When Jontay Porter was ten, his father woke him up most mornings before dawn. He and his siblings piled into the family’s Sprinter van and drove to an empty field house off the highway. Then, while their friends slept, they ran basketball drills with their father. “All I remember is it still being pitch-black outside, and the two dreaded double doors on the side of the building that would always be left open for us,” Jontay told me recently. In the bleary moments just before one of his siblings tugged the field-house doors open, Jontay always secretly wished that they’d be locked. And, one morning, they were. Jontay smiled as he climbed back into the van and drifted off to sleep. But his brother Michael, Jr., who was seventeen months older, was furious. “Michael was the opposite,” Jontay said. “He wanted to go.”Jontay grew up in Columbia, Missouri, the fourth of eight children. His father, Michael, Sr., worked in Christian ministry, and his mother, Lisa, homeschooled the children. Both had played college basketball—Lisa, as a high-school senior, had averaged a nearly impossible fifty-eight points per game—and they saw the sport as their children’s ticket to college. All eight of the kids eventually got basketball scholarships. By the time Jontay was sixteen, he was six feet ten. In most families, as a five-star high-school recruit, Jontay would have been the main attraction. But Michael was Mozart. In 2010, their father got a job on the coaching staff for the women’s team at the University of Missouri. The men’s coach spotted Michael shooting alone in the arena one night and offered him a full scholarship; he was still in seventh grade. When he accepted it, as a high-school senior, he was the top recruit in the country. His highlight reels had racked up millions of views on YouTube. N.B.A. scouts believed that he could be the next Kevin Durant. “He’s a game-changer,” a league executive told the New York Post.Big state schools turn their best athletes into local celebrities, but the hype that followed Michael to Missouri’s campus on his recruiting visits was closer to Beatlemania. Fans asked for autographs and took selfies. Jontay, who came along, was seduced by the hysteria. “Frat houses are putting up posters, and he’s literally treated like a king,” he recalled. “I wanted to be a part of that circus.” He skipped his senior year of high school to join the team, too. The brothers were best friends. Still, it was sometimes hard to be one of the top players in the country but just the second best in his family. “He got all the attention,” Jontay said. “I was just kind of his biggest fan.”For a time that first season, Michael was sidelined with a back injury, giving Jontay a turn in the spotlight. “He’s the best player I’ve ever been around,” Chris Hollender, then an assistant coach at Mizzou, told me. “I’ve always said I thought he was a more complete player than Mike.” At eighteen, Jontay led his team to the N.C.A.A. tournament. “For me to finally get a taste of stardom?” Jontay said. “I was the man. I controlled the narrative.”Michael went to the N.B.A. draft that summer. Jontay planned to enter the following year. Then, during the final scrimmage before his sophomore season, he pushed off his right leg to explode toward the rim. “I felt, like, every crack in that moment, and just crumpled to the ground,” he said. He had torn the major ligaments in his knee. His teammates lifted him off the ground and laid him on a table in the training room. “He was beside himself,” Hollender said. “Couldn’t catch his breath, he was crying so hard.” It wasn’t from the pain; Jontay knew what his injury meant for the team’s chances that season. “The only thing he said to me was ‘I’m so sorry,’ ” Hollender said. “It was gut-wrenching.”In 2019, while Jontay was in rehab for his knee, he injured it again. “Everybody’s telling me, ‘You’re going to be O.K.,’ ” he said. “I knew it wasn’t true.” By then, Michael was a rookie with the Denver Nuggets. (He went on to win a championship with the team, in 2023.) But Jontay, watching the N.B.A. draft in his parents’ basement, saw sixty picks go by without a team calling his name. Eventually, the Memphis Grizzlies took a chance and signed him to a contract as a free agent. He loved the N.B.A.—luxury travel, assistants to run his errands, last-minute reservations at Michelin-starred restaurants—but he felt that he was a tourist there. He had to take painkillers just to play, and after games he had to stick needles into his knees to drain fluid, in order to keep them from swelling. After just two seasons, he was cut from the roster.Jontay, middle, with his siblings, around 2006.Photograph courtesy Jontay PorterIn September, 2021, Jontay was in Memphis, living like any other twenty-one-year-old kid—except for the money. He’d made two million dollars from his N.B.A. salary, and had received an insurance settlement for another $2.7 million (the difference between his projected N.B.A. earnings before his injury and his actual deal). One Sunday, he invited some friends over to watch football. Sports betting had recently been legalized in several states, and apps like FanDuel and DraftKings, which previously hosted fantasy-sports contests, were suddenly the biggest sportsbooks in America. Jontay had always avoided them; it seemed improper for an N.B.A. player to bet even on other sports. But now he was out of the league, and had started dabbling in sports gambling. He opened up FanDuel and placed a hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-dollar bet that the Kansas City Chiefs would beat the Baltimore Ravens. He put another ten thousand dollars on a parlay—a riskier bet that strings together multiple outcomes to increase the payout—wagering that the Chiefs would win, that their running back would rush more than his expected yards, and that the Ravens’ quarterback, Lamar Jackson, would run for a touchdown himself.In the fourth quarter, the Chiefs were up eleven points, and Jackson raced along the right edge and into the end zone, clinching the last leg of the parlay. If the Chiefs held on to their lead, Jontay would win hundreds of thousands of dollars. His friends recorded a video of him jumping off his couch, hands in the air, shrieking, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”But, in the final minutes of the game, the Ravens scored to take the lead. The Chiefs then fumbled while setting up what would have been a game-winning field goal. Ravens 36, Chiefs 35. Jontay slumped into his bed. “Literally, like, the party was over,” he said. That night, he stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep. How could he have been reckless enough to lose six figures on a football game? Then again, he had come so close to winning. In basketball, his body had betrayed him. But in sports betting all he needed was his brain. “That moment where I tore my knee is where everything that is on the news right now kind of started from,” he told me. “That point where I no longer had control.”Jontay and his brother Michael playing for the University of Missouri, in 2017.Photograph by Jeff Roberson / APIn 2015, amid a familiar flood of Bud Light and Allstate commercials, football fans were inundated with cheap-looking testimonials—men in jerseys holding oversized checks and spraying champagne. Some had taglines like “More sports, more winners, more millionaires.” The ads were for FanDuel and DraftKings, which had recently launched as fantasy-sports apps. That year, they spent a combined two hundred million dollars on TV advertising; in September, they ran a national spot every ninety seconds. The C.E.O. of DraftKings, Jason Robins, bragged that his business had signed up two hundred thousand new players in a single day.The companies were taking advantage of a legal loophole. In 1992, sports betting had been made illegal almost everywhere in the country except Nevada, through the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. But