“Fort McNamara stood in the Arkansas River Valley near the Indian Territory border, its citizens declaring it to be the last white civilization for hundreds of miles. But civilization was an ironic choice of words for the place as far as Kit was concerned.”
Source: His Most Wanted
“Know who's at the table. You act! I write!”
Source: Order in the Courtroom: The Tale of a Texas Poker Player
“Sports betting consumed him. If he was not watching a game to follow a bet, then he was thinking about past wagers, discussing gambling with friends he made through a Discord channel, or researching the upcoming slate of games. Working primarily from home, he would use a dual monitor setup and keep one screen devoted to gambling. In many ways, his life had two monitors, one for gambling and one for everything else—family, friends, work, hobbies, dating, self-care, and so on. “It was what I enjoyed in life at the time,” he said. Gambling offered an escape from any problem he was facing. The only issue was that his escape was more stress-inducing than whatever he was escaping. Gambling left him “just constantly on edge, never really had peace of mind,” which led him to alcohol to take the edge off. He had fallen into a rabbit hole where gambling took on a logic of its own, where the only rational thing was to keep playing.”
Source: Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
“Using his unemployment checks, he placed at least 151 bets totaling $14,000 over the course of February, losing $2,300. He kept going, gambling multiple times a day almost every day for nearly six months, resulting in a net loss of $7,250. With his mental health deteriorating and a void in his bank account where all the money he gambled should have been, he decided that something needed to change. He moved back in with his parents, outside of Wichita, Kansas. His career, his finances, and his life had been thrown off track. Gambling, he said, “tore me apart.”
Source: Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
“Polls indicate that between 20 and 40 percent of American adults have bet on sports, many doing so legally for the first time in the last seven years.”
Source: Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
“Between May 2018 and August 2024, Americans gambled $308 billion through legal sportsbooks, including $121 billion in 2023, more than they spent that year on video games, movie tickets, music streaming services, books, and concert tickets combined.”
Source: Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
“Nearly half of millennials and 60 percent of Gen-Z have bet on sports, including two-thirds of students living on college campuses.”
Source: Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
“Calls to gambling hotlines have increased dramatically since states legalized sports betting. For the first time, many of these callers are young people. The director of a problem gambling resource center on Long Island notes that teenagers and twenty-somethings have become the “number one demographic” for gambling hotlines.”
Source: Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
“A study from Australia finds that each problem gambler financially or psychologically affects five others—for example through requests for money—so even a modest increase in the percentage of people with a gambling disorder will impact millions of people.”
Source: Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
“,,,all around her she could feel the echoey space of no one caring about her or worrying about her or helping her. She might as well have been nursing this baby on an abandoned space station.”
Source: Margo's Got Money Troubles