Dice, but With Balls
On Polymarket, Sports Betting, Michael Jordan, Pete Rose, Nuclear War, and Greed
October 1992, Washington, D.C.. After a year of senate hearings which found betting on sports games to be a creeping issue of national concern, and supported by the likes of David Stern, then-commissioner of the National Basketball Association, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act was signed into federal law by the coke-bottled-trifocalist-in-chief himself, President George H.W. Bush.
Colloquially referred to as the ‘Bradley Act,’ the law prohibited states from, among other things, “operating” or “authorizing” any “betting scheme based on competitive, professional, or amateur sporting events,” exempting only Nevada from its purview — a narrow and begrudging exclusion necessitated by the state’s long history of economic reliance on gambling.
“As most sports fans today will tell you, it’s difficult to overstate the extent of the disruptive emergence of national sportsbooks.”
Prior to the Act, sports gambling was largely an issue of states’ rights, and almost every state had exercised its right to criminalize gambling activities by the early twentieth century. But desperate times fray moral fibers, and most forms of gambling were legalized by Nevada in 1931 in an attempt to combat the worst effects of the Great Depression on the state (then not much more than a series of minimally populated gold- and silver-mining towns, which had effectively run out of both gold and silver).
Due to the efforts of Nevada lawmakers, and because the only alternatives were dismal state-sponsored sports lotteries in Delaware and Oregon, the not-yet-glittery streets of Las Vegas soon became home to the largest sportsbook in the country. As a gray-market endeavor, sports gambling would quietly flourish from its seat on the Vegas strip — always present, but never attracting too much national attention.
Then, in 1989, sports betting was thrust into the spotlight. After years of speculation — and half a decade into his tenure as manager of the Cincinnati Reds — Sports Illustrated published a bombshell cover story detailing allegations that Pete Rose, 17-time all star and all-time hits leader to this day, had been placing bets on his own baseball games. The extent of his alleged gambling, as revealed by Major League Baseball’s subsequent investigation, would attract nonstop national attention until Rose was banned from the game later that year.
As for its impact on the sports world: imagine the Pope defecating in public, or the sitting President of the United States tweeting, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait”! For the first time, the country was viewing with wide eyes what could previously only be glimpsed from the shadows. And so it was that just a few years later, the Bradley Act received widespread public support, helmed by the commissioner of the NBA — a league whose public image appeared to be on the opposite trajectory of the MLB’s.
The financial windfall dropped into the lap of the NBA by the final decade of the twentieth century was welcome, if a bit unexpected. Gone were the cocaine-snorting, bleary-eyed, artery-blowing cowboys of the early 80’s, replaced instead by slick, PR-trained superstars like Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, and most importantly, Michael Jordan. But as godlike as Jordan’s image was in the public eye, he was, after all, just a man — one who happened to be extremely talented at putting a ball through a hoop. In late 1992, during a money laundering investigation in Michael’s home state of North Carolina, the IRS discovered a $57,000 check made out by His Airness to cocaine-dealing bookie James “Slim” Bouler.
More checks from Jordan — who would later testify in court that the Bouler payment was intended as compensation for gambling debt — continued to turn up in black-market gambling probes along the North Carolina coastline that year. The rumors reached a fever pitch in 1993, when the NBA opened a series of inquiries into MJ’s alleged gambling activities — but before the investigations concluded, Jordan retired from the game of basketball. Although the Bulls legend would return to the NBA a year and a half later, fans speculated that his first retirement was a poorly disguised suspension designed by Commissioner Stern to protect the newfound advertiser-friendly professionalism of the NBA. While we might never know the truth, the muddied waters around the personal life of basketball’s biggest ambassador were more than enough to solidify public sentiment toward gambling on U.S. sports.
Accordingly, for twenty-six years, and with little opposition, sports gambling was a federally prohibited activity. Then, in 2012, it was legalized by the state of New Jersey, whose legislature was very shortly thereafter sued by every major sports league in America — and the U.S. Department of Justice. The litigation that followed led to Murphy v. NCAA, a 2018 Supreme Court case in which the Bradley Act was challenged and overturned on constitutional grounds. Although the Act purported to federally criminalize gambling activities in connection with sports games, the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reserves to the states all governmental powers not specifically delegated to the federal government. This includes, as particularly relevant in this case, the power to regulate intrastate commerce (i.e., business within state bounds). Thus, after a brief two-and-a-half-decade-long interlude, the states were once again entitled to legislate around the issue as they saw fit.
In a post-Murphy world, thirty-nine U.S. states and Washington D.C. have legalized some form of sports gambling. As most sports fans today will tell you, it’s difficult to overstate the extent of the disruptive emergence of national sportsbooks. DraftKings and FanDuel seem to inhabit every third advertisement on sports radio, television, and podcasts. The companies have deals in place for broadcast segments, branded awards, and in-game marketing with most major American sports leagues. Even traditional gambling platforms have moved into the digital space, with Caesars and Circa offering individual-game betting direct to consumers online and striking logo jersey patch deals with National Hockey League teams (the Capitals and Blackhawks, respectively). Gambling is, simply put, a significant part of the sports-viewing experience in 2026.
“To many, gambling may well be considered a vice — an evil, a sin, a dark pit inside that can reach out with shadowy tendrils to claim your job, your family, your home, and even your life.”
However, there still remain several states and territories in which citizens may not engage in sports gambling — or at least, they couldn’t, until the rise of peer-to-peer prediction markets. Polymarket and Kalshi, the two most prominent examples of this type of business, skirt gambling regulations by offering the purchase of “YES” or “NO” shares in relation to almost any world event (although generally opposed, Polymarket has removed few controversial markets from its platforms, such as whether the U.S. would detonate a nuclear bomb during its war with Iran in early 2026).
Here’s how it works: instead of betting against a sportsbook with fixed odds, these predictive markets allow users to set their own — collectively, and mostly without regulation. Each “winning” share is paid out at $1, while the value of “losing” shares drops to zero after the occurrence of the world event. Users can purchase vast quantities of shares for an outcome on which they are bullish; if they start to lose their nerve, they can hedge their bet by purchasing shares representing the opposite outcome. Effectively, then, live share prices on Polymarket or Kalshi reflect that market’s perceived probability of any given outcome, at any given time. Due to this structure, Polymarket’s contention (as supported by the CFTC) is that it does not offer gambling propositions subject to state legislation but rather, federally regulated investment derivatives.
Although clever, the companies’ efforts to work around state laws might be catching up to them — some state governments have passed legislation to attempt to regulate the platforms, and most recently, Polymarket was the target of a class-action filing in New York. Only time will tell whether peer-to-peer markets will act as the next evolution in legalized sports gambling, but if not, trust that something else will claim that title — perhaps something even more adept at parting a sports fan from his money.
To many, gambling may well be considered a vice — an evil, a sin, a dark pit inside that can reach out with shadowy tendrils to claim your job, your family, your home, and even your life. But in America, gambling is just a business. When business flourishes, so does greed. And in the immortal words of Gordon Gekko, “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” So gambling, in this America — and especially on the ballgame — must, too, be good.
Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, sports, tech, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and consider sharing this post if you enjoyed.
It was a fascinating read, thanks for sharing...