fantasy sports had been a staple of American fandom going back to the nineteen-eighties—a social activity that the comedian Joey Mulinaro once likened to a “book club for regular guys.” Traditional fantasy sports were slow and methodical. Friends and colleagues got together, forked over twenty dollars or so, and drafted an imaginary team of real players. Then they pored over newspapers and tallied up their players’ stats with pencil and paper. The person with the best record at the end of the season took home the pot. Eventually, leagues moved online so that computers could do the math, but the scrappy ethos remained. In 2006, lawmakers banned online gambling, but they exempted fantasy pools. They didn’t want the F.B.I. kicking down the doors of suburban dads on N.F.L. Sunday.Nigel Eccles, a sandy-haired former McKinsey consultant, grew up on a dairy farm in Northern Ireland and knew nothing about American sports. But he saw that there was an opportunity to monetize the endless optimism of dudes who think they know ball. Eccles founded FanDuel out of his home in Edinburgh, in 2009, and began offering weekly, or sometimes daily, fantasy competitions. Pay an entry fee, draft a football team to compete against scores of strangers on the internet. If your team is good, you win some money; if it’s terrible, you can try again the next day. The action never stopped. “People love fantasy, and the idea that you could take something they love and make it faster, more exciting, give it real money, and they could play it on their phone was just, like, Yes, yes, definitely yes,” Eccles has said. (He left the company in 2017.) DraftKings launched soon after. In 2011, FanDuel had one U.S.-based salesperson, who worked out of a home office. Four years later, it had a forty-thousand-square-foot headquarters in the Flatiron district, with seats from the original Yankee Stadium. It also had a billion-dollar valuation.The ad blitz brought in millions of new players, but it also drew scrutiny. To observers, the apps looked a lot like illegal sportsbooks. They collected entry fees that were essentially bets on a player’s performance, and kept a cut of around ten per cent. ESPN reported that FanDuel pitched investors on targeting players with a “higher preponderance to gambling.” In 2015, Jim Leach, a former congressman from Iowa who had co-sponsored the ban with the fantasy-sports carve-out, said he’d had no idea that it would “morph into today’s cauldron of daily betting.” By 2016, states were sending cease-and-desist letters to FanDuel and DraftKings, and both were facing bankruptcy.That’s when they caught a lucky break. A couple of years before, New Jersey, hoping to revitalize Atlantic City, had attempted to legalize sports betting, eventually arguing in a lawsuit that the national ban violated states’ rights. In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the ban, permitting states to decide for themselves. Jeremy Kudon, a lobbyist working for FanDuel and DraftKings, then started in on a plan called Project Aftermath. (“I’d just seen the N.W.A. movie, and that’s what Dre names his company after Death Row,” he said, laughing.) He went state to state, leaning into the similarities between sports betting and fantasy competitions. “I’d meet with legislators who were, like, ‘Didn’t we pass this already?’ ” he said.Kudon had a powerful new ally. In the early nineties, major professional-league commissioners had testified in support of the sports-betting ban. “We should not gamble with our children’s heroes,” Paul Tagliabue, the N.F.L. commissioner at the time, said. The leagues even sued New Jersey to defend the ban. But by 2015 they had also cashed in on fantasy-sports deals. The N.B.A. became a direct investor in FanDuel, and M.L.B. in DraftKings. Twenty-eight of thirty-two N.F.L. teams formed partnerships with at least one of the companies. FanDuel, wooing the leagues, cited research showing that its customers watched forty per cent more sports after becoming members. The year after the Supreme Court ruling, the leagues were prepared to capitalize on the legalization of sports betting; the N.B.A. even advocated for it. “The data is clear,” Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, said at the time. “If someone has a bet on a game, even a small bet, they’re much more likely to engage in that match.”Silver became the public face of the leagues’ flip-flop. The day after the N.B.A. closed on its deal with FanDuel, in 2014, Silver wrote an Op-Ed in the Times calling for sports betting to be legalized nationwide. He argued that Americans were already betting huge sums in unregulated markets. “Some estimate that nearly four hundred billion dollars is illegally wagered on sports each year,” he wrote. This figure was later debunked, but the idea allowed the leagues to appeal to the same sentimentality that they’d once used to argue against gambling—the purity of the games was at stake. Kudon began lobbying lawmakers with famous athletes by his side. “Everybody has a pennant for their favorite baseball team,” he said. “Nobody has a pennant for their favorite casino.” The effect was obvious. “We brought Joe Torre to the New York State Legislature,” he said, referring to the former manager of the Yankees. “And I watched grown men cry. I mean, people were weeping.”Traditional casino giants like MGM and Caesars didn’t see what was coming. Sports gambling is typically a small slice of the betting pie relative to roulette and slots. The big casinos “were kind of almost patting us on the head: ‘What are you guys doing?’ ” Kudon joked. The casinos started building apps, but FanDuel and DraftKings were already on everyone’s phone. MGM and Caesars were like shops at the mall; FanDuel was Amazon.By the end of 2021, thirty states and Washington, D.C., had legalized sports betting, many crafting legislation with substantial input from industry lobbyists. The companies launched another ad blitz. A study by McKinsey found that just five per cent of fantasy-baseball players were responsible for seventy per cent of the businesses’ profits. In a pitch to investors, according to ESPN, FanDuel noted internal data showing that twenty per cent of its customers would describe themselves as “a bit of an addict.” The companies spent a fortune on promotions, but it was nothing compared with the “customer lifetime value” of the guy who stuck around, day after day, to try his luck.Strangers have always stared at Jontay Porter because of his height. Recently, I visited him at his brother’s house in Columbia, where he dipped under doorframes and moved through the living room like a parent navigating a child’s play fort. “There’s times where I wish I just lived a normal life,” he said. His size makes it difficult to find clothes that fit, or to squeeze into a commercial-airline seat. Still, he told me that he never once thought about buying a first-class ticket to get extra legroom. He saw himself as a frugal person.Jontay had been fixated on money since childhood. In seventh grade, he started a side hustle fixing iPhone screens. At fifteen, he got hold of his mom’s driver’s license to create a Coinbase account, and bought bitcoin before most people had any idea what it was. He watched the price soar, and bought his first car with the proceeds. “I felt like, I’m better than these hedge-fund guys,” he said.After his knee injury, he signed up for a Robinhood account and began day-trading stocks. In the N.B.A., ungodly money was the norm. “You’re just used to guys that are spending three thousand dollars on a bottle of wine at dinner,” he said. Jontay began to enjoy a reputation in the league as a market guru. He went “diamond hands” on meme stocks like Big 5 Sporting Goods and GameStop. This fuelled his belief that he didn’t need basketball to make what he called “N.B.A. F-U money.” (He rarely curses.) Soon, he and a partner were selling stock tips to