I’m Gambling Now And I’m Doing It For The People

My wife and I were laying in bed on Wednesday night.

“This is going to sound weird, but I have something I think I need to do for work,” I said. “I think I need to start betting on sports.”

She laughed.

My wife doesn’t care about sports. Her dad was a Kansas basketball fan in the sense that he was happy when someone told him they won. Before we started living together, I think it would be a safe bet that no TV in her home had ever been on an ESPN network. There has never been a time in her life where she was interested in what happened in a game unless one of our kids was on the field or court.

Her answer shocked me and also confirmed my suspicion.

“I get it. It’s everywhere now.”

That is how omnipresent gambling has become. It is perhaps the single most influential industry on our own. You don’t have to be a sports media professional to understand what sportsbooks have done for networks and stations across the country. Just sit down and watch a game or listen to any show. You will lose count of the number of free play and bonus offers thrown at you. I’ve called it a “money cannon” in the past.

I live in North Carolina. Mobile betting isn’t legal here yet, so I opened an account at Bovada. I did a little math, made an agreement with my wife about how much I could lose, and then got started.

I am doing this to better understand the information that gamblers prioritize and the way they consume a game. Would I like to win? Sure, but that isn’t really the point. I’m only betting on college football, the sport I follow the closest, and while I did pick a few games that felt close to sure things, I also thought it was important to live on the edge a bit and make picks in some games that could go either way.

I bet numbers. I bet money lines. I bet props. I even put together a couple parlays. There are so many things that you learn best by doing. Betting on sports is certainly one of them, and there are so many ways to do it!

So how did I do? Well…

Seven bets made. Seven bets lost.

Of course I would have preferred to have won even one of them, but winning wasn’t really the point. Besides, this is a world of learning from past mistakes. On top of that, I have a spectacular story!

Here are a few things I learned in my week of sports betting.

1. STATS OVER STORYLINES – This is my single least favorite thing that happened during the week. Betting turned games from entertainment into investments. So I found myself seeking out my favorite writers less and VSiN considerably more. I think VSiN does a great job. It just isn’t usually my thing.
2. IT IS THE BEST WAY TO TALK ABOUT A MEANINGLESS GAME – I put $20 on Arkansas State to beat Georgia Southern. I love college football, but that is not a game that was even on my radar for the weekend until I was presented with information about Georgia Southern’s ineptitude on offense and the fact that they fired their coach midweek.
3. TWITTER IS A NECESSITY – Audience interaction is always a good thing. Add money to the equation and I was locked into what some of the writers and hosts I had followed through the week were saying on Saturday, becuase I wanted to know what information I needed to either turn my luck around or convince me to stay away from a game I was intrigued by before it was too late.

My buddy Arky Shea writes for Outkick Bets. He was my shepherd through this world. One of the things he told me when I explained what I was doing and why was that gambling makes you a more engaged fan. The information you seek is different than the guy that is a die hard fan of a particular team or sport. If you know what you are doing, you should already know the things that are going to impress that guy.

While I understand Arky’s point, I am not sure that is entirely true. You certainly are devoting more time to parsing through the numbers when you are trying to figure out how to spread your money around, but in just a few days of this, I found myself looking at players and coaches less as people and more as trendlines. Gambling makes you do more homework. It doesn’t necessarily mean you understand the sport any better.

Arky did open my eyes to something though. As gambling becomes more popular, it gives those of us that talk about sports for a living a chance to reframe our content a little bit. I still think it is a bad idea for a host to ever assume listeners know everything that he/she does, but there is plenty of evidence that most of our listeners don’t need to constantly be walked through the basics. If you’re doing a show in Nashville, you don’t constantly have to say “Titans running back Derrick Henry.” There’s a huge chunk of the people listening that not only know who he is, they are counting on him to be able to go out next weekend.

The last thing that became crystal clear in my first week of gambling is addiction seems pretty easy. I absolutely had those “one more bet to break even!” thoughts. I never gave in, but, man, was it tempting!

The people and the companies taking the bets are the ones with the responsibility to recognize and discourage problem gamblers. That is why I wrote last week that the FanDuel/Craig Carton deal is a positive thing. For media professionals, it is important to understand that, like any hobby, the majority of your listeners probably won’t try it, but there is a group that is really into it and wants as much information on it as you can give them. It is up to programmers and EPs to help hosts find that balance.