Speaker 1Oh, hello again. Steve Patterson, host of The Debaters here. Canada's comedy competition judged by live audience applause. We bring comics together to battle it out over the world's silliest topics. Like, are you one of the last people you know who still uses a landline phone? This week we're asking if every home should have a landline and I promise we will not be phoning it in. Listen to The Debaters wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast.
Speaker 2A developing story here on SportsCenter. Raptors forward Jontae Porter is under NBA investigation after multiple betting irregularities. Investigation found that Jontae Porter broke the league rules by. A federal criminal case tied to a betting. Jontae Porter is now in the Sports Betting Scandal Hall of Fame. To understand how Jontae Porter, an NBA player with the Raptors, winds up at the center of one of the most notorious betting scandals in modern history, you have to start long before he ever got to Toronto.
Speaker 3I've got a lot of notes on exactly where Jontae Porter was.
Speaker 2Anthony Milton spent months reporting a profile of Jontae Porter for Toronto Life, so he knows the story.
Speaker 3Yeah, so he was born on November 15th, 1999, in Columbia, Missouri. His mom, Lisa Porter, was an incredible high school and college basketball player in her youth. She was awesome. She averaged 58.7 points per game as a high school senior. So this was a basketball family.
Speaker 2Jontae's dad, Michael Porter Sr., also played. All eight of the Porter kids played. Jontae, his sisters, his younger brothers. But none of them could compare to his older brother, Michael Jr.
Speaker 3Until he was in the fifth grade, Michael Sr. would wake up Jontae and Michael Jr. at like five o'clock in the morning and bring them to a basketball facility that was usually unlocked after hours to go training. And it sounds like Michael Jr. was very into those workouts, but Jontae was not so much.
Speaker 2As the brothers grew up, it became clear that Michael Jr. was the superior basketball player. But Jontae had other talents.
Speaker 3He had a real entrepreneurial strength. Going back quite early, in grade seven, he learned how to fix iPhone screens from YouTube videos and then quickly turned them into a business. So he'd fix them for his classmates, buying a screen for 30 bucks and then charging his buddies $70 to $100 for a fix. So tripling his investment.
Speaker 2In high school, he also began dabbling in crypto.
Speaker 3Bitcoin was just becoming a thing. And his cryptocurrency investments pay off massively, massively. Enough to get him his first car.
Speaker 2But basketball was still the main event. In 2017, ESPN ranked Jontae the 11th best college prospect in America. His older brother, Michael Porter Jr., had been ranked second the year before. The brothers both ended up playing for the University of Missouri. Porter will try first and he'll knock down the triple.
Speaker 4How about the three-point shooting?
Speaker 2Then everything stalled. In 2018, Jontae tore his ACL and MCL. Six months of rehab followed. The week that Jontae was finally expected to be cleared to play again, he joined his brother for a pickup game.
Speaker 3There's a popping sound in his knee and Jontae knows he's hurt himself again. His brother calls him an idiot and they're shouting like, why did you play? What are you doing? A specialist tells him that he's torn his ACL. It's the second time and he's driving home with no cell service through a windy, snowy road, thinking his career is over. But as he tells it, it only takes a day before he realizes, no, no, no, my career is not over. I can keep going.
Speaker 2And he does keep going. Well, the Grizzlies have done it again.
Speaker 4They've signed Jontae Porter, who is the.
Speaker 2In 2020, Jontae Porter signed with the Memphis Grizzlies. He'd made it to the NBA. But the injuries had changed something for Jontae.
Speaker 3It didn't mean that suddenly he's got a lot of downtime and he's not on the court anymore.
Speaker 2A lot of downtime to get back into his other interests.
Speaker 5Luckily, I've had a lot of free time to trade lately because I'm still dealing with a little knee injury and I haven't been playing or anything.
Speaker 2That's Jontae Porter. The same year he signed with Memphis, he started posting on a Twitter account called TayTrades11. That was all about crypto trading tips. Jontae Porter wouldn't speak with me for this podcast. But back then, he was happy to appear on another show. Welcome
Speaker 5to the Bound to be Rich podcast. I'm your host, Ismail Hamed. Jontae, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for coming on. Of course, man. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2Jontae was on the show to talk, not about basketball, but money.
Speaker 5With my schedule right now with the NBA, I like to day trade. I like to day trade or scalp in the mornings before I go to practice. And then I'm out of all positions for the three hours I'm at the gym. I get home, look for better positions or better trades that have, you know, the patterns formed throughout the day. I either day trade or swing trade that afternoon. I'll be totally honest with you, man. I had no idea you were an NBA player. I actually was following you mostly for your trading. Yeah, man. That's really honestly most of my followers. I kind of wanted to keep it that way too just because I've never really liked to use my basketball platform to gain anything. And I felt like that kind of be cheating.
