A cleaner conscience
Why one writer left gambling trade publications to launch a new venture, GamblingHarm.org.
I’D LIKE TO SHARE THE STORY of a man I’ve gotten to know recently named Brian Pempus, who for the past few months has been doing valuable reporting for his new site GamblingHarm.org. For the decade prior, Brian wrote for gambling trade publications—first to cover poker, then to report on the legalization of sports betting. After so much time immersed in an industry that he saw endangering customers, Brian decided he needed to do something about it.
A chapter of my book, Everybody Loses, probes how instrumental the media has been in normalizing sports betting. Many journalists are uneasy about being paid to shill for sportsbooks, which often involves overstating the odds of winning money and understating the risks involved—a betrayal, some say, of journalists’ commitment to their audience.
A significant chunk of my media chapter focuses on affiliate sites, which receive a payment for every customer they get to click on a link and sign up for a betting account. During the initial race to acquire customers after a state’s legalization, operators spend a fortune on referrals.
Often, affiliate sites provide betting advice or present themselves as neutral sources of news, when, really, they exist to funnel customers to sportsbooks so they can lose money. I won’t give away any more about that chapter, other than to say this dynamic between affiliates and sportsbooks creates egregious conflicts of interest.
I didn’t interview Brian Pempus for the book, but his story is similar to those of many writers who find themselves working for affiliates.
He studied sports journalism at Penn State in the late 2000s. This was the height of the online poker boom, and the common area of his dorm, Brian told me, “was like a casino four or five nights a week,” with dozens of students congregating to play poker on their laptops for hours on end.
Once, one of Brian’s good friends entered a poker tournament on the site Full Tilt Poker. The buy-in was typical, about $100 or $200. Brian checked in over the course of the night, and the friend seemed to be riding a hot streak. After many hours of playing, the friend won the tournament, earning him $40,000 (roughly three times Penn State’s annual tuition back then).
Brian went to bed. The friend who’d just scored this incredible win, however, kept playing poker. By the time Brian woke up, the guy had lost the entire $40,000—though he didn’t admit to it until several weeks later.
Like so many gamblers before him, this experience didn’t turn the friend off from poker. Instead, it made him determined to chase another big payday. “A couple of years later,” Brian said, “he was asking to borrow money from me so he could continue to play poker.”
Brian wrote a few stories for the student paper about the popularity of online poker. After college, he got a job in Las Vegas covering poker for the affiliate site Card Player magazine. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, not a lot of the sports outlets that Brian admired were hiring.
On April 15, 2011, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment that caused two of the top poker websites, PokerStars and Full Tilt, to cease operating in the U.S.—a day remembered in the poker world as “Black Friday.” A generation of fervent online gamblers turned to sports for their fix, and Brian began covering sports betting legalization for Better Collective, the parent company behind gambling sites including Action Network and SportsHandle.
“It’s funny,” Brian told me. “When I was covering poker for Card Player, all the professional poker players were like, ‘Stay away from sports betting. It’s the worst thing for your finances.’ I had this negative impression of sports betting well before the Supreme Court ruling in 2018, but with online poker fading away, I was at a crossroads in my career. Sports betting became the hot topic and I had a wealth of experience that was attractive to companies trying to capitalize on this gold rush. I just followed where the jobs were. I wouldn't say I was plugging my nose doing it, but I felt a little guilty.”
Brian’s reporting was rigorous and down the middle; it could have appeared in any number of mainstream news outlets. The difference was that affiliate companies like Better Collective only published news because it improved their standing among search engines, so that when people searched things like “sports betting bonus offer Pennsylvania” or “where can I bet on sports,” the affiliate site would appear higher in the results.
Brian eventually left to spend a few years writing sports betting content for Forbes. When he was laid off this past April, he took it as an opportunity to start fresh.
“I could not go back to working for an affiliate,” he told me, based on everything he’d learned about gambling, starting with his college friend’s $40k nightmare. He launched GamblingHarm.org, which for now is just him, writing about things like DraftKings being ordered to refund $3 million to Connecticut bettors because of a misleading promotion; a glitch on FanDuel’s platform in Iowa that prevented customers from blocking themselves from accessing the site, as required by state law; or an analysis of the concerning arguments made by prosecutors to contest that Ohtani’s former interpreter was addicted to gambling when he stole $17 million from Ohtani to fund his sports betting.
Brian has been hearing from readers about their experiences with gambling harm. In time, he hopes to expand the site to include resources for people needing help.
One thing’s for sure, he added: He’ll never do business with a sportsbook.
I’M THINKING OF STARTING a recurring feature in this newsletter that invites experts to identify a popular talking point about betting that frustrates them.
I posed that question to Brian, and he brought up the widely cited stat that 1-2% of the population experiences gambling disorder. “It really does a disservice to the people out there who have a gambling problem but aren’t meeting the clinical threshold of gambling addiction,” he said. And minimizing the scope of these struggles, he explained, does a disservice to everyone at risk of getting sucked in.
He pointed to a recent survey from Siena College, which found that 52% of American sports bettors have “chased” a bet, which means betting more than usual in the hopes of making up for a loss. Chasing losses is a telltale warning sign of a gambling problem. The Siena survey also found that 37% of bettors have felt “ashamed” after losing, and 20% of them have had trouble meeting financial obligations as a result of money lost gambling.
I tried to hammer home that idea in my book: that an alarming number of people are developing problems with gambling even if they don’t (yet) meet the clinical definition of having a gambling problem. Still, sometimes I lose track of how prevalent it is.
When my book became available for preorder a month ago, I posted the link on Facebook. An acquaintance from high school sent me a message. “Hits close to home,” she wrote. “Literally had to break up with my boyfriend of five years because he became addicted to gambling.” She said he became addicted to online sports betting, which led him to take up online blackjack, too.
A reporting source saw the book listing and shared a story about his friend’s devastating descent into gambling addiction. The story isn’t for me to tell, but I can relay a sentiment expressed by that source.
“It’s so sad,” he said. “It’s happening everywhere, in all shapes and sizes.” He described the allure of gambling for young men in particular who are lonely, bored, and bombarded with ads. “Younger generations increasingly isolated, disconnected, and living online,” he wrote. “Bad, bad, bad.”
These two exchanges have been on my mind recently as I hone how to talk about the book. On the one hand, my goal was to make every page as entertaining as possible, packed with behind-the-scenes intrigue and surprising revelations. On the other hand, the book includes stories of people whose lives were derailed or nearly destroyed by sports betting.
So, I hope you find Everybody Loses entertaining, informative, and at times even funny. But I also hope some parts leave you a mix of heartbroken and livid.
I HAD THE PLEASURE of appearing last week on WNYC’s “All of It” with Alison Stewart to discuss a variety of gambling issues in the news. Here’s a link if you’re interested:
Also last week, I received a box of galleys—advance copies of the book before the official hardcovers are printed. Very exciting! Wynnie seems intrigued.
Some great ideas -- as always J