Episode 8: The Integrity Landscape

Pushkin.

All right, here, we are welcome to the third and final part of our season. In this last part, we'll be giving you secret tips so you can make a killing.

I was able to completely change my life around, from making zero dollars to now making one hundreds of thousands of dollars from sports betting. During this entire journey, I found seven key habits I wish I knew earlier.

Just seven key habits. How hard can it be? I mean even Eric Andre is doing it.

No, it's broncos times.

I'd take the over, take the over over to YouTube.

Everybody's gonna hate me for this.

But day three oh seven of betting one hundred dollars every single day of the year, I won five hundred dollars yesterday.

Every day is a new day, but it only counts as a day if you put some money down on it. You need to be more like me or Kevin Hart. All run, lady, like it's the birth of your child.

Michael. Yeah, yeah, you're in the wrong script.

Oh oh, go.

To V two.

I mean, you know, I never never realized how important was to have an editor. Thank you, Julia. Yeah, so that was the old script. I guess I wrote that somehow before we decided to be the only podcast that refuses ads from sports gambling companies. Ah, here's the new one. Here it is. Welcome to the third and final part of our season. It's it's not about how to make a killing gambling on sports, No, it's about how to prevent sports gambling from killing you. There we go. That's better.

Okay, let's roll the theme.

I'm Michael Lewis, and this is against the rules. In the first part of this season, we told the story of how sports gambling came to be legalized and normalized in the United States. In part two, we laid out how the new sports gambling industrial complex works, how it came to be dominated by two companies, Fan Duel and Draft Kings, and exquisitely designed to maximize both the number of and the stupidity of sports bets that Americans make.

Court gambling signs and gambling advertisements. We can't even watch playbacks of our game without seeing you know, FANDUL DraftKings or whoever advertising you know, the player props or futures going on.

That's Larry Nance, junior first round pick of the Los Angeles Lakers back in twenty fifteen. Now he's a power forward for the Atlanta Hawks. The NBA forbids its players from gambling on basketball, but they still have to live in the same world as the rest of us.

I know, obviously no betting, no tipping, no fixing, but it's like, come on, guys, you just at least try to hide it from us, like you know, this is still a passion of ours? Is the job of ours that you know you're making just to share almost like a mockery of it.

Feels like are you ever made aware of like the specific bets people might have made on you, like the prop bets social media?

Will you if you log into social media before or after any game, Before the game you have people begging you to hit a certain amount of rebounds or points or whatever it is. And after the game you either have somebody praising you or absolutely cursing you out for it being your fault that they lost money.

Is it different than it was when they were just upset or happy that the team won?

Oh significantly significantly. Yeah, it's the kind of language used is drastically different than just like losing a basketball game or having a poor performance. But now like when when somebody thinks you lost the money because you know, it's my job to get your seven rebounds tonight, you know, then then they they get very animated if you don't hit that number.

So it's it's kind of it gets personal, oh very much.

So yeah, at tax on, family, at tax on just anything they can lash out on, they will use and lash out.

So what do you do to defend yourself? I mean, I mean, I don't mean physically. I'm just like just like to make sure this isn't making your life miserable?

Oh, I I mean I didn't. I didn't ask you to put money on me for me, Like I honestly, I have no desire to hit anybody's number. I hope, I hope nobody ever bets on me ever, Like I genuinely hope nobody ever bets on me because I just don't care about your specific agenda. So you can tweet at me anything you want, and my honest reaction is like, shouldn't have bet.

Now. Larry Nance isn't even close to the focus of gambling interest in basketball. I love watching him play, but he usually comes off the bench and hardly anyone accepts sports gamblers pay attention to how many points scores. But even he senses the new danger in the air.

We played in Memphis, I think, and when we were staying there that night and I didn't hit my player prop, which I don't know why you're betting on me, but I got a message while we were in Memphis that was like, hey, better not leave your hotel room to night. And it was just like, you know what. I don't know if that's credible or not, but regardless, I'm probably gonna stay in my hotel room tonight.

