Marcus DiNitto has been covering sports business since 1995 and the gambling industry since 2012. He's been managing editor at SportsBusiness Daily, Sporting News, and Gaming Today, and was director of content for a licensed...
Read Full BioAs the NBA deals with the fallout from the FBI investigation related to gambling improprieties around the league, a “simple solution” has been floated: Ban betting on individual player props, or fundamentally change how they are offered.
To be clear, the suggestion, which comes almost entirely from people outside the sports betting industry, relates to just one of the probe’s multiple facets – Terry Rozier allegedly conspiring with gamblers to ensure they won ‘under’ bets on his props.
According to gambling industry insiders, though, removing player props from the betting menus at regulated sportsbooks would do nothing to alleviate such transgressions. In fact, it would make them far more difficult to uncover.
Game-fixing, the thinking goes, existed long before the repeal of PASPA in 2018; it was happening via black and unregulated markets. The legalization of sports betting isn’t the cause of the corruption; it’s the reason light is being shed on it.
A counterargument is that prop menus have expanded exponentially since legalization. Sure, a bettor could get a bet down on a star’s statistics, but markets on an average player’s rebound total, for example, were not nearly as accessible.
These betting markets are susceptible to manipulation, particularly those further down the roster.
Gouker: Truth Somewhere In Between the Two Sides
So is the regulated market and its proliferation of prop betting the cause of corruption, or the solution to it?
“The truth is somewhere in between,” gambling industry analyst and consultant Dustin Gouker told CasinoBeats. “The regulated sports betting market does uncover this stuff. This happened in the regulated market, it was flagged, it was caught. That’s true.
“It can also be true that the proliferation of legal sports betting has created more opportunity to bet, more props. So I think there is a middle ground between those two takes.”
Legal Betting Makes Match Fixing More Visible
In addition to Rozier, two other NBA players – Jontay Porter and Malik Beasley – are also embroiled in controversies involving suspicious betting patterns on their props. Porter pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and has been banned for life from the league. Beasley has not been charged, but federal and NBA investigations are ongoing.
In MLB, Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and starter Luis Ortiz remain under investigation for suspicious bets on specific pitches.
While these incidents are troubling, similar misdeeds surely occurred pre-legalization.
“Were we aware of how many people were doing it [pre-legalization]? No. You know why? Because we didn’t have dedicated resources looking at it,” said Joe Brennan Jr., co-founder of Prime Sports and an instrumental figure in the legalization of US sports betting.
“Only now does the Department of Justice have dedicated resources to look at gambling. Why? Because the industry is now regulated in the United States. … Nobody knows the level to which there may have been tampering in games up until legalization.”
Added Elihu Feustel, a professional gambler who consults with sportsbooks and has written extensively on match-fixing: “In the big picture, spot-fixing, match-fixing has occurred for years. … You could predict it with data. You could say before matches are played, ‘This match is suspicious.’ I don’t think the regulated markets have increased it, it just makes it more visible.”
Experts Don’t Recommend Banning Prop Bets
In an op-ed for The Atlantic published under the header, “Sports Can’t Survive Prop Bets,” Keith O’Brien writes, “It’s time to kill—or at least reel in—the prop bet.”
Tony Clark, executive director of the MLB Players Association, said, “We’re in support of removing any types of bets, prop or otherwise, that could create issues for our guys on the field.”
And political journalist Chuck Todd wrote on X, “Simple solution to the gambling anxiety the leagues are feeling this morning: ask your gaming partners to ban player props,” a take pushed back on by several voices from the sports betting industry, two of whom are quoted in this article:
Regulated sportsbooks are just one of the many options for people to bet on props. There are also sweepstakes sportsbooks, DFS apps, and prediction markets, plus offshore books and black-market bookies.
“If you take away props, either in a diminished way or try to ban them entirely, we’re not instantly gonna see everybody go to offshore sportsbooks or fantasy apps or all that,” Gouker said. “But as time goes on, people are going to find ways to do this.”
“You’re kidding yourself if you don’t think all this is coming to prediction markets, at scale as time goes on. You’re just moving where it’s going to happen.”
Brennan points to American sports fans’ voracious appetite for stats as the impetus for the proliferation of prop betting.
“Americans have learned to consume sport differently over the last 25 years,” he observes. “Props didn’t just come out of the ether because some evil little bookie sat somewhere and said, ‘I know what we’ll do. We’ll get them to bet on one statistical category.’ No, Americans are all about stats.”
Where the industry currently sits, Gouker offered, “The best place for [player prop wagering] to happen is in state-regulated sports betting.”
The Next Step for Prevention
There’s no doubt that safeguards put in place in a regulated sports betting environment help catch bad actors, and that sportsbooks are among the victims when their markets are manipulated.
But can the industry play a role in the prevention, as well as the detection, of these crimes?
“The best way to prevent it is to have consistent, effective prevention,” Feustel believes. “If a player knows that when they fix it, it’s gonna be spotted and there’s a risk, that’s gonna minimize fixing.”
Brennan, impassioned, “Continue to root these guys out, get better and closer to real time as we possibly can. We’re doing our part. … We’re pointing out when there’s odd betting patterns, and we pass the data onto [monitoring firms].
“Short of coming up with a way of detecting corruption in the minds of the players before they do something, there’s nothing that we can do until somebody puts a bet down.”
While sports betting scandals in the US date as far back as the 1919 Black Sox, Gouker wants to see today’s stakeholders learn from the current NBA controversy, which has also ensnared Chauncey Billups. The Trail Blazers coach is accused of running rigged poker games, and, potentially worse for the NBA, he matches the description of a co-conspirator who provided insider information to gamblers about the team’s lineup.
“This absolutely should be a learning point for everyone involved in the ecosystem. Education is not where it needs to be,” Gouker said.
“Not everybody knows that you’re probably gonna get caught, especially if you do this at a regulated sportsbook. That fear has not been instilled in everyone. Can sportsbooks and the gaming industry help instill that fear? Absolutely, and they should.”
“There should be more done. How do sportsbooks make that happen in partnership with the leagues? It’s not an overreaction to say this is the most important thing that should be happening post-PASPA.”