subscribers on Discord through a company that he started called the Financial Cloud. “We couldn’t technically give financial advice, because we’re not licensed,” Jontay said. “We had automated algorithms that would spit out alerts of stocks to go buy.”Robinhood’s interface was gamified: digital confetti exploded on the screen after customers placed a trade. “It looks like a casino,” Jontay said. “I’m not a scientist, you know. But that type of thing that gambling fed? Robinhood did the same thing.” He started playing a little blackjack on offshore-casino sites such as Stake, later made famous by the rapper Drake, who regularly streams six-figure bets. Jontay signed up for FanDuel two months shy of his twenty-first birthday. (He was underage, which made it illegal to sign up, but this didn’t seem to pose a problem.)For Jontay, there was truth to Paul Newman’s iconic line from “The Color of Money”—that money won is twice as sweet as money earned. He made a hundred thousand dollars on an unlikely ten-leg college-baseball parlay. But there were warning signs. He told me about his first big bet, on the Chiefs, yet he had memory-holed the fact that, the same weekend, he’d made a hundred and forty-three other bets for more than a million dollars. When I reviewed his transaction history and texted him about them, he replied, “Omg!!!! No way.”Jontay’s family gave him the benefit of the doubt. He was bashful, but his brother Michael seemed to enjoy stirring up controversy. Michael had suggested that the COVID vaccine was a means of population control, and once warned that kids who attend public school might one day identify as “a cat.” He recently said that, when he’s dating women, he will “throw on some Andrew Tate and see how they react.” These takes, some offered on his own podcast, “Curious Mike,” have led fans to give him the nickname MAGA Porter, Jr. (More tragically, Jontay’s younger brother Coban, in 2024, pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter for driving drunk and causing a crash that killed a young mother. Two weeks after his sentencing, another brother, Jevon, got a D.U.I.) Jontay, by contrast, had never so much as stayed out past curfew.Around the time Jontay started gambling, he began a long-distance relationship with a woman from Seattle named Kelli Kingma. She hadn’t initially been interested in him, because he played in the N.B.A. “I wanted a normal life,” she told me. But, she added, “I fell for how kind and humble and gentle he was. He seemed so innocent.” In 2021, he decided to sell his house. Kelli hoped to use the money to start a nest egg. What she didn’t know was that Jontay had taken out a five-hundred-thousand-dollar loan against the house, and then lost it all gambling. When he realized that she was sure to learn his secret, he panicked. “I’m instantly, like, I gotta make that five hundred thousand back real quick,” he said. While driving his Tesla from Memphis to his parents’ house, in Missouri, he put the car on Autopilot and spent the whole six-hour trip playing blackjack on his phone. By the end of the drive, he had lost another two hundred thousand dollars.Later that month, Jontay holed up at his brother’s penthouse in Denver and opened FanDuel. He had discovered that his favorite sport to bet on wasn’t football; it was table tennis. It can take weeks to make money from a stock trade. But “a Ping-Pong match, it takes fifteen minutes,” he told me. FanDuel let players “live bet” a match while it was happening. Starting around midnight, he began repeatedly betting hundreds of thousands of dollars on Russian table tennis. “It’s exhilarating because, in your mind, your whole life rides on how good a serve this Ping-Pong guy has,” Jontay said. “It drives you insane, quite literally. Eyes bloodshot. Staring at the screen. I think you’re addicted to the thrill of the in-between, when you don’t know if it’s going to win or lose.” He bet for nearly three days straight, and won more than a million dollars.Jontay called Kelli ecstatic. He told her that he’d earned the money trading futures. “I was super proud,” he said. “But she was equally, if not more, hurt.” Kelli was a financial adviser, and the story didn’t add up: what edge could her basketball-player boyfriend possibly have in commodities trading? She pressed him for details, but, ultimately, she backed down. “When you’re close to people, your own perspective makes you cling to things you want to be true,” she said. “I just wanted to get married. And I trusted that it was all O.K.”Jontay playing for the Toronto Raptors, in 2024.Photograph by Rick Osentoski / USA TODAY / ReutersFrank Cardenas started a job as a V.I.P. account manager at FanDuel a few months before Jontay began betting. At forty-two, Cardenas is a natural sportsbook host—classically good-looking yet weathered, like an aging frat guy. He had been working in casinos since he was sixteen, when he handled greyhounds at a dog track in Iowa. At FanDuel, part of his job was to scout big bettors. Poring over spreadsheets of fresh betting data, he quickly spotted Jontay. “I looked at his wagering history and I was, like, Damn,” he said. “I know that a guy making this many bets, betting every single game in the world right now, he doesn’t have some edge. He’s just a hard-core gambler.”Online sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings offer V.I.P. programs modelled on the perks that Vegas casinos provide for high rollers. DraftKings V.I.P.s can win the kinds of prizes one might expect (golf clubs, a Peloton) but also more exotic ones (a thirty-thousand-dollar crystal decanter of rare Cognac, a trip to the Pyramids of Giza). Cardenas regularly hosted clients in box suites for sporting events. He bought them steak dinners and took them to swank night clubs, where bottle-service girls in bikini tops lit sparklers and served alcohol under a banner that read “We bet on FanDuel only!” He took them to parties with Chris Rock, and to a track where they test-drove Porsches. The purpose of it all was to keep them betting.The irony was that, to be a V.I.P., you had to be a loser. Unlike Vegas casinos, where hosts typically confirm the assets of their mega-rich whales, online sportsbooks don’t typically do so. Some of Cardenas’s clients were wealthy. But a V.I.P. could also be a “Taco Bell manager” who “was betting five hundred dollars a week, and then it goes up to two thousand,” he said. Bettors who show a propensity for winning often face restrictions on the apps, or are sometimes even banned. Isaac Rose-Berman, a professional tennis “sharp” and a gambling researcher, told me that, when he tried to place a bet on FanDuel predicting the winner of a tournament last summer, the app gave him a maximum wager of a hundred and ninety dollars. His friend, a V.I.P., could make the same bet for seventy-six thousand. “These are companies that want to make the most amount of money,” he said. “That’s their prerogative.”Some pros will make dumb bets just to get V.I.P. status, so that they can unlock higher betting limits. It’s also now a common (though prohibited) practice to pay existing V.I.P.s for access to their accounts. I talked to two of these “straw bettors”—people who loved sports and jumped at the chance to let someone else bet for them as long as they could use the box seats. They expected a raucous atmosphere at the games they attended, with V.I.P.s living like kings. But both found quiet rooms of young men glued to their phones, placing bets. “Every other person in this box must be a gambling addict,” one told me. “It was profoundly joyless.” The other told me that, once his pro started winning, he never heard from his V.I.P. host again.The real V.I.P.s, Cardenas said, are the people who “just can’t stay away.” I spoke with a former client of his whom I’ll call Chris. He told me that he had bet more than a billion dollars in two decades of relentless gambling, and that he’d tried “every modality of treatment” to quit. “My life’s been an absolute disaster for twenty-one years,” he said. “I’m getting evicted. I have a one-year-old daughter.” But nothing has worked. “I’m a zombie. Sex is whatever. Food is whatever. Everything is so mundane—unless I get a hundred thousand on a parlay.”Jontay’s habits would have raised a red flag with any mental-health professional. One week, Cardenas told me, Jontay wagered more money than anyone else on FanDuel. Harry Levant, a counsellor and gambling-recovery coach who is one of the country’s leading experts on gambling addiction, and a recovering addict himself, told me, “Here’s a sentence that has never in the history of mankind been uttered. You ready? ‘I know what I want to do with my money for enjoyment purposes today. I’m going to go bet on Ping-Pong from the Czech Republic.’ ”Cardenas wasn’t directly compensated for his clients’ losses, but, per a job posting, V.I.P. hosts were expected to use their clients to “drive revenue.” “These guys make all our money for us,” Cardenas said. When he first welcomed Jontay to the V.I.P. program, he sent him a bonus of ten thousand dollars to gamble with. For Jontay, it was a rush. He was used to offshore-casino apps in which he had to “beg for a bonus after losing” so that he could keep playing. When Jontay asked for another ten thousand the next night, Cardenas gave it to him. The following day, Cardenas got a call from a supervisor. “I got my ass chewed out,” Cardenas said. “ ‘Don’t you give him another dollar without our say-so!’ ” Cardenas was in trouble not only because he’d exceeded his discretionary-bonus limit but also because he’d given out the extra bonus while Jontay was winning. “Yeah, he might be up off ‘Monday Night Football,’ ” Cardenas said. “But we’re gonna get the money back.” The next day, Jontay lost six hundred thousand dollars. Cardenas’s bosses quit scolding him. Then the company gave Jontay another thirty-five thousand dollars in credit.Frank Cardenas, Jontay’s V.I.P. host at FanDuel.Photograph by Caitlin O’Hara for The New YorkerFanDuel didn’t ask Jontay for proof of his income. All he needed was his name. “It’s right away known that he’s a basketball player,” Cardenas said. “And it doesn’t take much of a deeper dive to find out he’s M.P.J.’s brother.” Michael had recently signed a contract extension with the Nuggets worth more than two hundred million dollars. “There was certainly a sentiment at some point, like, Well, what’s the big deal if M.P.J. has to break him off a million?” Cardenas said. Early on, the accounts team noticed that Jontay had made more than thirty million dollars’ worth of bets during his first two weeks on FanDuel, and when Jontay didn’t respond to an e-mail asking whether he was “comfortable” with his “level of spending,” his account was briefly suspended. Cardenas berated the employees, pointing out how much money Jontay’s brother had. Cardenas walked Jontay through replying, and FanDuel reactivated the account.In fact, Cardenas said, the company had evidence to suggest that Jontay couldn’t afford his bets. Deposits from PayPal into Jontay’s FanDuel account were instant, but PayPal took a couple of days to actually withdraw the funds from a bank account. About a month after Jontay began betting on FanDuel, according to Cardenas, PayPal notified the company that Jontay owed half a million dollars in overdrawn deposits, and asked for help retrieving the funds. FanDuel decided to suspend Jontay’s account until receiving proof that he’d paid PayPal back. Cardenas said that the company could have used the incident to investigate how many V.I.P. players were betting with overdrawn deposits, though he speculated that the company didn’t want to know the answer. “A lot of these states don’t allow you to bet on credit,” he said. “But with PayPal you essentially can.”A former FanDuel V.I.P.-program executive I spoke to defended the company’s actions, saying, of Jontay, “At no point when he was on FanDuel was he in such crazy debt.” When I suggested that FanDuel would have no way to know this without verifying Jontay’s finances, the executive agreed that there should be mandatory income checks and other safeguards, particularly for V.I.P. players. “It was never supposed to be twenty-four hours a day,” he said.As one of the top V.I.P.s at FanDuel, Jontay was offered all kinds of perks: a new iPhone, courtside seats at N.B.A. games, tickets to the Super Bowl. Jontay and Cardenas became friends. They texted almost every day. Jontay called him the “goat of bonuses.” He told me that, while he was hiding his gambling from everyone else, it felt good to have someone who shared his secret. “Frank became why I stayed,” he said.[embedded content]The anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll spent fifteen years studying how casinos developed electronic gambling machines such as slots and video poker. In her book “Addiction by Design,” from 2012, she wrote that executives said the machines were engineered to increase “time on device” by entrancing players into a kind of dissociative state that came to be known as “the zone.” The companies sped games up by increasing the lines in slots or the playable hands in blackjack and poker. They removed “frictions” like pulling levers or depositing coins. The machines flashed with bright lights and played rhythmic sounds. The zone was so hypnotic that some gamblers soiled themselves rather than leave their machines to go to the bathroom. A compulsive gambler named Mollie told Schüll, “The thing people never understand is that I’m not playing to win” but, rather, “to keep playing—to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.” One industry consultant admitted that the goal was to keep players so enchanted that they stopped only because they ran out of money: to “play to extinction.”Traditional sports betting didn’t have much in common with machine gambling. The hypnosis of the zone shared characteristics with the Skinner-box effect. Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, the behavioral scientist B. F. Skinner discovered that, when pigeons were given a lever that dispensed food pellets at random, as opposed to in a predictable pattern, they began to unceasingly peck at it. Unlike slot machines, sports bets were not random. Games were narrative contests. There was a limited number of bets that a player could make, and matches took hours to resolve.But FanDuel and DraftKings found ways to increase the speed and the volume of sports betting. They offered bets on everything from soccer to jai alai, to insure that there was always something to bet on. In Colorado, one of only a few states that publish the amounts wagered by sport, table tennis, which is prized among gamblers for its speed, is now the fourth most popular, ranking above soccer and hockey. Professional leagues agreed to lucrative licensing deals to sell their official stats, allowing sportsbooks to offer a dizzying number of in-game “prop bets.” Now, in a football game, you can bet not just on who will win but also on the next guy to score a touchdown, and whether a drive is going to end in a punt. During the last Super Bowl, you could’ve built a parlay betting that no one would cry during the national anthem, that Bad Bunny’s first song during the halftime show would be “Tití Me Preguntó,” that the color of the Gatorade dumped on the winning coach would be red, and that the game’s M.V.P. would thank Jesus first during his post-game speech. Ten bucks to win five hundred and seventy-two—but you would’ve lost, because the Gatorade was yellow.The thing is, sports betting is fun. I love college football, and one time I bet twenty dollars on a long-shot parlay that six underdog teams would all win their games. The sixth game went into four overtimes, and, when my team won, I raised my fists in triumph. I won a thousand dollars, and felt like I’d succeeded because I was smart, not lucky. One of