This moment in Larry's story, it reminded me of someone we heard from a few episodes ago, Jeff Gordon, the recovering gambling addict. As a kid, Jeff had been a huge basketball fan, but after he started gambling on the sport, his love curdled into something else.

What triggered my mind that I think I have a problem is I was pissed at the player because I was a quarter of a point away from being in first place and winning more money. And I was pissed that I that that player didn't score one more basket or you won't give more more as this, And I just remember hating Andrea Iguidala for so long, and it's like why.

Of course, fans have always wanted things from players, there's nothing new about that. What's new is the tone of their desire. Less a want, more a need.

Like you know, when you go sign autographs or something pregame or go sign autographs for people getting on the bus and be like, hey, how's how's Zion feeling the night or as a nasty fall? How is he? And you got to look at him and go like, fine, you know, just one work fun, fine, good.

I don't know more and more what fans want is information an edge.

There's been multiple occasions where like you can tell someone's come up look digging for information. When you don't give it to them, they're like come on, man, like come on, just you know, help me out this one time, like I don't know, you.

Know, the players always know stuff that would be useful to gamblers. The players are also seeing gambling happening all around them, on them to larry. It seems pretty clear what's coming next.

I think there's gonna be a lot of players getting in trouble. A lot, I mean a lot of players getting in trouble.

Trouble, that's what's coming. We've already seen a trickle of it. But the waters are rising, and you can feel the flood on its way, and so can everyone involved in any sport that's being gambled upon. The entire sports industrial complex is a bit like those poor people in western North Carolina who were told they lived in a flood zone but had never seen a flood, and then came the rain. One of the amazing things about the new sports gambling industry is just how totally unconstrained it is.

So all you're doing is monitoring the market for abnormalities. When abnormalities are identified, you send those abnormalities out for requests for information from every licensed operator in the country. Hey, did you also see any abnormal aging here?

That's Matthew Holt who created the first so called independent licensed integrity monitor. Because Matthew got there first, Matthew's company took the best name, US Integrity. And so tell me what you're monitoring in the marketplace.

For number one, and the easiest would be, Hey, Michael bets one hundred dollars a game on average on football, So we have a you know, we have a betting pattern for Michael. We know he likes the bet football usually bets one hundred to two hundred dollars, but now he wants to bet twenty thousand dollars on the first set of a tennis match. Hmmm, very abnormal. Or you know, Michael bets one hundred to three hundred dollars on baseball every day, but now he wants to bet fifteen thousand

Boom.

That's going to trigger someone to look into that match.

These new sports gambling companies have more data on their customers than all the casinos in history combined. The integrity monitor sitsts through most of it hunting for betters who clearly know something they shouldn't.

Why are we getting all these new accounts signing up just to bet one wager? Severe odds movement is something that definitely triggers the system and would have an analyst further investigate.

These integrity monitors are behind the recent uptick in sports gambling scandals. One week, Johntae Porter of the Toronto Raptors NBA team fakes an injury and pulls himself out of a game so as creditors can make money betting that he won't score as many points as he could have. Next thing, you know, a wide receiver from the New England Patriots named kay Jan Boudet is arrested for placing eight nine hundred bets while he was a student at LSU.

Brad Bohannon was a college baseball coach at the University of Alabama who with a group of his friends had got into some gambling debt and they came up with an idea to make some money. They were playing LSU on a Friday night when LSU was the number one team in the country, and the coach came up with an idea that he wouldn't tell anyone. He was going to make a pitching change to a basically an outfielder relief pitcher who had not started any games and didn't have any experience.

Corrupt sports bets are a bit like weird sex acts. You hear about them and think, nah, no way anyone would do that. But a good rule of thumb in life is that anything some human being has imagined, some human being has done. And apparently some human being imagined the college baseball coach hired to teach and improve a bunch of young men rigging a game against his own players.

