Everything's fixed

Recently, an NBA player was banned from the league for life for a variety of gambling-related activities, and a personal assistant to the highest-paid player in Major League Baseball was charged with bank fraud in relation to gambling losses said to exceed $40 million. These sorts of incidents have called further attention to how integrated betting is with spectator sports, though it is not like anyone who watches them could be ignorant of it. Gambling companies are among the main sponsors of sports media, and their ads run constantly during broadcasts, telling us to “get in the game,” as though betting were a way to emulate the players in competition and better align our intensity with theirs. Gamblers can make wagers at any given moment on a wide range of possible outcomes related to individual and team performance, and play-by-play announcers are even compelled to provide updated odds throughout their broadcasts as though it were no different from any other statistics they might provide for context. Sports books are beginning to nestle next to stadiums and arenas, and one assumes it is only a matter of time before betting windows will be open on the concourse, just like at the racetrack.

It’s reasonable to conclude that the main point of sports is to provide structured opportunities for wagering, and that the leagues themselves are encouraging their customers to adapt the nature of their fandom accordingly. Sports betting offers a more contemporary and “online” way to be a fan, a way to leverage a connection and assume a kind of pseudo-interactive relation with the athletes. It provides a more concentrated form of what live-tweeting a game might offer, with clarified stakes — not the ambiguous social value of engaging with other people and trying to win their attention and approval but a pure monetary proposition.

Gambling suggests that one should be a fan of measurable outcomes rather than a particular team. To truly enjoy a sport in the way it is now being presented requires making bets on it, or at least it requires finding a certain thrill in oscillating between the simulation of games (the predictions and probabilities that translate into odds) and the games themselves. If not for the odds, how would anyone know what should have happened? If there are no bets on a particular event, does it even take place? Every moment must be auctioned off so that there is a reason to simulate it and a reason for it to occur.

Some sites provide a graph that tracks a team’s “win probability” from moment to moment, re-simulating the game with updated information as each play happens. Events are shown to have immediate consequences, a meaning whose impact is automatically known and can be instantly measured and factored in. (Likewise, every betting opportunity is a way of forcing the world to disclose its significance on demand, at the immediate moment of its resolution, as Erving Goffman notes in “Where the Action Is.”) Even when the probabilities fluctuate wildly, the probability calculation persists in imposing an implicit rationality, an unshakable sense that there is a calculably correct outcome, a reasonable method for determining what should happen, a reliable way of casting the past into the future. Yet it is frequently overtaken by events; it’s not unusual for a team’s win probability to go from 70 or 80 percent to 0 in an instant, at the point when predictions no longer matter and the game is over. Its accuracy, though, isn’t a matter of outcomes. Its purpose is to digest and interpret events and set norms for how one should feel about them. It processes the news for you and charts what your reaction should be.

Inevitably, what should have happened and what did happen diverge, producing potentially unreconcilable feelings. In an official statement regarding the player ban, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver argues that “legal sports betting creates transparency that helps identify suspicious or abnormal activity.” But one might also argue that it makes every moment of every game appear potentially suspicious or abnormal. Ubiquitous betting gives plenty of incentive to regard anything unlikely or exceptional that transpires not as athletic achievement but as suspicious activity, all too convenient or fortuitous for some syndicate out there. Puzzling coaching decisions, uncharacteristic lapses in player effort or attention, egregious refereeing: Isn’t it probable that these are linked to some wager somewhere on somebody’s behalf? Doesn’t the idea of “human error” seem to ring especially false here?

Foregrounding an elaborate gambling apparatus in sports foments a paradox: Everything has stakes, so nothing seems accidental. Everything and nothing is up to chance. The probabilities feel like predeterminations because that is precisely what they are not. Outcomes seem uncertain enough to be worth betting on, but thereby more vulnerable to being made certain. All the betting reminds viewers that opportunity costs are everywhere, perverse incentives are everywhere, and events are inscrutably overdetermined. All the data-based predictions make it seem certain that the leagues themselves can calculate how much more revenue they will make if particular teams make the playoffs, or if divisional races are closer, giving them a clear reason to fix games. By embracing gambling, the leagues have shown that they understand that the games are not about fair play but money: They should do whatever is necessary to maximize the action.

This opens up new ways to consume sports, with a hermeneutic of suspicion. Rather than enjoy the surface level of what actually happens or the strategic level of second-guessing various decisions, one can shift to the conspiratorial/prosecutorial level, where one tries to identify moments of cheating and potential beneficiaries. You can assess any given game in terms of a larger narrative, a broader design, and feel like you are in the know by rejecting out of hand the possibility of unscripted outcomes. Hence the social media posts that compile “evidence” of suspicious player or referee behavior. These gesture toward an alternate reality where the “win probability” chart never fluctuates. They purport to show why the simulation was correct and reality was fatally flawed.

Instead of making peace with an unknowable world full of unpredictable events, we are prompted to ruminate and reason backward from what occurred to what “probably” should have happened according to the available data. If we can posit possible conspirators, we can confirm that the world is fundamentally comprehendible and that things happen for comprehendible reasons, even if we can’t change them or make them fair.

Sports betting models a broader probability-based understanding of the world. It carries with it a structure of feeling: how to experience life as an endless series of calculable risks, the opportunity for “action” everywhere. This doesn’t mean acknowledging the world as fundamentally chancy, however. It means seeing everything in terms of wins and losses that are assessed instantly according to clear standards, an irrefutable scoreboard. What good is having the internet everywhere if you can’t use it to put each moment up for a wager., to have it recompute your win probability in real time? That is what it is to live in the moment. By means of betting we can have a rational relation to fate that doesn’t include an ability to direct it in anyway. Our sense of control is shifted to a different level.

The preponderance of gambling discourse conditions us to see the world as a field of managed risks, not unmanageable chaos. That is, it disseminates simulations and insists on their relevance. They are more real than real, and should reshape reality accordingly. All unpredictability, all difference, should be negated as a kind of “suspicious or abnormal activity” within a rationalized spectacle of competition whose outcomes at some ultimate level are never really unknown. All the data is out there. The more prediction is normalized — and betting is everywhere a normalization of predictive capabilities — the more we expect the world to be fully deterministic. Betting itself is a bet against itself. Every bet made is a demand that the world be less random.