Speaker 2This interview was in 2021, years before things fell apart. But there's a moment I always go back to that anyone who now reports on Jontae Porter goes back to. It's the way he talks about how trading shaped his relationship with money and risk.
Speaker 5I blew my account like five times in the beginning. And I just kept, you know, yodeling my whole account to each other. Each thing, each thing. And then lost my whole position and vowed never to trade again. And then just slowly learned from it, slowly learned from it. Got better with the risk management, all that jazz. And just not panicking too much if I lost something. I kind of just started looking at money differently when it was in my trading account. I almost treated it like a video game where almost looking at it just like numbers on a screen.
Speaker 3What was going through your head listening to that? I was just listening to that going, oh my God, can you not see what you're saying here? Like, no, Jontae. It's not just numbers on a screen. That is your money.
Speaker 2To be clear, day trading isn't gambling per se and crypto isn't sports betting. But they do have plenty in common. The fast moving apps, the instant feedback, the thrill of winning and the sting of losing. Only to convince yourself that with one more move, you can get everything back that if you just believe in yourself, you can win.
Speaker 3Athletes are kind of the perfect gamblers because they are competitive. They don't want to give up on a loss. They will always chase that win. It's a kind of cruel irony that in many ways, the thing that makes them very good athletes, that persistence, that willingness to defy the odds on the court is also what puts them in a very dangerous position. When it comes to gambling.
Speaker 2I'm Danny Funt. And in the five years that I've been reporting on all this, I've learned that in sports betting, just about everyone believes they've cracked a code that will lead them to riches. The problem is that things sometimes have to go horribly wrong before reality sets in. This is Understood The Big Bet. Episode two. Winners and losers. Around the same time Jonte Porter was getting into day trading, crypto, and eventually sports betting, so was a whole generation of young men. Travis Mistrata was among them.
Speaker 6I grew up huge athlete, played a lot of hockey, played a lot of baseball, but really just every sport. And then just, you know, just bonding with my father and my brother. We were a big sports household, big Yankees fans, big Giants fans.
Speaker 2Travis played division one baseball in college. That's also where he placed his first sports bet a few years before it was legal.
Speaker 6There was a bookie that was on the team and, you know, innocently had asked me, do I want to put $20 on a game? And it was like a Patriots Steelers Sunday night football game. Tom Brady was playing and I always knew Tom Brady was great. You know, I figured he was going to win the Patriots. We're on top of the world. So I took the Patriots, ended up winning that game and being a college kid, freshman, not making any money, $20 was a lot at that point. So I started to think like, okay, I can start to make some money here on the side. And I know enough about sports where I can start to do this. But he wasn't exactly broadcasting it. I was afraid to talk about it when it wasn't legal. I didn't want people knowing that I was using offshore websites or dealing with bookies and paying them out through Venmo and what kind of trouble I might get in for that. I knew people. people shouldn't be gambling. - Then in 2018,
Speaker 2In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down PASPA, the federal law that had effectively banned sports betting across most of the country. State by state, sportsbooks began taking bets.
Speaker 6Once it gets legalized, for me, it kind of like switched everything in my head. I kind of start saying, OK, well, if they're thinking we should gamble and they think it's OK, well, then why don't we all gamble like we should all be gambling?
Speaker 2That logic also took hold in Canada. When it comes to betting on sporting events, the Canadian government is ready to go all in. Three years after the U.S. lifted its ban on sports betting, Canada changed its rules. Up until then, the two countries had gone about restricting sports betting quite differently. So while sports betting had been illegal for decades across the U.S., with the exception of Nevada, in Canada, it was legal, but limited. You had to pick the winners across multiple games. This type of parlay betting usually took several hours, if not days, to play out. And bets could only be placed through the lottery and gaming bodies of provincial and territorial governments. But in 2021, spread by changes to U.S. laws, Canada decriminalized single-event sports betting. This opened the door for live, in-game betting, and fast payouts. The legislation, Bill C-218, also left it up to individual provinces and territories to decide if they wanted to welcome private sportsbook operators. Ontario is all in on sports betting. Ontario took immediate advantage. The province was the first to allow private sportsbooks, like FanDuel and DraftKings, to legally operate in exchange for 20% of their revenue.
