By Patrick F. Cannon
If you watch sports on TV, you will see countless commercials for online betting services, some of which are “official” partners of one league or another. Many of them extoll the glories of “prop” bets. In the interests of public education, I investigated this and found that “prop” is short for “proposition.” While the possibilities are almost endless, you can place a bet on how many innings the starting pitcher lasts in a baseball game, how many touchdown passes a quarterback throws, which team scores first (any number of sports), how many home runs are hit, how many three-pointers a basketball player hits – well, you get the idea.
As for me, last weekend, I bet $32 on 14 Breeders Cup horse races. The top race, the Breeder’s Cup Classic, had a $7 million purse, with the others at least $1 million. When it was all over on Saturday evening, I lost $14.60. I can afford it.
I am unlikely to make another bet until the end of the year, since all the major races have been run, both in this country and in Europe. Except for one day early this year at Tampa Bay Downs during a visit to my son, all my bets are made online. There are off track betting sites in the Chicago area, but the only thoroughbred track left is Hawthorne, where purses are low and the amenities subpar. As you may know, the once wonderful Arlington International Race Course is now an empty lot.
Other gambling opportunities in Illinois abound. In addition to the two remaining race tracks, the state has long had the lottery and now has 17 casinos. Add the taxes on sports betting, and state and local tax income exceeds $2 billion. Nationally, that number is closer to $20 billion. There are now 30 states and the District of Columbia that permit online sports betting. This ease of betting on the whims of chance has exacerbated gambling addiction. While it’s impossible to know with any exactitude, it has been estimated that more than 10 million Americans have some level of addiction.
Regular readers will know that I was born in Pennsylvania. Although the state has long since joined the legal gambling bandwagon, when I was a kid, all gambling was illegal. What we did have was something called “the numbers.” It involved picking three numbers and betting a buck or two that those three numbers would match the last three numbers on that day’s Dow Jones industrial average. Chicago had a similar game called “policy.” Bets could be placed at the candy store, tavern, or other retail locations. My father was a regular player. Occasionally, he won a few bucks, always a cause for great celebration.
I went to my first horse race in 1957, a year after I moved back to Chicago. The only legal gambling was at one of the Chicago area’s six tracks. On rare occasions, I placed a bet illegally with the runner for the local bookie, who happened to be LaSalle Street Station’s freight elevator operator. Most office buildings in Chicago’s Loop had someone who could take bets. You could, of course, also bet illegally on most sporting events. Later in my career, I participated in the weekly NFL office pool, where I put up $5 every week, and occasionally in World Series pools.
Now, all this is perfectly legal. I can even drive a few minutes to a community that has legal slot machines in bars. A full-scale casino is operating in downtown Chicago, and another suburban casino is only 30 minutes away. I can buy lottery tickets by walking one block, although I can also buy them online. The same site I use to bet on horses (not only here but in many other countries), would also take my bets on other sports.
Whether legal or not, people are going to gamble, so governments at all levels have decided they want a cut of the action instead of some shady bookie. Sports leagues ban their players from betting on their sport but are happy to name “official” betting site sponsors. Commercials for these betting services punctuate televised coverage of the games. At the bottom, if you look fast, there will always be an 800 number to call if you have a gambling problem. But, really, it’s just a bit of PR. Without the problem gambler, their bottom lines would suffer, and you can bet on that. Even the occasional scandal like the recent one involving the NBA won’t cause more than a little flutter (by the way, “flutter” is slang for a small bet, but also the name of the world’s largest online gambling company).
Copyright 2025, Patrick F. Cannon
cannonnadedotcom 
I don’t have much interest in gambling. In fact, none. My family when I grew up scrupulously avoided it. As Italians, they knew full well it was rigged. Winning money you didn’t earn was suspect, and the consequences of losing, serious. As a teen I once lost about $10 after I got suckered into a street shell game. From that experience, I learned how smart I wasn’t.
Gambling can be quite addictive. I think of seniors in Vegas spending their retirement years and Social Security checks pulling handles on slot machines, which resemble the pellet dispensers in labs that do behavioral research on rats. If gamblers lose money, which they do constantly, they’ll keep doing it as long as they receive a small reward win every so often. Even if reduced to their last dollar, they reason, there’s always the chance of winning big.
State governments capitalize on this behavior. Their lottery ads explain with a bit of false logic, “You can’t win if you don’t play,” which is a way of saying, you can win if you play. But of course you can also lose if you play, and better yet, by not playing, win!
The truth of the proposition becomes apparent when you consider the terms of the lottery. The odds are against you, and if you win, half the payout goes back to the state in taxes. Those million dollar jackpots, which go astronomically higher each week there’s no winner, are built on losing bets. Of course there’s the consolation that the state’s proceeds go towards education, you know, for the kids. And for the gambler that hits bottom, lost his house and impoverished his family, there’s the crisis hotline, 1-800-CRA-POUT, where you’re connected to an trained call center in Pakistan.
One of my favorite movies is “Lost in America,” where a yuppie couple, tired of life just making money, decides to drop out, buy a Winnebago, and live off their savings, their nest egg. Unfortunately, on a stop in Vegas, the wife, played by Julie Haggerty, goes down to the gambling hall and loses everything. The ensuing scene where the husband, Albert Brooks, tries with a PR sales pitch to convince the casino to give the money back is hilarious.
With sports gambling, I’m sure the number of bettors is quite high, though not ten billion as you note (the US population is only about 343 million). The internet makes betting much too easy. It also overshadows the sports contests themselves. Imagine how boring baseball would really be without it!
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Interesting stuff. By the way, my son pointed out my math problem, so I fixed it later.
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