I learned how to play poker younger than anybody should. Before there was the Texas Hold ‘Em Craze of the 2000s, in the late 90s, my dad, a Doyle Brunson adherent, laid down the rules of five card stud to me in his mother’s house. Accessing this now feels like looking for a time capsule I buried too deep. 

Later came my own obsession with games of all kinds. I have wanted to be good at everything. Poker, as a game, only works with wagering. When to bet, how to bet, all of it requires money or something of an equivalent. There are no bragging rites for children who have the biggest stack of plastic chips. What makes poker interesting and exciting is how people react to money. (A whole wing of poker has become about figuring out when somebody is lying, thanks to Rounders and its infamous Oreos, but I tend to think the emphasis on tells is hokum and pseudoscience even if you can extrapolate future behavior from past patterns). Gambling was never far away from me. My dad ended up playing some amateur poker, often to the neglect of his kids or putting me in odd situations like taking me to a table at somebody’s house and leaving me at the guy’s in-ground pool with my copy of Bright Lights Big City and an estimation of how long it would take him. The fascination with games meant in order to be good at poker, I had to understand how betting works.

This is how I wound up fascinated by sports gambling. Just as I was ten years early for the poker boom, I was seven, eight years early for understanding the meanings of parlays. I had no idea Costa Rica existed, so I kept that fascination to myself until I downloaded Draft Kings to get odds on Oscar contenders with some friends. It stayed on my phone, untouched, until the 2021-2022 NBA season. I began realizing due to my intimate knowledge of the Detroit Pistons that season, I was better at handicapping their games than most gamblers. For a couple of weeks, I would look for Detroit Pistons games where I knew Cade Cunningham would have a good game, and lay out parlays that bet he would score above 20 odd points, 5 rebounds, 5 assists. Other than an odd Ja Morant game I nailed when I was feeling cocky about him in Madison Square Garden, Cade Cunningham made me around $150. That season I lost maybe one bet. The season after I quit due to financial problems that had very little to do with gambling but made it so if I kept playing I had problems besides my checking account. I also lost twice and it made me sick.  This all was before sports gambling began financializing sports fandom. 

Gambling imposes a simple question over watching a game: if the game is going to have a winner, why shouldn’t you also be one? There are other questions, but most of them go back to you winning. The Indiana Pacers are playing the Oklahoma City Thunder (the Vichy Supersonics) right now in the NBA finals. If Oklahoma City didn’t have the history it did and if my western conference team hadn’t alway been Denver, I might openly favor them. The Pacers are a divisional rival and no matter how many clutch shots he makes, Tyrese Haliburton has a remoraesque relationship with NBA memedom that reminds me of no other figure than Elon Musk. But if I can read the augury of the games, I can become a winner by staking some of my hard earned money on its outcome. The ideal is if the bet fails, the amount of money you would have put aside would be a healthy, losable amount (most of my parlays were either $10 or $15), so no real consequences should be felt. By all accounts, there have been nothing but consequences from this arrangement. Something as mainstream as ESPN.com runs stories about “the betting public” and how it favors the underdog Indiana Pacers in the NBA Finals. 

Here’s the thing, though. As I write this essay, the series is tied, but on June 5th, the Pacers were 5-1 underdogs. Because you are not inflicted with the same sickness as me, that means if you bet $1.00 on the Pacers, you get $5.00 if they win the series. Nobody bets $1.00, however. $10 becomes $50. $25 becomes $125, an eighth becomes an ounce. Meanwhile, according to the Stephen A. Smith network, you have to pay $700 to make $100 on the Thunder. The betting public are going to pay into the Pacers because that’s how you make money. Who knows: maybe the Pacers pull it off and Draftkings and MGM have to throw some cash back to the public. But were those money-line bets (winner of the series) or parlays with absurd lightning bets on whether Chet Holmgren or Myles Turner wins the jump ball? We don’t know. In this moment, betting can feel like joining a multitude. Nobody believed in the Pacers, not the house, not the league, not the sports fourth estate. But we did, and this is our money. 

The odds are set by what is likely to happen. That means what is likely to happen is this: people lose. In what amount, we don’t know. We just have to hope that what they wagered wasn’t too much, was in an amount they could afford, that no bill that needs to be paid gets missed, that it doesn’t cause them too much despair. If that’s not true, then one thing is: the house made its money back, the money it needs to operate, because it’s the people who bet on what won’t happen who make the enterprise run. The enterprise runs on the losers, not the winners: it lusts for suckers with money, or, more accurately: someone who gets paid every two weeks, a sheep who replenishes wool twice a month.

 For a certain kind of gambler, the loan shark has always been replaced with the credit card company, and with sports gambling more accessible than ever, the connection between financiers and the invisible casino is all the more obvious. The past five years have been the most economically tumultuous period of many of our lives. I’m in debt. Everybody I know is in debt. The result is a prole-speculator class: someone who buys stocks or gambles just to buy some of the power back from the banks and system that took it from you. Considering capitalism (youtube essay moment) is a system that relies on the investment of capital, this means workers can be capitalists, too, but in petty amounts, one that gives them no power but what is invested in the betting ticket or stock portfolio. It’s coins in a wishing well, Presidents drowning in murky water. 

But to give gamblers their credit, many of them know the risks attendant with their choice. Nobody knows more than them that losing exists so there is no reason to do a “they know not what they do” sashay about the idea that the bottom will fall out and that they will bust. If you look long enough, when you see the loose conflagration we’ve called “the Zynternet” in a foundational piece, the idea of gambling, putting it all on the ridiculous in the risk of busting out is a recurring motif large in part because it resembles a temporary freedom from money, a swan dive into oblivion that was the risk of the leap of faith. Both the believer who died and the believer who delivered affirm the same God. 

They are deluded in the moment of intoxication, because it is a release from responsibility. It’s why when we look over ledges we imagine leaping and why someone daydreams about careening into a divider and slipping into nothing. It’s because it’s a detachment from it all that reveals the inherent smallness of consciousness. The aches and pains experienced from living life pale in comparison to the revelation of that vast churning sea of dark ink. Drowning in it, suddenly debt and rent are revealed to be the illusions of property imposes on us. Nobody really owns anything because there is nothing to own, not even our choices. Busting is nirvana on its head. All paths to oblivion are. My father found his eventually; it pools at his feet in Winston-Salem under the barstools and in the sportsbooks on his phone. For me, there is only the call, the memory of a day alone at in an inground pool, reading, looking at the water next to me roiling into a caliginous body the color of a dead hour and wondering if—

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