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Sports betting at Grinnell

Yahir Dominguez follows live updates of games through a sports betting app.
Yahir Dominguez follows live updates of games through a sports betting app.
Natalie Ng

Yahir Dominguez `27 is looking for sports betting friends.

“Sportsbooks give you good offers from the start. I’ve been trying to tell people, if you’re 21 right now, you could take advantage of the offers,” he said. “Start with $20, you can guarantee $200 as a first time user. I could teach you right now how to do it.”

Dominguez is part of a growing subculture of sports betting in the United States, where wagers are placed on games ranging from professional leagues to college matchups. 

In 2023, the sports betting industry raked in $66.5 billion — a record high revenue for the third year in a row. Since the 2018 overturn of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, sports betting has been legalized in 38 states, including Iowa. State-regulated sportsbooks, such as DraftKings and FanDuel, boast millions of active players. 

Although Grinnell does not have a Division I sports program, it does cultivate a small and scattered sports betting scene, which students and staff anticipate will continue to grow. 

Andrew Kozhaya `25 said that while he personally does not bet on sports, he finds it interesting to watch others. To him, people engage in sports betting because it makes games more fun to watch.

“It’s a social thing,” he said. “I don’t think people here are gambling more than like, $20 compared to state schools, where people will have hundreds or even thousands of dollars.”

Dominguez, however, plays the game seriously. When Real Madrid won the Champions League, he was able to turn a $75 bet into $500. For his mother, he made a hundred-fold profit. And with his last $20, he earned back $1000 over a Mexican soccer game, which enabled him to pay his tuition fees.

“I’m poor, that’s why my tuition is $1,000 … and the $1,000 was due,” he said. “If I lost the $20, it would have been over.”

Dominguez’s favorite teams to place bets on are Real Madrid and his home team, Deportivo Toluca F.C.. He has spent entire days following games and chasing bets across sports like baseball, hockey and even darts.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) does not allow athletes like Kozhaya, who plays linebacker for the College football team, to register on official sportsbooks. However, he said that simply observing other betters had given him insight on his own performance.

“Sportsbooks set a line for how they think certain players will do, so I think of that like, how will my teammates do? How many points will we score this week based on our match up?” he said. “It’s a cool way for us to estimate how games can go based on who we’re playing.”

Dominguez said that successful betting outcomes typically stem from strategy and experience — but that even so, results are never set.

“I know odds really, really well, and I know how to use odds,” Dominguez said. “But even I go on a run where I’ll just lose.”

Dominguez cited an example of a bet he had once placed that everyone considered a guaranteed win. “People were risking 20,000 bucks … for Aaron Rodgers to get just one passing yard in a football game,” he said. “He got injured on the first play, and didn’t get a single yard.”

“Odds don’t mean anything because anybody can win … You just have to stay consistent, bet $20 here, $20 there,” he said. “Say you start off with $1,000, you don’t want to be betting $100. 10 bets, you lose everything.”

For Pratima Hebbar, professor of mathematics, strategies and odds in sports betting are merely a “trap.”

“There are no math models of these kinds of games,” she said. “If you follow the betters and their odds that they have bet on and look at the actual outcomes, they’re almost never right as a whole.”

Hebbar said that game outcomes depend on too many complex factors, like player health and weather. “It’s not a real probability experiment … it’s a flawed kind of system where fans think they are really able to game the market,” she said. “They have made fools of us by telling us there are methods to game the system.”

As the industry grows, however, Dominguez, Kozhaya and Hebbar individually recognized that sports betting has become increasingly normalized. 

“If you’ve watched an NFL [National Football League] broadcast, you’ll see now the sportscasters make their picks on bets … I think it’s to get more ratings, because they know people are sports betting,” Kozhaya said. “If Michael Strahan is telling me that this player is gonna do super well today, then maybe I’ll take his word for it, and then I win money.”

Hebbar said because sports betting is thought of more as entertainment than a taboo, like other more traditional forms of gambling, people do not realize that they are being sucked in.

“You can watch NFL games, DraftKings advertises something, they show you a QR code, and you just go to the website and immediately bet $10 on that game,” she said.Websites are tremendously gamified … there’s these numbers running on one side, you’re seeing buttons, seeing the odds change live. All those things shout at you, ‘Bet $10, win $150, you get VIP memberships, VIP treatment.’”

Kozhaya said that he thinks sports betting will only continue expanding with time, but that gamblers should also be aware of the risks before placing bets –– “These people are making these sites for you to lose. They want to make money.”

As for Dominguez, a countdown set on his phone declares he has less than 260 days until he can register on the online betting site FanDuel.

“Probably, when I turn 21, I’ll just be donating to the sportsbooks,” he said. “If you see me not in this college anymore, I’m going to be sports betting.”

“I might have an addiction,” he said.

Hebbar said that there is “a thrill in almost losing everything, and therefore almost winning something of value … it activates something primal in us.”

However, she said, because sports betting is still in its “infancy” stages, there are no targeted programs to address issues of addiction.

“It’s very hard to quit, even after recognizing the problem,” she said. “You especially can’t expect 18 year olds, 20 year olds, to be able to have the tools to immediately say, ‘Okay, I’m gonna stop.’”

Dominguez said he has a “love-hate relationship” with sports betting.

“If I could start from day one, I would have never done sports betting in my life,” he said. “The money you share is great, but there’s so much wasted time.”

Although he still wants to create a network of betters on campus, he does not recommend anyone who isn’t already into sports betting to start now. Personally, however, he would only quit once he had lost “enough.”

“I feel like it’s destroyed my life a little bit, but I need money, so honestly, I really don’t care,” he said. “It’s fun.”

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