FanDuel’s taglines is “Make Every Moment More.” By taking endless moments and making them bets, the company has made football look a lot like a multiline slot machine. I wondered how many more bets I would need to place before I found my way to Russian Ping-Pong.Our phones are already addictive, in the way of Skinner boxes. Sports-betting apps operate less like casinos than like TikTok or Instagram, using thousands of personalized data points to keep gamblers engaged. “It’s a perfect sort of surveillance-capitalism story,” Schüll told me. She pointed to a 2005 study showing that people who live within ten miles of a large-scale gaming operation are ninety per cent likelier to develop a gambling problem. Now we all have casinos in our pockets. “Bathroom stalls, more than we’d like to think, are now the sites of sports betting,” Schüll said.The result has been the largest expansion of gambling in American history. In 2017, the year before the sports-betting ban was overturned, Americans wagered about five billion dollars on sports through official channels. Last year, they bet more than a hundred and sixty billion. Half of men under fifty now have a sports-betting account. Not long ago, broadcasters avoided even a hint of gambling conversation. These days, N.B.A. games feature FanDuel betting odds onscreen. LeBron James has starred in DraftKings ads and has shared custom N.F.L. parlays.We are just beginning to understand the ramifications. A recent study found that gambling addiction has risen by sixty per cent in states that have legalized sports betting. “The evidence is overwhelming that expanded sports betting has led to increased harm on a national scale,” Keith Whyte, who led the National Council on Problem Gambling for more than two decades, told Congress in 2024. (He has since become a safety consultant for online sportsbooks and has advocated for more states to legalize betting.) A national survey found that forty-three per cent of thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds had gambled in the past year, and that ten per cent of them qualified as high-risk problem gamblers. An addiction counsellor in New Jersey recently said that one of her clients, a fifteen-year-old boy, had stolen his parents’ and grandparents’ Social Security numbers to create four FanDuel accounts, and had bet nine hundred thousand dollars in a single year. Rose-Berman, the professional bettor, told me that he gives regular talks in high schools about the dangers of gambling, only to find a line of teen-age boys afterward waiting to ask what he thinks of their bets. He noted parallels between the normalization of gambling culture and the Joe Camel ads that helped make smoking cool among young people. “In five, ten years, we’re going to look back and be, like, Why the fuck is LeBron James doing these ads?” he said.Sports-betting companies claim that they don’t want addicts to gamble. But chasing those most likely to gamble often means chasing addicts. In a case that recently became a scandal in the U.K., Sky Bet, a subsidiary of FanDuel’s parent company, was accused of targeting a compulsive gambler. The player, who went by RTM in court, began gambling after taking advantage of a free promotion and soon developed an addiction. Sky Bet ultimately collected thousands of data points to build a “propensity model” that would predict his behavior. He tried to quit, but Sky Bet had labelled him a “high value” customer and sent him targeted e-mails and bonus credit to keep him playing. He eventually lost his entire life savings, and came close to killing himself. “They took his addiction and turned it into code,” Ravi Naik, RTM’s lawyer, told me. “We know that online-gambling companies use those codes to algorithmically target, in the U.K. and across the world.” (The case is pending at the U.K. Supreme Court.) A recent Times investigation found that DraftKings used artificial intelligence to send compulsive gamblers promotions and free-bet credits, but declined to use the technology to help identify at-risk bettors.Whereas the algorithms find the people who are most likely to gamble, the V.I.P. host provides the human connection to keep them going. Several lawsuits in the United States allege that online sportsbooks use V.I.P. programs to groom addicted gamblers. In one case, a V.I.P. lost more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in four months; she was offered promotional credits even after she asked her V.I.P. host if DraftKings could give her a loan to help her pay her mortgage. “Probably means I need to quit gambling soon,” she messaged. (The case was settled before trial.) In another case, a V.I.P. realized that he was addicted and asked DraftKings to close his account. A month later, he realized that he could still log in, relapsed, and lost three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. (DraftKings won the case, and it is being appealed.) Matthew Litt, a lawyer who has filed several suits against DraftKings and FanDuel, said, “The scale of it? I think we haven’t even scratched the surface.” (DraftKings and FanDuel declined to comment on pending litigation, but, in court documents, both deny any wrongdoing.)Cardenas, Jontay’s V.I.P. host, once asked his boss what percentage of V.I.P.s he thought had a gambling problem. “He says, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ ” Cardenas recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, I do know. It’s about a hundred per cent.’ ” He added, “What is problem gambling? Is there a specific sign? Yeah, when they get into the V.I.P. program. That’s when I know they’re a problem gambler.”[embedded content]In 2022, Jontay married Kelli on a golf course in Seattle, with panoramic views of Mt. Rainier. Their wedding photos document a day of joy: feeding each other cake, laughing with friends on the dance floor. In one, Jontay is on a balcony as Kelli sneaks up behind him for their “first look.” “I’m looking out at the beautiful horizon,” Jontay said. “And I’m just thinking about the four bets I need to hit to be able to pay back a bookie.”The first year of their marriage was tumultuous. Kelli discovered Jontay’s gambling problem soon after the wedding. She cut off his access to their joint accounts, but at night he would Venmo himself from her phone, hoping to put the money back before she woke up in the morning. He gambled with her credit cards and then insisted that it was fraud. On Thanksgiving Day, he stole thousands of dollars from his mother’s Apple Pay. “Literally, I got shingles twice,” Kelli said. “I was so sick.” The following year, Jontay’s family staged a tearful intervention. Michael paid for a thirty-day treatment at a top facility in Florida. Jontay went to group therapy and read the Bible. He promised he would get clean. Kelli thought the worst was over.Jontay had also managed to resurrect his basketball career. His knees had improved, and in December, 2023, he was offered a contract with the Toronto Raptors. He and Kelli moved into a condo in Toronto. He played his first game in early January. “It’s quite the comeback story, I guess,” he told a reporter afterward. “Hopefully, it has a happy ending.”But, behind the scenes, the gambling hadn’t stopped. By that point, Jontay had bet more than fifty million dollars on FanDuel and, through a friend’s account, millions on DraftKings. He’d lost millions in cryptocurrency gambling on such sites as Stake. “I was pretty much living off scraps,” he said. “I was sitting in my locker, like, leaned back so nobody can see my phone, watching college basketball, betting on that.”In 2022, Jontay had met Johnny Kalaj, a heavily tattooed fitness influencer. Jontay asked Kalaj if he knew any bookies who would let him bet on credit. Kalaj hooked him up with a group that he called “the Jews.” Jontay came to understand this to be the Jewish mafia. Within two weeks, he had lost more than a hundred and sixty thousand dollars. When