When one of the better is attempted to place a six figures wager at a sports book, you know, the people behind the counter started asking him questions. You know, they realized that he was actually communicating with the coach on the phone at the time. We were able to collect that evidence, video, surveillant evidence and end up showing that they were putting together a pretty big scheme and they had four people betting in four different places.

It doesn't sound like they were that smart about it.

They weren't.

No, and at the end of the day, you know, sometimes we joke that we certainly catch America's dumb as criminals.

That's one point about integrity monitors. They're pretty good at catching the dumb insider traders. People who work for pro sports teams placing bets from inside their training facilities, for example, and they were instantly caught by the sports apps geolocation feature and reported to the league office. I'm told that's happened a lot, But there's just no way that everyone

Number One, you want to try to place the bets in person if possible, because you know, again, once you sign up for an account, there's this huge digital footprint with all of your information. Make sure that it's across state lines.

Why do you want to make sure it's across state lines.

Because at the end of the day, and if it's different operators across state lines. What we are seeing right now is more competition in the integrity landscape.

The integrity landscape, I love that phrase. The integrity landscape in sports gambling is complicated, less like a wheatfield in Kansas than a rainforest in Borneo. There are a bunch of companies like US and Integrity. Each state with legal sports books hires its own integrity monitor with its own set of data on wagers.

And let's say that I knew that there's five big sports books, and I can use a different sports book in each state, and of those five big sports books, three of them use different integrity monitoring providers. Well, suddenly, one bet at one sports book might not trigger the alert. But if each integrity monitor only saw one or two of the bets, and each operator also only saw one of the bets, they're not likely to report and you're more likely to get away with it.

Still, it's true that they're catching a lot more people trading on inside information than ever have been caught in the history of sports. Matthew says that they're now like one hundred and fifty bus a year. So these integrity monitors are kind of doing for illicit sports gambling with the Kinsey report once did for sex, showing us all what everybody else is doing and is there a pattern to why they do it?

You know, it's crazy some of it. You know, it just goes to the competitive nature of athletes in general. When you think of like Calvin Ridley and Jamison Williams and some of the NFL suspensions, just as examples. Those guys were betting such inconsequential amounts of money. Calvin Ridley was hurt. He wasn't even playing. He certainly wasn't trying to manipulate any matches.

The insider trading is often totally irrational. I mean, you think that a guy making millions of dollars as a player wouldn't risk them by making sports bets. But they do. And you would think that if they're going to take that risk, they at least make very big bets. But they don't.

Hunter Deckers, the starting quarterback at Iowa State who lost his eligibility. His average bet size was seven dollars and twenty two cents. Seven dollars and twenty two cents, and he lost his entire collegiate career.

Why and why? I don't know. Just use boredom, I guess. Yeah.

You know, some of those guys, especially in college, lives such regimented life. You get up, you have team practice and breakfast, and you're basically told what to do all day. Every day is scheduled out for you. But the one thing they can't control is those little gaps you have in this device that's in your hands. Oh, I got fifteen three minutes. I can't actually go anywhere and do anything in that fifteen to eighteen minutes, but I could take out my phone and mess around.

One way to think of sports gambling is as a massive new market for information. All sorts of information that no one thought twice about can now be used immediately to make money, and not just information that most people used to pay zero attention to, like I don't know whether the quarterback for some obscure college football team just came down with pneumonia. I'm talking about information that would never have occurred to anyone ever in the history of man to have financial value.

We saw some significant betting on this basketball game. The line move like four points.

This was a college basketball game before which the odds shifted in a big way even though there was no new public information.

And then one of these syndicate betters called us and said, hey, I heard that this team is stuck on the tarmac with mechanical issues. They're going to make it to the arena, but not in time for warm ups. And we know in football and basketball, if you miss your stretching slash warm ups, those teams lose every time.

Is that true? Every time?

You know that it is.