Speaker 1And dozens of companies,
Speaker 2not just in Canada,
Speaker 1but
Speaker 2all across Canada, were able to take advantage of this. And it's not just about getting into the game.
Speaker 7This Toronto start-up offers virtual casino games and sports betting. Yeah, there was loads
Speaker 2of interest, because we were like, this is something. R.S., we're going by his initials, was 23 years old when the law changed in Ontario, where he lives.
Speaker 7And he was ready. As soon as legalization came, I saw it as an opportunity. It was like, how can we make money out of this? ♪ ♪
Speaker 2♪ ♪ In the sports betting world, there are two kinds of gamblers. The first are casual. The industry calls them recreational bettors. These are people who might throw 50 bucks on the Leafs because they're fans. Then there is a tiny portion of people who have an actual edge: sharps.
Speaker 7So we had a group chat of four guys. We'd wake up, we'd all get into the group chat, basically say, OK, hey, so-and-so games are going on. What do you guys think? What looks good to you? Injury news, all that kind of stuff. It was funny because we didn't care if we won or not. It was more throwing it in that group chat and being able to come back and replying to the message, being like, cash. Or dropping a money sign emoji or something.
Speaker 2Travis Mistrata was pretty sure he had an edge.
Speaker 6Yeah, I mean, I always thought I was a numbers guy. I always thought I understood it. A lot of people don't know how to gamble, right? It's not always easy, and you can pick it up and learn it. But I think I thought I knew how to do everything.
Speaker 2R.S. mostly stuck to bets under $1,000 at this point. Travis' stakes were much higher.
Speaker 6There would be weeks where it was upwards of $10,000, sometimes a little bit more. You know, there were weeks that I would win $50,000. It was pretty incredible watching the numbers fluctuate. There were times where I thought I was good because I was having these massive weeks. And my friends weren't, but I wouldn't show them. But I would be down pretty quickly the following week.
Speaker 2No matter how big things got for Travis and R.S., this was all small potatoes compared to what Jonte Porter was up to.
Speaker 3So Porter, with Memphis, was making big money. He had a proper MBA salary. And he has this Discord account and this Twitter account, the TateTrades11 account, and he's posting about the trades he's making with the money he has. He had a $3,000 investment jump to $40,500 in three months. That's crazy. Yeah. And in three months, he called himself King Diamond Hand Tay on Discord, which was using the kind of verbiage of this whole Wall Street Bets kind of Reddit ecosystem.
Speaker 2So he signs with the Memphis Grizzlies in 2020. Earlier that year, Tennessee, where Memphis is located, obviously, legalizes sports betting. What do we know about when Jonte Porter got caught up in sports betting?
Speaker 3See, this is one of the interesting things, right? There's reports that he had an account with FanDuel, but FanDuel is almost exclusively a sports betting service. Now, if he was betting on sports as an NBA player, he may have been running into issues. And I'm generally not sure how he managed to square those two things.
Speaker 2At least at first, there may not have been a problem. NBA players are prohibited from betting on NBA or WNBA games. But they can legally bet on other sports as long as they are in a place where sports betting is legal. So a FanDuel account didn't necessarily mean Jonte Porter had broken any rules. The Action Network, a sports media company that focuses on betting, reported that according to multiple insiders, between 2021 and 2023, Jonte Porter placed more than a thousand wagers on FanDuel, risking millions of dollars. Once you reach that level, no matter who you are, sportsbooks take notice.
Speaker 3These sports betting companies. Just know that one big spender can account for a really outsized percentage of the balance sheet. And that means the customer loyalty becomes a really big deal. If you're FanDuel and you've got a guy like Jonte putting down huge amounts of money, you do not want to lose him to DraftKings.
Speaker 2Sportsbooks make most of their money from a surprisingly small number of customers. The industry calls them whales or VIPs. And keeping them happy becomes a huge part of the business. Jonte Porter reportedly had earned that status.
Speaker 3There he was, spending a lot of money, being courted by the big guys, and presumably being given all the perks that come with being a sought-after VIP in the new world of legalized
Speaker 2sports gambling. R.S. was not the high roller that Jonte was. But eventually, he too got that golden invitation.
Speaker 7R.S. "VIP hosts came knocking and they throw gifts at you every time you unlock a new level. You know, I got free AirPods, Dyson fans and hair dryers and all that kind of stuff. Expensive stuff. They told me, 'Hey, man, we're going to get you tickets to games, events, we're going to drop, you know, cash bonuses.' I think it came with like a $100 free bet, actually, a $100 or $200 free bet when they sent me the email. And that was like, whoa."
