We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America

I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.

Photo by Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash

Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America.

1. Baseball

In November 2025, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged in a conspiracy for “rigging pitches.” Frankly, I had never heard of rigged pitches before, but the federal indictment describes a scheme so simple that it’s a miracle that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time. Three years ago, a few corrupt bettors approached the pitchers with a tantalizing deal: (1) We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; (2) you throw those pitches into the dirt; (3) we’ll win the bets and give you some money.

The plan worked. Why wouldn’t it? There are hundreds of pitches thrown in a baseball game, and nobody cares about one bad pitch. The bets were so deviously clever because they offered enormous rewards for bettors and only incidental inconvenience for players and viewers. Before their plan was snuffed out, the fraudsters won $450,000 from pitches that not even the most ardent Cleveland baseball fan would ever remember the next day. Nobody watching America’s pastime could have guessed that they were witnessing a six-figure fraud.

2. Bombs

On the morning of February 28th, someone logged onto the prediction market website Polymarket and made an unusually large bet. This bet wasn’t placed on a baseball game. It wasn’t placed on any sport. This was a bet that the United States would bomb Iran on a specific day, despite extremely low odds of such a thing happening.

A few hours later, bombs landed in Iran. This one bet was part of a $553,000 payday for a user named “Magamyman.” And it was just one of dozens of suspicious, perfectly-timed wagers, totaling millions of dollars, placed in the hours before a war began.

It is almost impossible to believe that, whoever Magamyman is, he didn’t have inside information from members of the administration. The term war profiteering typically refers to arms dealers who get rich from war. But we now live in a world not only where online bettors stand to profit from war, but also where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position.

3. Bombs, again

On March 10, several days into the Iran War, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported that a warhead launched from Iran struck a site outside Jerusalem.

Meanwhile on Polymarket, users had placed bets on the precise location of missile strikes on March 10. Fabian’s article was therefore poised to determine payouts of $14 million in betting. As The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel reported, bettors encouraged him to rewrite his story to produce the outcome that they’d bet on. Others threatened to make his life “miserable.”

A clever dystopian novelist might conceive of a future where poorly paid journalists for news wires are offered six-figure deals to report fictions that cash out bets from online prediction markets. But just how fanciful is that scenario when we have good reason to believe that journalists are already being pressured, bullied, and threatened to publish specific stories that align with multi-thousand dollar bets about the future?

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Put it all together: rigged pitches, rigged war bets, and attempts to rig wartime journalism. Without context, each story would sound like a wacky conspiracy theory. But these are not conspiracy theories. These are things that have happened. These are conspiracies—full stop.

“If you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention” has historically been one of those bumperstickers you find on the back of a car with so many other bumperstickers that you worry for the sanity of its occupants. But in this weird new reality where every event on the planet has a price, and behind every price is a shadowy counterparty, the jittery gambler’s paranoia—is what I’m watching happening because somebody more powerful than me bet on it?—is starting to seem, eerily, like a kind of perverse common sense.

FROM LAUNDROMATS TO AIRPLANES

What’s remarkable is not just the fact that online sports books have taken over sports, or that betting markets have metastasized in politics and culture, but the speed with which both have taken place.

For most of the last century, the major sports leagues were vehemently against gambling, as the Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins explained in his recent feature. In 1992, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue told Congress that “nothing has done more to despoil the games Americans play and watch than widespread gambling on them.” In 2012, NBA commissioner David Stern loudly threatened New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for signing a bill to legalize sports betting in the Garden State, reportedly screaming, “we’re going to come after you with everything we’ve got.”

So much for that. Following the 2018 Supreme Court decision Murphy vs. NCAA, sports gambling was unleashed into the world, and the leagues haven’t looked back. Last year, the NFL saw $30 billion gambled on football games, and the league itself made half a billion dollars in advertising, licensing, and data deals.

Nine years ago, Americans bet less than $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion. Big numbers mean nothing to me, so let me put that statistic another way: $5 billion is roughly the amount Americans spend annually at coin-operated laundromats and $160 billion is nearly what Americans spent last year on domestic airline tickets. So, in a decade, the online sports gambling industry will have risen from the level of coin laundromats to rival the entire airline industry.

And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion. “These predictive markets are the logical endpoint of the online gambling boom,” Coppins told me on my podcast Plain English. “We have taught the entire American population how to gamble with sports. We’ve made it frictionless and easy and put it on everybody’s phone. Why not extend the logic and culture of gambling to other segments of American life?” He continued:

Why not let people gamble on who’s going to win the Oscar, when Taylor Swift’s wedding will be, how many people will be deported from the United States next year, when the Iranian regime will fall, whether a nuclear weapon will be detonated in the year 2026, or whether there will be a famine in Gaza? These are not things that I’m making up. These are all bets that you can make on these predictive markets.

Indeed, why not let people gamble on whether there will be a famine in Gaza? The market logic is cold and simple: More bets means more information, and more informational volume is more efficiency in the marketplace of all future happenings. But from another perspective—let’s call it, baseline morality?—the transformation of a famine into a windfall event for prescient bettors seems so grotesque as to require no elaboration. One imagines a young man sending his 1099 documents to a tax accountant the following spring: “right, so here are my dividends, these are the cap gains, and, oh yeah, here’s my $9,000 payout for totally nailing when all those kids would die.”