Yeah, they lose over ninety percent of the time and usually can't blowout fashion.

Moments after the pilot announced the delay of the team's flight, the sports book started seeing bets from people who had obviously heard about it because it took the integrity monitor only seven minutes to get the news, and in.

That timeframe, you know, it somehow got in the hands of syndicate betters who bet all this money, and one of them even had time after making all those bets to call us and give us a heads up to like, hey, if this keeps happening, you know, here's what's going on. Information moves so fast.

So fast that the modern world really hasn't gotten its mind around it, so fast that there's no way it won't run wild over any integrity landscape. The various sports leagues are really trying hard to prevent this from happening. They want to turn the American fan into a habitual gambler, to keep everything else about American sports as it was

I just Kansas because we had two possible weekends where we could do this reporting trip because of our production schedule, and I was looking for were places that had games that were a big deal for students, like on those weekends that had direct flights from like New York and California.

That's of course, lydia Jan caught my producer. I usually hate the sort of journalism we're about to do, you know, where some reporter or pundit talks to some supposedly representative person or visit some supposedly typical place to take the pulse of the nation. But we made an exception here because going to the University of Kansas felt more like

So yeah, So the first thing I did is I went to this kind of student coffee shop in Lawrence, and I met with two student reporters, and one of them was Chad Cushing. He's a multimedia editor at the University Daily.

Cansen. It's everywhere. It's absolutely everywhere.

I mean any morning of the game day in class, especially for bad basketball. I mean, the most guaranteed thing you could say to break the ice on most if you find another boy that you said next to is like, Hey, what's what's the place?

You know?

What what's money line?

Money hawks?

Money line hawks? Money line people get That's Ben Hook.

He's a sophomore and the sports editor like tattoos.

So money line is they win out right.

It's just you ticking the winner.

And if if the Hawks are going to win, the Jayhawks are going to win Hawks money line.

People get Hawks money line like tattoos.

Many people get Hawks money line tattoos.

I've seen crazy. Yeah, I means Hawks money line. Yeah on the yeah, on the inside.

Yeah, Hawks, I'm made.

I'm made good money on Hawks money long last year.

So so you you talk to the journalists, and the journalists lead you to the real people.

Yes, they tell me that where I need to be is in the in this place called.

The Triangle like that like the Bermuda Triangle.

Exactly, and it's three bars kind of in the middle of nowhere, like not near anything else that don't really card. So like I heard that freshmen work as the bouncers of these bars, and they'll accept anything as an id, even like a Pokemon card.

Taking me back, You're taking me way back. You're taking you back to it as like twelve years old in New Orleans.

And I'm supposed to be there at like in the Friday afternoon because they have something called free beer Fridays.

And So Friday afternoon, before the big game against arch rival Kansas State, Lydia Jean enters the Bermuda Triangle.

Hod Buck come back.

Why but it's a good clot.

The fraternities have set up these tables in front of the bars where they have plates of shaving cream, and if you pay five dollars, you can throw the plate onto their faces. Uh huh, I guess to raise money for cancer.

One day someone will study all the things Americans have done to raise money for cancer research and notice that some of them almost certainly cause cancer.

So there's like long line outside of these bars, and then there's people congregating around these tables of shaving cream plates.

Okay, how are you feeling in this crowd?

Oh?

Terrified?

Absolutely terrified.

Yeah, Like every single cell in my body was like, do not be here.

But I did my best to stay. I knew she'd stay. I've said this before and I'll say it again. My producer has the gift forgetting the story. People forget just how dangerous she is.

Are you guys winning overall?

Probably not?

Probably, I've got a lot of cats.

Up in fun though, Like, how do cut down?

Are we talking overall?

Yeah? I'm talking hundreds, probably in the lower hundreds, I would say, lower hundreds.

Know what's your guys' strategy.

It's wedding strategy.

I am just wait for someone who's due, and then you just hammer it.

