about sports has been conditioned to accept that gambling goes hand-in-hand with the activity of watching a game. We turn on a podcast, we get an offer code from a betting app. We read a story, we get the pop-up ad directing us to check out the odds. Even when we go to an arena in certain markets, you walk right past the sports book before getting to your seat.” Hence, wagering that a scandal would emerge was about the safest bet you could have made. Dan Wolken in Yahoo Sports: The inevitable bill of legalized sports gambling has come. “And everyone who feeds off its advertising dollars — the sports leagues, team owners, even the media — kept shoving it in everyone’s faces, buoyed by the idea that it’s better to have a gambling ecosystem operating with oversight rather than in the shadows. That may still be true. And yet today, for all the sports leagues that have been nursing from the teat of easy gambling company cash, the justification doesn’t matter. The inevitable bill has come due.” Will this be an isolated incident or the first of many sports betting scandals? Bet the over.
+ ESPN: What we know about the Billups-Rozier NBA gambling cases.
+ The NBA game-fixing part of this story has more far reaching implications. But the poker-fixing scandal is even more interesting. WSJ (Gift Article): The Rigged Poker Games That Used NBA Stars and James Bond Tech to Steal Millions. “Prosecutors say the defendants in the poker-rigging scheme would often modify DeckMate shufflers with tech that could read the cards in the deck and relay that information to an off-site operator … They had other ways to cheat, too. They used poker-chip trays equipped with hidden cameras. There was an X-ray table that could read cards while they were face down. There were even special contact lenses that could read marked cards.”
+ “Terry Rozier has earned an estimated $160 million from three teams over his 10-year NBA career. Chauncey Billups played for 17 years and earned $106.8 million.” Why do millionaire athletes get involved with gambling? (You think wealthy people are any less attracted to gambling than anyone else? Consider that more than 1,300 AI startups now have valuations of over $100 million, with 498 AI ‘unicorns,’ or companies with valuations of $1 billion or more. The richest investors in the world like gambling so much they’ve made unicorns ubiquitous.)
+ For what it’s worth, I’m saving Gabriel García Márquez’ other famous novel opening for another story. From One Hundred Years of Solitude: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ICE.