Speaker 2J.S. "Wow. You know, what was that like for you?"
Speaker 7R.S. "I felt like a boss. I felt so sick. The fact that they call it a VIP program is like, you know, there's a reason behind it. They make you feel like a very important person. First thing I did, screenshot, throw it in that group chat, tell the guys, I'm VIP, boys. You know, considering that we were betting 20, 30 bucks a night just a couple of months ago to getting $200 free bets, it was like, I'm on top of the world, right?" J.S. And the gifts kept coming. R.S. "The more you bet, the better it got, right? If you started out as the baseline. Base level VIP, you're only getting 500 bucks off a cruise. But then if you go up to the next level, then you get a free cruise, and then you go up to the next level, and you get a free cruise that's all inclusive, and then so on and so forth. Like, it's nonstop. Every single day. You're getting texts, you're getting phone calls, you're getting emails. They're really on you."
Speaker 2Sportsbooks employ hundreds of people who are tasked with pampering this kind of customer. The catch, however, is that customers don't know. They don't qualify for this treatment just by wagering massive amounts of money. It's all contingent on how much you lose. And before long, R.S. was spiraling.
Speaker 7"If you ever watch Dexter, it's like The Dark Passenger. It was very easy for you to be like, 'Okay, I lost 50 bucks on a sports bet. Let me go to the casino and win it back. Let me place 50 bucks on a blackjack hand.' And next thing you know, you lose that 50. And you're like, 'All right, now I'm down 100.
Speaker 2So I need to put 100 bucks on a roulette spin or whatever it is.' Right?" Nigel Eccles, one of the founders of FanDuel, says there are some issues with VIP programs. The question is, what do you do if you lose 50 bucks on a roulette spin or whatever it is, right? "If you lose 50 bucks on a blackjack hand, the next thing you know, you lose that 50. Let me place 50 bucks on a roulette spin or whatever it is, right? Let me place 50 bucks on a roulette spin or whatever it is, right?"
Speaker 8"That one is very hard. Unless someone is willing to tell you, 'I'm a problem gambler,' it's not clear whether they just like betting a lot or they actually have a problem. And that one's quite difficult as well. But yeah, it's like largely the people who are VIPs who do lose a lot of money are losing their own money and they're making their own choices for their own money."
Speaker 2Nigel is invoking something I've heard many times from the industry: that most of the VIPs who can afford to wager such eye-popping amounts in the first place won't miss that money when it's gone. But that's not always the case. And for RS, the losses began to pile up into debt. Nearly $40,000 a month. And his wife? She had no idea. "We were early on
Speaker 7in our marriage, we were talking about finances. and where our finances were going to go, whether we're going to combine them or not. And then that's when I said, hey, I don't think I'm in a position to do that because I wouldn't want you to carry this debt. And she goes, what debt? And then that's where it came out. It was obviously a shock to her, but we had been together for several years. We started dating in high school when we were 15. So for us, it was like, we'll power through it. We'll figure it out.
Speaker 2What's going through your head at this point?
Speaker 7You're not really mad at that point. You're more disappointed in yourself to turn around and say, hey, I'm this deep in the hole, right? When you go outside and you tap your card and it declines, it's like shame, disappointment, guilt, right?
Speaker 2For Travis Mistrata, the college baseball player, betting slowly stopped being something he did and turned into something he was always doing.
Speaker 6Tuesday nights in class, I'm gambling on first pitch to be a strike or, you know, no runs in the first inning. And it would be the San Francisco Giants playing the Oakland Athletics, like two teams that I have no interest in. So that was when I started to realize, OK, maybe this is a little bit more. But at the same time, you know, everybody in my house was doing it. All my roommates were doing it. My dad was gambling openly. I was gambling with him. And it was a lot of, you know, just fun and didn't feel like anything bad at the time.
Speaker 2But the more he gambled, the harder it became for Travis to tell him this was all just innocent fun.
Speaker 6The more money I was down, the higher my bets would get because I would have to win it back. I told myself I'll never gamble again, telling myself I'm going to stop and then somehow finding a way to do it again.
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Speaker 2When Travis Mistrata was 25 years old, his mother passed away from pancreatic cancer. Then over the course of the next two years, his best friend drowned and his father had a fatal heart attack. And with the loss of Travis's parents came life insurance money.
Speaker 6I was already gambling pretty significantly without any reason before. I really liked to gamble. And then once that kind of happened, it changed from gambling for fun to gambling to. prevent any pain, to numb myself, to distract myself. And it worked. I didn't have to acknowledge anything that hurt. And I was able to just, you know, lock into a game.