Two related points here, most of these people are under twenty one years old, so whoever's accepting their bets is breaking Kansas state law. Also, none of them have any idea what they're doing. Still, it's obviously a total blast. Everyone's just hammering everything while getting hammered. You ought to make the Kansas mascot a hammer. Are they at all nervous about talking about what they're doing?

So I will say that I eventually started being like, don't tell me your names, because when I asked them, I originally I would say, can you introduce yourself? And then that I kind of felt like I was getting like marketing material, like it's so bad what they're doing to the youth or whatever. So eventually I was like, don't tell me your name and tell me about sports

His name is Jack.

Jackson being friends with people who weren't athletes. To'd be like, oh, like, what do you think about Do you think we're gonna blah blah blah blah blah, Like are we gonna cover it?

You feel like people were like trying to, like in this squirrely.

Way, get yes, yes, yes, and k you did a very good job of media training every single one of us, even like my closest friends. They'd be like, oh, what's like the game plan? I'd be like, I don't know. I can't tell you, Like, I'm not gonna get in trouble over something silly.

There are a few laws that ban insider trading in sports. You can't get put in jail for it or even fine. You can only get in trouble with your team, or your school, or your league, or of course your sports bookie. He'll toss you out if you win too much. And so the players might feel a bit frightened to share inside dope, but the fans, they have no reason not to dig for whatever they can find.

I found this one guy, for example, who told me that his roommate was on the football team and that he was planning to bet on the game. Are gonna ask your former roommate for anie like intel on the player.

Yeh yeah, yeah, Well he's in uh drive there right now, he's on the bus, So I'm gonna text him layer and I'd be like, what sha I put money on?

He think he'll tell you? He'll tell you anything.

Oh yeah, he definitely will.

Oh oh yeah, he definitely.

He always does.

Because what he tell you helped me make money.

A couple of them were in college than lad because he's college athletes, so he knows a lot more things than I do.

But like NFL, he doesn't know shit right, you're right.

But he's a player, so if he tells you stuff about the team, he'll know that's correct, and that has helped you make money.

Before fifty bucks.

I went up to a lot of people and I heard so often that they had some way of getting inside information. A lot of times they like had me turn off the mic that I was actually googling how many people are on the football team because I was like, how is it possible that they're talking to so many people that everyone feels like they have some sort of in on the football team. So, like I have tape of me saying like have you ever gotten inside information? And the guy is like three times and then he

Is that anything that I've been saris.

To play their No, here's one bet I'd like to make DraftKings. Make me a market on the number of sports bets that get placed each week on college football games by college students who think they have inside information. I don't mean winning bets. It's actually not as easy as it looks to make money trading on inside information. I just want the over on bets that threaten the

Oh yeah, I just felt I went up to a guy with a mic and I was like, do you have inside information? And he was like, I'm texting for it right now.

How do we refer to you in the podcast? Governor Baker, President Baker, Charlielie?

Is that all right?

This is Charlie Baker, former governor of Massachusetts who recently became president of the NCAA, which has got to be at least in the running for the world's worst job. But Charlie took it and did the same thing he did when he became governor of Massachusetts. He hit the road and talked to people to hear their problems.

We have colleges all over New England and just started talking to him about what was on their minds, and a lot of them brought up not so much sports betting, but the harassment around it.

Charlie heard so many complaints and so soon after he took the job that he commissioned to study.

The numbers came back and they were huge.

You know, sixty percent of eighteen to twenty two year olds about on sports, and the numbers were higher for those that were on college campuses. That just puts college athletes basically in the midst of a whole community that is betting on sports. Whether they're betting on their games or betting on other people's games, they're betting on sports. A lot of the kids on campus better on their

And the athletes you were talking to when you first took the job. Some of them brought up the pressures caused by the gambling interests.

Oh absolutely, it was just all kinds of trash being talked at them based on their performance and how much somebody lost or how much it costs somebody, or I'll meet you outside your dorm the next time I see you, And I mean really just awful stuff.

