The $2 Bets That Ended a $5 Million Career

Those bets might have been enough to end Sorsby’s career on their own. Though the NCAA recently liberalized its rules to avoid being forced to harshly punish every college athlete who wagers a few bucks on pro sports, the volume of those bets might have been enough to get him banned. That’s even before considering the gravest sin the NCAA thinks Sorsby committed: betting on his own team’s games. Most of us aren’t good enough at sports to find ourselves betting on our own team’s games, but some of the details of Sorsby’s case should be a warning even for those of us who aren’t starting quarterbacks.

The sports betting industry has a way of painting every busted athlete as a success story for legalized gambling. The sportsbooks would argue that the player only got caught because of the highly mechanized, public nature of the betting market. This argument is both correct and disingenuous; the player wouldn’t have been caught if he were betting with a private bookie, but he also may not have been betting at all if he needed to find his own private market maker. Reasonable people will go in circles forever about whether specific cases are proof of the industry’s maturity or proof of its corrupting effect. Sorsby’s case is an unambiguous black mark for the entire enterprise of legal sports betting, though. Before computerized and heavily advertised online sports betting, it was not possible for a random college student to place mountains of small bets on individual events within a ballgame.

Sportsbooks make this much easier than their financial industry peers. If you have a brokerage account at, say, Fidelity, and you want to buy an exchange-traded fund that tracks the price of Bitcoin, Fidelity will make you check a big, scary box attesting that you understand the risks of dealing with such a speculative currency. Even at Robinhood, one of the least scrupulous brokerages, someone who wants to trade stock options needs to go through at least a nominal approval process. You can probably still do it, make no mistake, but it might take you a few minutes, and there’s a chance you’ll get caught in red tape. There is no similar process for someone to place a bunch of microbets during a live sporting event, or to place parlay wagers that account for a huge chunk of sportsbook profits (because they are terrible bets).

In a more old-timey version of sports betting, someone like Sorsby wouldn’t have time to walk back and forth from a betting window and wager on whether some Cincinnati Reds pitcher was going to throw a ball or a strike. The game moved too quickly. But in this phone-dominated version of sports betting that we actually have, not only does Sorsby have the time to place a bunch of those bets, but he has no real gating mechanism to stop him. There is no grizzled attendant at the window to look at him with a raised eyebrow as if to ask him, “Young man, are you sure you want to place this bet with such terrible expected value?” The sportsbooks’ apps are all really good, and they make placing bets look like pure fun.

Call me a purist, but I’ve always found a certain honor in sports betting in its simplest form: A sportsbook sets a line, and a bettor feels confident enough in their view of the game that they think they can make the right call about 54 percent of the time and take some of the book’s money. Call me naive, but that’s what I thought most sports betting would look like after the Supreme Court struck down a law in 2018 that had prevented states from legalizing the practice. But the sportsbooks have turned much of the betting experience into a pure sugar rush, one in which someone doesn’t just bet degenerately on events with little information and bad odds but does it repeatedly without ever pausing to think about it.

This new world is working well for a handful of sportsbooks, and for prediction markets that function as sportsbooks while enjoying a friendlier regulatory environment. It is working well enough for the big professional leagues, which collect sportsbook sponsorships and, probably more importantly, sometimes get a ratings bounce from people who are watching their games with a vested interest. (Disclosure: I have earned money from sports gambling advertisers and media companies, though not for several years.) Is it working for anyone else, though? Sports bettors losing money shouldn’t be surprising—where else would you expect sportsbook profits to come from?—but the manner of our collective losses seems both sleazy and unsustainable. Retirement accounts are suffering, and debt collectors are finding lots of work.

The system is screaming out for more friction, for an experience that will make more people pause for a second before lighting their money (or, worse, their life) on fire. It should so obviously be illegal for anyone to deposit funds into a betting account with a credit card. But for now, it isn’t. It should so obviously be as hard to place a parlay or bet on a specific pitch as it is to trade other financial instruments that have historically offered much better returns. Maybe those reforms wouldn’t have saved Sorsby, who is alleged to have broken one of the longest-standing and most obvious rules in sports. But the sports betting industry we actually have is one designed to encourage moronic behavior. To whose benefit? Not yours.