he didn’t pay his balance, Kalaj texted him: “Tay you think I’m joking when I say these are the worst people.” When Jontay asked if they would kill him if he didn’t pay, Kalaj told him that they didn’t “deal in violence.” What they did was “worse.” “These are the type of people who hack your computer, fill it with kid porn and alert police,” he wrote.Kalaj eventually said that he had paid off the debt for Jontay by selling two expensive watches. “What I just did, you fucking owe me,” Kalaj texted. After a year, Jontay still hadn’t paid Kalaj back, and Kalaj threatened to go public with Jontay’s gambling. “Just do the right thing. I swear on my mother I dnt want to take the next step,” Kalaj texted. (Kalaj did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Jontay also owed money to an Antiguan politician he’d met at rehab named Asot Michael. “You want me to finish you?” Asot texted him. “You better send my money today Jontay or I’m exposing you.” (Asot was later murdered, for unrelated reasons.)But Jontay interacted most with another bookie whom Kalaj had introduced him to named Ammar Awawdeh, a thirty-five-year-old Palestinian American with a thick build, soft brown eyes, and the vibe of a Spike Lee character. His family owns grocery stores in New York City. He bragged about having run “the biggest poker games in New York City,” with guest lists that included Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Hart, and the N.B.A. All-Star Paul Pierce. He told me that, while the Lakers were visiting New York, LeBron James had once rented a house where Awawdeh hosted poker games. (A representative for DiCaprio declined to comment. James’s spokesperson denied that he had rented the house. Pierce and Hart did not respond to requests for comment.) Though Awawdeh was friendly, Jontay knew that he was connected to some dangerous associates, including the Gambino crime family in New York.What happened next is a bit of a black box, because most of the planning occurred on the encrypted messaging service Telegram, and the messages were deleted. Jontay says that, about a week after making his début with the Raptors, he had dinner with Awawdeh in New York, their only time meeting in person. Now that Jontay was back in the N.B.A., his stats were also potential bets. According to Jontay, Awawdeh suggested that, to pay back the money, he could do a “special”: fake an injury or an illness so that the “unders” on his stats all hit, like a boxer taking a dive in a fight.Awawdeh claims that this was Jontay’s idea. “I was, like, ‘Hey, listen, I’ll go sit courtside and watch you fucking poke your eye out in person,’ ” Awawdeh said. Regardless, the pair agreed on a plan. Jontay was initially nervous, but Awawdeh told me that he and his friend Bruce Pham were confident that Jontay would get away with it. Pham was part of a crew that had allegedly done this before, using a player far more prominent than Jontay: a guard for the Charlotte Hornets named Terry Rozier. Awawdeh and Pham told Jontay that they would spread the bets across multiple sportsbooks, including on offshore sites, to make them harder to trace. With his cut, Jontay could pay off all of his debts. He would finally be free.Jontay outside his home last year.Photograph by Sarah Blesener for The New YorkerLast year, I met Awawdeh at his apartment, in a waterfront building in Brooklyn. He wore a Yankees hoodie, and a sunset view of Manhattan filled the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him. He had recently been arrested, and he recounted how federal agents had swarmed the building. “I smiled at them,” he said. “It’s a fucking gambling case, and they’re treating me like I’m Pablo Escobar.”In October, 2025, the Justice Department unveiled charges in a far-reaching N.B.A.-betting conspiracy involving Awawdeh’s crew and three of New York’s five Mafia families. Prosecutors allege that Awawdeh and some thirty co-conspirators helped rig several high-stakes poker games that cost unwitting players more than seven million dollars. Chauncey Billups, a basketball hall of famer and the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, and Damon Jones, a former player and assistant coach, were paid to act as “face cards,” helping to recruit players for the games. (Jones has pleaded guilty to a wire-fraud charge. Billups has pleaded not guilty. Neither responded to requests for comment.) Awawdeh and his crew then deployed hacked shuffle machines, electronic chip trays with hidden cameras, and even special glasses that allowed people in on the scam to read marked cards.Poker was only part of the con. Billups and Jones allegedly also shared inside information with sports bettors in Awawdeh’s circle, including Pham and a friend named Shane Hennen, which they then used to place bets. (Pham and Hennen both pleaded guilty.) Jones, for example, purportedly texted one of the co-defendants that LeBron James, a close friend of his, would be sitting out a game in 2023 because of an injury. A co-conspirator is said to have paid Rozier seventy thousand dollars to fake an injury and exit a game. (Rozier has pleaded not guilty, and did not respond to requests for comment.) Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, called the scheme “the insider-trading scandal of the N.B.A.”On January 26, 2024, Jontay suited up to play the Los Angeles Clippers. His mom, Lisa, was in the crowd—her first chance to see him play in the N.B.A. again. He checked in late in the first quarter and grabbed a few rebounds, but didn’t take any shots. “I don’t remember too much,” Jontay said. “You’re buzzing, you know? It’s a lot on the line.” At the end of the first quarter, a ball bounced off the rim and he started to reach for it, then awkwardly tapped it toward a teammate. Footage shows him walking off the court and pointing to his left eye, as if it were hurt. He had gotten poked in the eye in the previous game, and he told me that this seemed easier than inventing a new injury. It wasn’t until he was sitting in the hospital, having his eye checked out, with Kelli and his mom by his side, that the realization of what he’d done set in. “Just an overwhelming amount of shame,” he said. “It felt like I was taking advantage of the very thing that gave me the world.”The hall of famer Chauncey Billups; Terry Rozier, formerly of the Miami Heat; and Damon Jones, a former assistant coach, were all caught up in a betting scandal in 2025.Photographs by Soobum Im / Getty; Carmen Mandato / Getty; Andres Kudacki / GettyWorst of all, the plan didn’t even work. DraftKings noted that the unders on Jontay’s stats were the most profitable bet of the whole night, a surprise for such a small-time player. But Awawdeh said that, because of spending limits that they hadn’t anticipated, they couldn’t put enough money down to clear Jontay’s debt. They pressed him to do it again. For weeks, Jontay resisted.By that time, Awawdeh had put Jontay in touch by text with a guy named Vinny, whom Jontay understood to be a bookie for the Italian Mafia. Soon, Jontay owed Vinny some two hundred thousand dollars. According to Jontay, Awawdeh warned that Vinny had just been released from prison for manslaughter, and “didn’t take kindly to people who crossed him.” One gambler who hadn’t paid his debt, Awawdeh told him, was tied to a chair in a warehouse and had his finger cut off before giving up his crypto wallet. (Awawdeh denies saying this.) Jontay said that, at one point, he received a threat that enforcers would pay Kelli a visit in Toronto. “I guess that was my weak spot,” he said. Kelli had recently told him that she was pregnant, and Jontay didn’t want to bring a child into the world with a gambling debt to the Mob hanging over his head.In March, 2024, Jontay pulled himself out of a game against the Sacramento Kings, saying that he felt sick. Meanwhile, Awawdeh went with Pham, their friend Timothy McCormack, and a friend of Jontay’s named Mahmud