Speaker 2Travis isn't sure exactly how much he lost, but he knows it was more than $300,000. And the impact of the losses started spreading out like an oil spill into the rest of Travis's world.
Speaker 6I was having a lot of these fights with people. I started to drink a lot more because it helped kind of numb the pain of losing the money. And I started to think to myself, okay, if I don't stop right now, I'm either going to go to jail. I'm not going to have a house. I'm never going to have a family, which is what I want in my future. And I'm never going to be able to support myself. I'm going to be constantly living on $1 to the next. And all these relationships are going to be great in the beginning. And then I'm going to lose all these people. And it just got to a point where I finally said, like, I don't know what else to do. I need to. I need some help from somebody else.
Speaker 2So Travis made a phone call to a gambling counselor, said he needed to come in for a session.
Speaker 6We had set up an appointment. It was supposed to be in like two weeks. And then I had had another argument with the girl that I was dating. And I just remember hitting rock bottom. I went back to my parents' house. I had pulled into their driveway. The house was gone. We lost the house through foreclosure. And so it was kind of just a moment for me where I was, you know, just looking up, like, why did this all happen to me? How did this all happen to me? What did I do to ask for this? And I cried in their driveway for hours and just knew I had no money left in my bank account. I knew that I needed to stop this. And I made the phone call. And I told them, look, I can't wait two weeks. I need to come in tomorrow. And that was the day that they brought me in. And since then, I haven't gambled. So. Some addictions are
Speaker 2brought about by a tragedy. Some take shape after a huge win, causing the gambler to chase the thrill of that jackpot day after day. Every case is different. But researchers say that stories like Travis's have become a lot more common.
Speaker 10The number of people calling the Ontario Problem Gambling Helpline has slightly more than doubled since the introduction of the wide-open licensing of online gambling.
Speaker 2This is Nigel Turf. He's a scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. And he has studied gambling addiction for decades. For most of that time, Nigel says sports betting was something that barely came up.
Speaker 10Sports gambling has gone from a very small niche. Back between 2015 and 2019, sports gambling accounted for about 7% of total calls related to the Problem Gambling Helpline. And now it's up to around 23%. Back then, Nigel was
Speaker 2focused on electronic gaming machines, or EGMs. You and I would call them slot machines. And he says that they remain the biggest reason people develop a gambling problem.
Speaker 10EGMs are a big problem because they are continuous. There's no point at which there's a natural break in the gambling. You can make a bet every three seconds. And people will sit and cover three machines at the same time. Spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin. Now contrast that with lotteries, right? If I buy a lotto $6.49, I gotta wait until the draw before I get rewarded or punished.
Speaker 2With traditional betting, you wagered on who would win the game before it even started, then waited hours for the payout, sometimes even longer. But now you can wager second by second from the bottom of the game. From the palm of your hand on granular events that will also resolve within seconds, like that the next pitch is a strike or who will make the next free throw. There's a lot more betting opportunities within the game and it makes it more continuous. And with all these micro-betting opportunities comes something else that'll feel familiar from slot machines. Near misses. Okay, let's say you pull the handle and roll cherries, cherries, lemon. That feeling of, oh, I almost had it. That's the feeling of a near miss.
Speaker 10Near misses, it prolongs people playing because they believe that they can win. It has a galvanic skin response similar to winning. They get excited. And a lot of people believe that a near miss means they're getting closer to an actual win.
Speaker 2But they're not. A near miss is just, a miss. Parleys, which have exploded in popularity during the online betting boom, are another clear example of engineering near misses. A parlay allows people to combine bets for the chance at a big payday, but only if all of the bets are successful. You might go six for seven and think you're onto something, when in fact going seven for seven on a parlay is considerably less likely.
Speaker 10And of course the more bets you make in a game, they're more likely to get these near misses. And that creates a, like a roller coaster ride of thrills. And there's more. Another feature that happens with slot machines that is now found on sports betting is what they call losses disguised as wins. So the bells go off. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Woo, woo, woo, woo. Like my sound effects? I really do. So all the bells and whistles go off as if you've won money. And the ticker tape showing you your points, especially if it's in penny, is called click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. But it's only two bucks or three bucks or something less than you actually bet. That's losses disguised as a win. Now that all happens in sports betting.