It is a comforting myth that dystopias happen when obviously bad ideas go too far. Comforting, because it plays to our naive hope that the world can be divided into static categories of good versus evil and that once we stigmatize all the bad people and ghettoize all the bad ideas, some utopia will spring into view. But I think dystopias more likely happen because seemingly good ideas go too far. “Pleasure is better than pain” is a sensible notion, and a society devoted to its implications created Brave New World. “Order is better than disorder” sounds alright to me, but a society devoted to the most grotesque vision of that principle takes us to 1984. Sports gambling is fun, and prediction markets can forecast future events. But extended without guardrails or limitations, those principles lead to a world where ubiquitous gambling leads to cheating, cheating leads to distrust, and distrust leads ultimately to cynicism or outright disengagement.

“The crisis of authority that has kind of already visited every other American institution in the last couple of decades has arrived at professional sports,” Coppins said. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes. “Not to overstate it, but that’s a disaster,” he said. And not just for sports.

FOUR WAYS TO LOSE (OR: WHAT’S A ‘RIGGED PITCH’ IN A WAR?)

There are four reasons to worry about the effect of gambling in sports and culture.

The first is the risk to individual bettors. Every time we create 1,000 new gamblers, we create dozens of new addicts and a handful of new bankruptcies. As I’ve reported, there is evidence that about one in five men under 25 is on the spectrum of having a gambling problem, and calls to the National Problem Gambling Helpline have roughly tripled since sports gambling was broadly legalized in 2018. Research from UCLA and USC found that bankruptcies increased by 10 percent in states that legalized online sports betting between 2018 and 2023. People will sometimes ask me what business I have worrying about online gambling when people should be free to spend their money however they like. My response is that wise rules place guardrails around economic activity with a certain rate of personal harm. For alcohol, we have licensing requirements, minimum drinking ages, boundaries around hours of sale, and rules about public consumption. As alcohol consumption is declining among young people, gambling is surging; Gen Z has replaced one (often fun) vice with a meaningful chance of addiction with another (often fun) vice with a meaningful chance of addiction. But whereas we have centuries of experience curtailing excessive drinking with rules and customs, we are currently in a free-for-all era of gambling.

The second risk is to individual players and practitioners. One reason why sports commissioners might have wanted to keep gambling out of their business is that gamblers turns some people into complete psychopaths, and that’s not a very nice experience for folks on the receiving end of gambling-afflicted psychopaths. In his feature, McKay Coppins reports on the experience of Caroline Garcia, a top-ranked tennis player, who said she received torrents of abusive messages from gamblers both for losing games and for winning games. “This has become a very common experience for athletes at the professional level, even at the college level too,” Coppins said. As the experience of journalist Emanuel Fabian shows, gambling can turn ordinary people into mini mob bosses, who go around threatening players and practitioners who they believe are costing them thousands of dollars.

The third risk is to the integrity of sports—or any other institution. At the end of 2025, in addition to its indictment of the Cleveland Guardians pitchers, the FBI announced 30 arrests involving gambling schemes in the NBA. This cavalcade of arrests has dramatically reduced trust in sports. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes. It does not require extraordinary creativity to imagine how this principle could extend to other domains and institutions. If more people start to believe that things only happen in the world as a direct result of shadowy interests in vast betting markets, it’s going to be a permanent open season for conspiracy theories.

The ultimate risk is almost too dark to contemplate in much detail. As the logic and culture of casinos moves from sports to politics, the scandals that have visited baseball and basketball might soon arrive in politics. Is it really so unbelievable that a politician might tip off a friend, or assuage an enemy, by giving them inside information that would allow them to profit on betting markets? Is it really so incredible to believe that a government official would try to align policy with a betting position that stood to earn them, or an allied group, hundreds of thousands of dollars? That is what a “rigged pitch” in politics would look like. It’s not just wagering on a policy outcome that you suspect will happen. It’s changing policy outcomes based on what can be wagered.

THE FINAL VIRTUE

Gambling is flourishing because it meets the needs of our moment: a low-trust world, where lonely young people are seeking high-risk opportunities to launch them into wealth and comfort. In such an environment, financialization might seem to be the last form of civic participation that feels honest to a large portion of the country. Voting is compromised, and polling is manipulated, and news is algorithmically curated. But a bet settles. A game ends. There is comfort in that. In an uncertain and illegible world, it doesn’t get much more certain and legible than this: You won, or you lost.

A 2023 Wall Street Journal poll found that Americans are pulling away from practically every value that once defined national life—patriotism, religion, community, family. Young people care less than their parents about marriage, children, or faith. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, is filling the moral void left by retreating institutions with the market. Money has become our final virtue.

I often find myself thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.

As this moral vocabulary scales across culture, it also corrodes culture. In sports, when you have money on a game, you’re not rooting for a team. You’re rooting for a proposition. The social function of fandom—shared identity, inherited loyalty, something larger than yourself—dissolves into individual risk. In politics, I fear the consequences will be worse. Prediction markets can be useful for those who want to know the future, but their utility recruits participants into a relationship with the news cycle that is adversarial, and even misanthropic. A young man betting on a terrorist attack or a famine is not acting as a mere concerned citizen whose participation improves the efficiency of global prediction markets. He’s just a dude, on his phone, alone in a room, choosing to root for death.

If that doesn’t bother you, I don’t know how to make it bother you. Based on economic and market efficiency principles alone, this young man’s behavior is defensible. But there is morality outside of markets. There is more to life than the efficiency of information networks. But will we rediscover it, any time soon? Don’t bet on it.