Mollah to a brick-and-mortar DraftKings location in Atlantic City. According to prosecutors, surveillance footage shows them approaching the casino cage with a blue gift bag full of cash and handing the money to a teller. They made at least seven parlays against Jontay’s stats, which would have paid out for more than a million dollars.Instead, the bets were immediately flagged. Sportsbooks track bets in real time and use algorithms to spot suspicious activity. A huge parlay on LeBron James would earn a second look. One on Jontay Porter, a little-known reserve, might as well have been a confession. The minute Jontay took himself out of the game, a digital dye pack exploded all over their cash. (FanDuel and DraftKings, unlike illegal operators, can accept suspicious bets because if a bet loses they can keep the money, and if it wins they can notify law enforcement and will likely never have to pay out.) Jontay didn’t know it at the time, but the plan had also been leaked to other co-conspirators. Similar bets had been placed on several other sportsbooks. DraftKings reported the activity. (Mollah, Pham, and McCormack have all pleaded guilty to wire-fraud charges.)A few days later, while taking a pre-game nap in a hotel suite, Jontay got a call from the Raptors’ general manager, who told him that he was under investigation for “suspicious betting activity.” “I knew I was toast,” he said.He was soon banned from the N.B.A. Kelli considered divorcing him. Jontay Googled whether or not he could still go to Heaven if he killed himself. He bought a gun. “There was one incident where I—I don’t even think my wife knows this—but I held it to my head and I was just crying: ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ ” he said. Gambling has the highest suicide rate of any addiction; nearly twenty per cent of addicts attempt to take their own lives. But, as he thought about pulling the trigger, he imagined his unborn son. “I can’t leave this earth without meeting him,” he said.Jontay flew to New York and turned himself in. He walked past a holding cell and noticed the size of the toilet. It was so small. He glanced at the twin-size prison cot. Would he even fit? “That moment, I was, like, This could really be my future,” he said.Three days after the news of the investigation broke, Jontay got an e-mail from FanDuel. A few months earlier, his account had been deactivated because he had tried to place a bet with a co-conspirator’s debit card. This time, the e-mail offered to reactivate his account if he could provide proof of income.In 1994, the C.E.O.s of the seven major American tobacco companies denied before Congress that nicotine was addictive. The testimony earned them the nickname the Seven Dwarfs. Soon after, Frank Fahrenkopf, the founder of the American Gaming Association, a trade organization that represents gambling operators, brought a photo of the tobacco C.E.O.s into a meeting of casino executives. “This is not what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re not going to lie.” Fahrenkopf was a political operative—he had once been the head of the Republican National Committee—and he understood how important public opinion was to his industry’s long-term success.The casino executives acknowledged that gambling addiction was real, though they downplayed its prevalence. They convinced lawmakers that a self-regulatory framework was sufficient to protect consumers, calling it “responsible gaming.” Casinos helped fund organizations combatting addiction, such as the National Council on Problem Gambling, and gave gamblers voluntary tools, like deposit limits and self-exclusion lists, which allow people to effectively ban themselves from gambling operations. But, ultimately, they put the responsibility on the gambler.FanDuel and DraftKings both declined to answer questions for this piece, but they affirmed their commitment to responsible gambling. They pointed to tools like Real-Time Check-In, which uses A.I. to monitor players’ deposits, and My Budget Builder, which makes it easier for customers to set spending limits. They offer free telehealth therapy for players who self-exclude. Marketing material is tagged with information about how to access gambling-addiction resources. In a statement, FanDuel acknowledged making “significant changes” since Jontay’s time in the V.I.P. program, including “additional employee training” and “proactive account reviews when concerning play patterns are detected.”But Rose-Berman, the professional bettor, pointed out the absurdity of asking addicts to resist modern technology companies. “Alcohol stores don’t give you a coupon for a free drink if you’ve taken a week off drinking,” he said. “It used to be man versus vice. Now it’s man versus vice combined with a billion-dollar tech company. That’s not a fair fight.” Multiple studies have shown that casinos make most of their money from a small percentage of users. I recently obtained data collected by FanDuel’s V.I.P. program during the time that Jontay played. V.I.P. players made up less than half a per cent of the company’s monthly users, but were responsible for nearly six hundred million dollars in revenue. FanDuel reportedly had two billion dollars in revenue that year. “It’s just very hard for me not to believe that this industry only exists because of people who are harmed,” Brianne Doura-Schawohl, a lobbyist pushing for stronger regulations, said.None of the experts I spoke to think that we’re going back to the days of prohibition. Sports betting has become too big to deconstruct. But countries like the U.K. and Australia, both of which legalized online gambling well before the United States, have put laws in place to curb predatory behavior. They have cracked down on V.I.P. programs, implemented mandatory affordability checks, curtailed opportunities for constant prop bets, and limited advertising during televised games. So far, the industry has fought similar regulations in the U.S. Experts worry that the result is a looming public-health crisis. “Mr. Porter is not a bad person who tried to do harm,” Levant, the counsellor, told me. “He’s a gambling addict in a world where the government has given license to these companies to take these people for everything.”As the leagues have raked in exorbitant additional revenue from sports-betting partnerships and increased viewership, many athletes have found themselves mired in scandal. A study of European athletes showed that a third bet on their own sport. The N.F.L. has suspended several players, including Calvin Ridley and Jameson Williams, for breaking league gambling rules. The former Detroit Pistons guard Malik Beasley recently pleaded guilty to manipulating his prop bets. Prosecutors indicted two Cleveland Guardians pitchers for conspiring with bettors to intentionally miss the strike zone. (Both have pleaded not guilty.)When I spoke to Cardenas, the V.I.P. host, he was reckoning with his role in all of this. He had been fired from FanDuel shortly after the Jontay Porter scandal broke, for violating the company’s code of conduct. (Cardenas claimed that the timing was a coincidence.) FanDuel, he said, had asked to review his personal cellphone and passwords after accusing him of having unsupervised communication with players. Cardenas refused. He did admit that, on a few occasions—and never as a kickback for Jontay’s gambling with FanDuel—the two had loaned each other small amounts of money. “The code of conduct?” Cardenas scoffed. “I’m not the one with the moral deficiency. Their entire business model is legal theft.” Cardenas himself is a gambling addict. (A study found that casino employees are nine times likelier than the general public to develop addictions.) He had been a V.I.P. on online sportsbooks such as BetMGM and Fanatics, and had lost money wagering on just about every sport: virtual horse racing, Icelandic women’s basketball. That’s what made him such a good host. “I find