Speaker 2Let's say a better place is a $20 bet. As the game progresses, things aren't looking so good. So the Sportsbook offers a $6 cash out to let the customer off the hook without the risk of losing everything. The funny thing is, on the page that shows your betting history, that $6 cash out looks like prize money. So it feels like a win, even though you actually just lost $14. I've also seen Sportsbook's email customers a monthly report on their wagering. The emails highlight the most money a customer won from a single bed or they're most successful long shot. You read these emails and feel like a winner, even if on the whole, you lost more money than you won that month. But there's one big difference between slot machines and sports betting, something that convinces sports bettors that they have a real chance at winning. You heard Travis say it earlier. I know enough about sports where I can start to do this. Sports fans know sports, or at least they think they do. So they come into gambling with a lot of confidence. But Nigel Turner says that can backfire.
Speaker 10They are second guessing the game. They're trying to figure out what the odds are. They are involved in the decision making, generally speaking. And it is an escape, but it's an escape that is related to the pride of successfully figuring out the game. So they have this illusion of control. And of course, they all take credit for when they do win. And when they don't win? The referee was biased. You hear that a lot. Or it was just a random fluke that some player tripped and therefore they should have won, but they didn't. So they come up with all kinds of excuses to protect their ego. But there's a very much an ego involvement in the outcome of the game.
Speaker 2At the core of all this, slot machines, sports betting, is something that RS eventually realized. Although he was drawn to gambling to make money, he stuck around even as his debts mounted because he was chasing something deeper.
Speaker 7It was a bit of like the desensitization to the money and more so the high, you know, I started chasing rather than, OK, I'm down five grand. Let me try to make the five grand back or I'm down five grand. Let me stop. It was more so like, let me keep going. So I was like, OK, I'm down five grand. Let me try to make the five grand back. I asked Nigel
Speaker 2Eccles, the co-founder of FanDuel, about this. When he hears about sports bettors who have developed traits of problem gambling, what does he think?
Speaker 8Problem gambling is a very real issue and it affects some people and it's catastrophic for their lives. That type of gambling is clearly very bad. But gambling for someone who doesn't have those issues, who does it for entertainment, who controls it, I just think it's largely resentment. And so it's sort of, you know, it's as virtuous as, like, movie theaters, right? Are movie theaters virtuous? Like, I enjoy them. I enjoy going to the movies, but I similarly enjoy gambling.
Speaker 2And Nigel also points out that there are lots of areas where we leave self-control up to the individual.
Speaker 8We do live in a society where generally we don't decide, you know, we're not paternalistic in that we don't say to people, you can't go to Fifth Avenue, you can't afford it. Similarly, you can't waste it on sports. And I'd rather live in that society, but I'm not saying that there's no ethical issues in there.
Speaker 2Nick Bonadio, the VP of product at FanDuel during legalization, said something similar about what the attitude on the inside of that company was like.
Speaker 4I think we did take a little bit of a libertarian approach of like, look, like if someone wants to gamble on sports, we're not going to tell them no in the same way that we wouldn't necessarily tell someone who walks into a bar that, no, you can't have that beer. Like, that's not our job.
Speaker 2But even with that said, he does have reservations.
Speaker 4I hated hearing the stories about, you know, someone lost their house and things like that, like that. I, I don't want to feel responsible for that. And so to the extent that I can affect that, we did take responsible gambling seriously, you know, the entire time I was there. So where does this land us?
Speaker 10I still don't think sports gambling is as dangerous as slotting. But I'm not a fortune teller. I won't say that that won't happen. And of course, it is a niche population right now. It is generally young men. Most men who get into gambling problems start as teenagers, adolescent and develop this quite early on so that by their mid-twenties, they've got a severe gambling problem. But where these problems will go, I don't know.
Speaker 2And it matters because the numbers are going to change. The number of people wagering on sports is surging. When the Canadian government passed Bill C-218 in August 2021, every province immediately rolled out single event sports betting through provincial lottery corporations, with the Northern Territories making it available, but only in person at places like a gas station or convenience store. Then in 2022, Ontario was the first province to open its own sports betting system, which is now available for the public to access online gambling markets and private sports books, like FanDuel and DraftKings. To bet with online casinos or sports books in Ontario, users have to create what's called an iGaming account. And based on the most recent government reports, within three years of single event sports betting becoming legal in the province, the number of total iGaming accounts jumped by about a million. And online sports wagers now reach $12 billion annually. There's mounting evidence of the impact that is having. Gambling-related bankruptcies have quadrupled in Ontario, while the province's chief coroner reports a rise in gambling-related suicides. In the summer of 2026, a Toronto debt relief firm told the National Post that they are seeing unprecedented increases in gambling debt. As of fall 2026, Alberta is the only other jurisdiction that has legalized commercial sports bets. But the rest of the country is watching and weighing options. A federally funded survey found that about 70% of young Canadians who bet online meet at least some of the criteria for problem gambling, meaning they are more than 45 times more likely to experience gambling problems compared to young adults who only play the lottery. Perhaps that's partly why, according to another recent survey from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute, nearly half of Canadians believe increased sports betting is a bad thing. The criminal code had been
Speaker 11exclusionary of single event sports betting, whereas you could do parlay
Speaker 2betting. Between 2002 and 2025, the NDP's Brian Maas represented the rioting of Windsor West, Ontario, with Detroit, Michigan just across the border.
