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From World Series Fixes to FBI Stings: Why Gambling and Sport Have Never Made Peace Professional and collegiate athletes may feel confident that their own knowledge of sports gives them a decided advantage over the average person in wagering on a contest. The desire of some for high living, particularly in cases where they’re in … Read more
Baseball’s Oldest Sin, Baseball’s Strictest Punishment No professional sport in America has a more fraught, more consequential, or more thoroughly documented relationship with gambling than Major League Baseball. The rules governing betting on the game were not invented in a boardroom — they were forged in the wreckage of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, when … Read more
The League That Built an Empire on a Game It Once Banned The NFL has long held a complicated, often contradictory relationship with gambling. For decades, the league publicly treated sports betting as an existential threat—a corrupting force that could unravel the trust on which professional football was built. Today, sportsbook logos appear in stadiums, … Read more
Baseball’s Most Notorious Betrayal The expectancy that grips the American nation with the beginning of baseball’s World Series each year was even more apparent on October 1, 1919, when the great Chicago White Sox, winners of the American League pennant, were to meet the Cincinnati Reds in the first World Series since World War I … Read more
College Basketball Has Never Fully Escaped Its Gambling Problem College basketball and point-shaving corruption have been intertwined for nearly a century — and the pattern has never stopped repeating. From Mob-connected bookmakers prowling New York’s Madison Square Garden in the late 1940s to an FBI-unsealed federal indictment in January 2026 naming 39 players across 17 … Read more
Point shaving in football means a player deliberately limits his team’s margin of victory to beat a betting line, without trying to lose the game outright. The distinction matters, because a shaver can tell himself he still helped his team win. That moral loophole is exactly what fixers have sold to athletes for a century, … Read more