a job with FanDuel where it’s, like, Hey, we want you to just text with V.I.P.s all day about sports betting,” he said. “Yeah, it’s kind of what I’m doing anyway.” When we talked, last year, he had been evicted from his apartment, and was bouncing among friends’ couches. He was trying to quit gambling, but he said, “I don’t know who I am without it.”When I asked if he had regrets about encouraging an addict like Jontay to bet, he replied, “No one ever tried to stop me.” Still, he was haunted by where it had led Jontay. “That’s what I hate about gambling,” he said. “It broke my heart.”Jontay with his wife and first child last year.Photograph by Sarah Blesener for The New YorkerLast year, I watched Jontay play in a semi-professional basketball tournament in his home town of Columbia. I’d played basketball at Mizzou a decade before Jontay, and had been watching him since he was in high school, but I’d forgotten what a joy it was. The competition included former high-level college athletes, some making a living in professional leagues overseas, but, compared with them, Jontay seemed like a dad playing in the driveway with his kids. It was no N.B.A. arena, but he smiled a lot during the game. His family cheered from the sidelines. Jontay grabbed a rebound and flung the ball seventy-five feet to his younger brother Jevon, a perfect pass that ended in a dunk. “That boy crazy,” a guy next to me said.Jontay pleaded guilty to wire fraud. Fans now sometimes joke that when a player is struggling in a game he must be “pulling a Jontay.” He didn’t blame them. He also refused to deflect responsibility onto the sportsbooks or his co-conspirators. “We live in a generation of consumerism and greed,” he said. “And I was the pinnacle of that.”As I dug through the records of Jontay’s extortion, some details didn’t add up. Jontay dealt with the Jewish mafia and the Gambinos over text, but he never spoke with them directly. He placed bets on credit, and, when he paid after losing, he sent the money to Kalaj or Awawdeh. The phone number for “Murray,” Jontay’s point person from the Jewish mafia, came from what appears to be a burner-phone service provider with an office registered in midtown. The number for “Sal,” one of Vinny’s “enforcers,” came through the same carrier, even though the two organizations were supposed to be unrelated. When I traced Vinny’s number, it turned out to be registered to a person I recognized: Bruce Pham, Awawdeh’s partner.It’s impossible to know for sure what all of this means. But multiple professional bettors and a source connected to the case told me they suspected that Awawdeh and Kalaj had pulled a common scam. Middlemen tell a bettor he’s placing bets with a bookie. If the bets win, they make an excuse not to pay. If the bets lose, they collect the money. On at least one occasion, Jontay was up nearly six figures, but Awawdeh didn’t pay him, citing Jontay’s previous late payments as a reason to void his winnings that week. When I pressed Awawdeh on whether Vinny was real, he got quiet and took a deep breath, then said, “A wise guy once told me, ‘Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.’ ” He wouldn’t say any more.Awawdeh pleaded guilty to wire-fraud charges, and is scheduled to be sentenced next year. He’s out on bail, and hoping that his legitimate businesses will provide for his daughters when he goes to prison. He told me that gambling is a bigger problem among N.B.A. players than we yet understand, and that the league, by embracing sports betting, has opened a Pandora’s box. Awawdeh, too, is a gambling addict. He told me that it was partially his own gambling debts that had led him to get involved in the scams. He thought it was ironic that FanDuel and DraftKings (called Betting Company 1 and Betting Company 2 in the case) were technically the victims of Jontay’s crime. “The real criminals here are the guys in the suits—the guys who run FanDuel and DraftKings, and their N.B.A. partners,” he said. “You got Charles Barkley and Shaq talking about their prop bets. Bro, there’s little kids watching these games. This is the society they fuckin’ built.”In Missouri, I asked Jontay if he ever thought about an alternate scenario in which he’d gotten out from under the debts, and was still playing in the N.B.A. “You don’t stop the addiction until the pain of the addiction outweighs the pleasure,” he said. He told me that one night, after he’d already racked up debts with the bookies, he played blackjack on his phone. He’d started the evening with twenty thousand dollars. “I’m winning a ton,” he said. “I keep winning.” By 4:30 A.M., he was up a million dollars—enough to pay off all of his debts and start fresh. He began the withdrawal process, which takes a few hours, then closed his eyes to go to sleep. But, he said, “my brain is exploding. I wake up and I’m, like, I got to keep going.” Within an hour, he’d lost it all. “I just won a million dollars that would have saved my life,” he said. “And that wasn’t enough for me.”Today, commercial gambling is ubiquitous. FanDuel and DraftKings are both lobbying states to pass “iGaming” bills that would legalize online casino games like blackjack and slots. It’s obvious why: in the course of a month last year in Pennsylvania, where online casinos are legal, sports bettors lost twenty-seven million dollars; casino-game players lost more than two hundred million. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are the new disrupters. They allow users to bet on the Rotten Tomatoes score of the new “Cat in the Hat” movie or on the number of people Donald Trump will deport. But sports betting is their most popular offering by far. They have circumvented state legislatures by arguing that a sports bet is simply a commodity-future contract, like betting on the price of wheat, and therefore already legal. FanDuel and DraftKings recently created their own prediction-market apps, which have enabled them to bring sports betting to Texas and California, where legalization has stalled.Chris, the former FanDuel V.I.P., has spent a lot of time in manosphere-adjacent crowds online. He was troubled by the gambling fervor that he witnessed, but also understood it. “Doing things quote-unquote the right way? It didn’t get us anywhere. We ended up broke,” he said. “There’s just a desperation from people who want to break free from the middle. And I think one of the clear and present ways to do that is massive risk. People are just trying to gamble their way to the top.” According to a study, ninety per cent of young users believe that they will make money on sports betting. Yet only four per cent of accounts are profitable. Americans are now on track to lose a trillion dollars of personal wealth to commercialized gambling in the next five years. Bankruptcies are up nearly ten per cent in states that have legalized online sports betting.Jontay estimated that he has wagered at least half a billion dollars in his life, but he hasn’t placed a bet since before his arrest, more than two years ago. Still, he doesn’t feel cured. He admitted that he sometimes missed the thrill of gambling. “This war on my soul is going to continue,” he said. He’s in regular therapy for his addiction. His relationship with Michael, which fractured after he was caught, has mended. Kelli stayed with him, and the couple had a second son. She now works while he stays at home with their children, changing diapers and taking them to the park. As we were speaking, he heard his older son, Jayce, waking up after a nap; he carried him back into the room and bounced him on his lap. When I asked if his boys would play basketball, he laughed. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “They don’t have a choice.” Jontay had regrets, but getting caught wasn’t one of them. “I’m thankful to God that the F.B.I. investigated,” he said. “Because if that didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be sitting here today.” ?