Speaker 11Brian Maas, NDP's Brian Maas, represented the rioting of Windsor West, Ontario, with Detroit, Michigan. At that time, the U.S. did not have sports betting outside of Nevada that was single event sports betting. We knew that was likely to change. Maas was concerned
Speaker 2about the impact that could have on local jobs and tourism in Windsor, and revenues at the Caesars Windsor Casino. In response, Maas spearheaded the push to legalize single event sports betting in Canada.
Speaker 11If we did nothing about it, we would get all the problems associated because people would travel over to the U.S. and do single event sports betting. But we would get no benefit or revenue.
Speaker 2He didn't envision private sports books expanding to the country in the way that Ontario and Alberta have allowed. And he decries the explosion of sports betting ads that these companies have brought with them. But pushing to legalize single event sports betting?
Speaker 11That he doesn't regret. Because the alternative is much worse. And that's basically to turn this all over to the United States, other countries, and the black market and illegal ways of gaming. And that's basically to turn this all over to the United States, other countries, and the black that create other crimes from human smuggling to drug trafficking and so forth. And if you took it all away today, we would have all the problems, but we would have no control and have no revenue.
Speaker 2It's impossible to isolate sports betting's contribution to Ontario's GDP because it's run on shared infrastructure with online poker and online casinos. The last time iGaming's effect on Ontario's GDP was measured, it was in a report commissioned from Deloitte looking at the 2023 to 2024 fiscal year. It found that over that period, iGaming's total contribution to the province's GDP was $2.7 billion.
Speaker 11And then there's also data information that will come out of this. So it never would have been because we would not know the levels of addiction. We would not know the levels of cheating. Any of these different things or problems that we have from the activity are now in the open more than ever before and much more accountable.
Speaker 7Is torn. On one side, I'm like, this is a disease. Like, like gambling is a disease. It's terrible. But then money is really great and it helps you do a lot of things. So there's that, right?
Speaker 2In 2024, RS, a new father, was deep in the red. He made a decision.
Speaker 7So I took time off once I realized I was 30k down, 34. It was actually closer to 40, but 30, 40k down. I took time off because I'm like, this is ridiculous. What the hell am I doing? But then the VIP host came back and was like, hey, by the way, you still have your VIP tier. If you don't wager X amount by the end of the year, you lose it. And yeah, that's when I went back. I was like, hell yeah. Thanks for reaching out.
Speaker 2RS wanted to give this one more shot, not because he thought he could get lucky. He accepted that he couldn't, but because he'd found a system.
Speaker 7And then the light bulb started going off and I got in touch with a few people who knew how to really take
Speaker 2advantage of those programs. It's called positive expected value betting, or plus EV betting. Essentially, different sportsbooks sometimes post different odds. Under the right circumstances, customers can take advantage of those inconsistencies so that they gain the mathematical edge. But if you're thinking it's a quick hack, think again.
Speaker 7It was a day job. It's like a borderline 24-7. If I'm awake, I'm betting. I've got notifications on my phone, on my laptop, on my
Speaker 2everything. R.S. was able to make it work because he wasn't at his regular day job.
Speaker 7I was in paternity leave. So it was the best time. Yeah, I was at home, chilling with my baby and making money. Many times where I had to wipe down the phone because I put it in a spot I shouldn't
Speaker 2have after changing a diaper. R.S. had done it. He'd become a sharp. And got off to an incredibly hot start. In the first three months, I made $170,000.
Speaker 7It was money I've never seen that fast in my life.
Speaker 2Then one day, it stopped working. The apps had shut R.S. out.
Speaker 7I was just so frustrated because I'm like, why can I only place 60 cents on this NBA money line, right? And it was frustrating because I thought it's over. This is it for me,
Speaker 2right? Sportsbooks call it limiting, and it's completely illegal. They can let people blow millions of dollars while at the same time prohibiting customers who know what they're doing from wagering more than pocket change. So all those ads, the ones that promise you can win big?
