How to Win at Gambling and in Life
When everything is a prediction market, anyone can shave points
In sports betting, the practice of attending a game in person and exploiting your physical presence as a gambling edge is called courtsiding. In one example, as described in this Rolling Stone feature, a bettor at a Dodgers game could wait for a Shohei Ohtani plate appearance, cue up a bet related to whether he gets a hit, and then place the bet immediately if it actually happens. As you might imagine, app-based sports betting has expanded the opportunities for courtsiding not just by streamlining the interface for placing instant bets on one’s own phone but by creating a robust marketplace for live betting during games, which is the main source of courtsiding opportunities (the app format has also made courtsiding easier to identify and to prevent with geofencing). The latency between the apps’ data feeds and what’s happening on the ground is always at least a few seconds, enough time for in-person presence at a game to hypothetically make a difference for someone who knows what they’re doing. Courtsiding is generally taboo—certainly grounds for being banned from a sports betting app—but the concept and implementation are vivid illustrations of the human species’ relationship with the increasingly quantifiable landscape we inhabit. The material world we perceive with our senses is something to experience directly but also the raw material for data, a resource that can be refined into layer upon layer of digital abstraction, a gambling surface. More modestly, the physical is just a frame of reality that happens about 10 seconds sooner than its digital counterpart, and courtsiding is the type of arbitrage opportunity that arises when you pierce the veil separating the two, as well as a way to immerse yourself more fully in the multidimensional reality that our technology has produced.
Much has been made of sports gambling as a cultural phenomenon but the Zynternet is just its surface aesthetic, a fleeting brand identity that could change tomorrow. The proliferation of a new numeric category in our environment is one level beneath this: Anyone who consumes sports media has noticed the growing prominence of spreads and moneylines and prop bet odds on the margins of the TV screen and in dedicated gambling-focused show segments—alongside more familiar, backward-looking numbers like scores and win-loss records. This encroachment of probabilities in the visual landscape is the aesthetic of ubiquitous derivate markets, of creeping financialization. Another level down from that, we reach the bedrock cultural condition that ubiquitous sports betting expresses: a universe made entirely of numbers—some knowable, some guessable, some not yet revealed, and some that will remain eternally secret but no less real. If nothing else, sports gambling is one of the frontiers where the old vibes collide with the cold rational regime of mathematical precision, and nothing manifests this tension more than the pundits who share the screen with the odds tickers on ESPN. With their predictive skills increasingly obsolete, vibes are now the whole job. The horse may have lost its role as a mode of transportation, Marshall McLuhan said, but it had made a strong comeback in entertainment.
What’s happening in sports media today could be what happens everywhere else eventually. In the days following the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting back in December, I noticed that Polymarket, which had just gained notoriety for seeming to have accurately priced the US election a month prior (speaking of obsolete pundits), was offering odds on the shooter being caught by the end of the weekend. The below-50% probability of an arrest was validated, sort of, when Luigi wasn’t arrested until Monday morning, and as we learned more about Luigi he seemed more like the type of guy who would be making Polymarket bets himself. Which immediately let me to briefly contemplate scenarios where someone in such a situation would turn himself in to win a sufficiently large payout. As prediction markets reach further beyond the constraints of rule-bound sporting events and begin to encompass the actions of ordinary people—when all of life is a gambling surface—the opportunities to manipulate these tiny markets and bet on (or against) oneself will also proliferate. Luigi was obsessed with the idea of agency and here is an emergent form of agency: the ability to influence the derivative market even when your original goal has eluded you (like speed running a video game). When the paths to conventional success are more and more crowded, you can still complete the side quests and win the game within the game. Courtside yourself.
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Reads:
Kelly Pendergast on TikTok aesthetics and the Stanley cup as a transitional object. “Our relationship to the world now includes our relation to the screen and everything that goes on there, and the uncomfortable attentional fluctuation between phone-space and living-space adds yet another level of psychic jumpcut. Stanley is there in both spaces, screen and living room, bridging the gaps in diegesis and supporting a new kind of hybrid lifeworld.”