The NCAA now has filing cabinets filled with horrible things that sports gamblers have said and done to college athletes. I was hoping Charlie would let me rifle through them, but he wouldn't. But still I got a glimpse of what's inside from the guy who guards them. His name is Clint hunker Brow. He's Charlie's head of risk management, which is another job.

You really what we see messages.

One that we flagged this last year during our workaround March Madness is if you don't get twenty two points and twelve rebounds, everyone you know and love will be dead.

Jesus.

So again, it's not just oh, gosh, you cost me fifty bucks or things that are pretty innocuous like that. They're very specific, they're very threatening. You know, we've heard about a lot of student athletes receiving Benmo requests after games where it's like, you know, you f and this you f and that you cost me five thousand, pay up or I'll be waiting for you outside the facilities. So just really really specific, abusive, threatening messages with clearly a gambling neccess to them.

The NCAA has pushed for all the states that allow prop bets on college athletes to eliminate those bets. Very few have done so, and Charlie Baker keeps hearing these horror stories.

A kid will talk to me about, you know, having a dorm mate, a fraternity brother, a friend of a friend who comes up to him and says, look, you know I need the money and I don't want you to lose the game.

All you really need to.

Do is just don't take the first shot, you know, miss your first free throw.

Just you know, small stuff. That's all I need to you.

It may seem trivial if some college basketball player misses his first free throw in a game, and until roughly five years ago, no one would have thought twice about it. But now you could bet tens of thousands of dollars on whether or not that free throw is good.

And the problem with that is there's no end to that.

And you never want, especially an eighteen year old or a seventeen or nineteen year old, to be put in a position where they're being socially pressured by people they're going to see every single day who are claiming that this is a moment of desperation for them.

Back in the nineteen seventies, Charlie Baker played hoops at Harvard. He wasn't on the team at the time, but in nineteen seventy eight, Harvard lost a shockingly close game to a much stronger Boston College team. It turned out that several of the Boston College players had taken money from the Lukes crime family to shave points to make the final score much closer than it should have been. Fixing games is, of course, the ultimate act of insider trading.

It could be people who are you know, who live in the dorm next to you. It could be people who live right off campus and walk through campus when you walk past every single day when I talked to them.

The biggest thing.

About it is the challenge associated with not looking over your shoulder or not assuming that anybody you don't know could be one of these people, or the people you do know could be some of these people.

So here we are in a new world where college athletes walk around their campuses with just a little bit of the same uneasy feeling as the Boston College players must have had when they pissed off the look crime family. And the only question really is just how much that feeling will be amplified.

So we're just getting into this space.

And that's the other thing I'd say when people say to me, well, social media has always been obnoxious and nasty, that's true, but boy, in this world it has gotten a lot nastier in the course of the past couple of years.

My heart is palputating Clint Hunkerbrow again, Charlie's risk officer.

You know, I think that the biggest worry that keeps me up at night is really looking, you know, ten years down the road, twenty years down the road back and there's a whole generation of young people that you know, went to college and ultimately found themselves gambling and had just extremely negative consequences on their lives, from their finances to their aspirations to their relationships.

Like we're failing a generation.

If that's what we look back at ten to twenty years, and that's the picture that we see.

The integrity landscape in sports gambling. Here's maybe its most important feature. How hard it is to see all this new stuff is going on around us. But it's not like drinking or smoking or even drug use, even as sports gambling poisons the relationship between fans and athletes, even as it seeps like a fog into American college life, the drug itself is invisible. But in this strange new landscape,

How do you like decide what.

To put money on?

What was your.

I think you kind of gotta like do some research. I a lot of Twitter research, got yeah, emotions, emotions. Yet it's a lot Twitter people like on Twitter that do, like do act actual.

Research on it.

And are you and you said you're doing You've done pretty well.

No, I've done terrible.

M