Speaker 12You could win a shipload of money. Shipload of money. Shipload of money.
Speaker 2When I first spoke to Nigel Eccles, one of the co-founders of FanDuel a couple of years ago, he told me, quote, Advertising something as a, you know, like
Speaker 8really emphasizing the winning aspect or being a winner whenever you know that you're going to pull it out from under them as soon as somebody makes money. That to me, that sticks with me. And I think that one is very, very questionable behavior on the side of the books. And it's not that the books couldn't make money without limiting. It's that they make more money if they limit profitable customers, right? And these are sort of consistently, not you can win. You absolutely can win. But if you're showing a pattern that you have consistent profitability, they will limit you. And I've been limited myself. So I kind of am very familiar with this experience. And for the record, I am not a winning player. And so it's quite bizarre to be limited. And you're like, really? But the people that I know that are profitable bettors, they don't go on Twitter and complain about limiting.
Speaker 2And why don't sharps go on Twitter to make a public fuss about it? It's because they don't want to draw attention to their workarounds.
Speaker 7You can ask a friend to place a bet. You can ask a family member to place a bet. So like, hey, auntie, how you doing? Do you have your passport on you? Yeah, great. I need your phone for a second. Like, I just tell them, hey, don't worry, this isn't illegal. Don't worry, you're not getting a credit check run. Don't worry, this isn't going to affect anything. Are you enjoying your stay here? Yes. Here's some tea. Whatever. And then go through it. And then in a couple of days, I'll be like, hey, where are you at? Let me come see you. And then I'll go see them and deal with it there.
Speaker 2This is why R.S. asked us not to share his name. Because betting through a proxy is part of how he makes his living. And if the sportsbooks catch on, they'll shut down those accounts, too. Today, R.S. mostly relies on his wife, friends, sometimes strangers he meets at bars. And yes, the experience. I always pay them out. I always give them something. R.S. says he's made hundreds of thousands of dollars playing this way. He is one of the few people who actually wins at sports betting. But I asked him, is it worth it?
Speaker 7I'm always stressed. I'm stressed right now because I know I have bets in place. It's like you're just always stressed. It's a matter of being able to not let that. Let that stress take over your life.
Speaker 2If you're careful, anyone can get away with placing bets through a proxy. Even an NBA player. Here's Anthony Milton.
Speaker 3In 2024, John DePorter was betting again. And this time, under the table. So in three months in early 2024, you put down $54,094 in wagers. $54,094 in wagers. $54,094 in wagers. $54,094 in wagers. A profit of $21,000, almost $22,000. It was risky, though, because he was betting by proxy at this point. So it's theorized that at this point, Porter was beginning to give people leverage.
Speaker 2We don't know exactly why Porter started using a proxy, but betting through someone else's account can create more than one kind of vulnerability.
Speaker 3An athlete gambles with a proxy. The proxy now knows. And that is forever leverage.
Speaker 2And there's another risk. If you let your proxy front the cash, you could end up owing them a lot of money.
Speaker 3And by 2025, we know that he starts racking up a serious gambling debt to Amaruwade.
Speaker 2Next time on Understood the Big Bet.
Speaker 3If Jonte Porter is an athlete that is known to have a gambling problem, then he's a good mark.
Speaker 12To think that athletes are not going to do what their peers are doing, it's just naive. We've always relied on this idea that athletes are unwilling to throw the game. And does it become easier to think of it as, I'm not throwing the game, I'm throwing a stat.
Speaker 2You've been listening to Understood the Big Bet. Our lead producer is A.C. Rowe. The producers are Arman Agbali and Hadil Abdel-Nabi. The sound designer is Julian Uzielli. Our story editor and senior producer is Veronica Simmons. I'm Danny Funt. In this episode, you've heard archival tape from CBC and the Bound to be Rich podcast, City News, CTV, ESPN, Fox 31 Denver, the Grits and Grinds podcast, J&D Hoops, NCAA, and TVO. The executive producers of CBC podcasts are Chris Oak and Cecil Fernandez. The senior manager is Tanya Springer, and the director of CBC podcasts is Arif Noorani. If you enjoyed this episode of Understood, there's another season I think you'll like. It's called Artificial Intimacy. It's a story of emotional entanglements. What happens when people become intimately enmeshed with a chatbot. From a woman who marries a man, married her chatbot, to the man who was a chatbot, and saw it all from the other side. You can find Understood, Artificial Intimacy, wherever you're listening now. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.
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