Free Republic

Sports betting has become so ubiquitous and so massive in the US that it can be difficult to remember that at the start of 2018, it was only legal in four states, and only in Nevada could you bet on individual games.All that changed in May of that year, when the Supreme Court stuck down the federal law that barred most forms of sports gambling. Since then, the legal sports gambling industry has spread to 38 states plus Washington, DC, with revenues of nearly $14 billion in 2024, much of which has come from burgeoning and highly addictive mobile apps...

FBI Director Kash Patel called out sports commentator Stephen A. Smith on Thursday after the pundit suggested the arrests in connection with the NBA sports betting scandal were revenge for perceived anti-President Trump activism. Speaking with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Patel called Smith’s claim “the single dumbest thing that I have ever heard out of anyone in modern history, and I lived most of my time in Washington D.C.” “It’s right up there with Adam Schiff,” Patel said, referring to the Democratic senator from California. “We arrest people for crimes.” After the news of the arrests broke, Smith in an...

The NBA scoreboard has turned into a stock ticker. Crowd chants, but half of them are watching their parlays instead of the play. Somewhere a coach calls timeout; somewhere else a bookmaker grins. This was always coming. The NBA invited gambling to the game when it signed lucrative sponsorship deals and paved the way for odds and offers to be splashed over our TV screens during games. So when the FBI finally showed up on Thursday, they were simply collecting the rent.Portland head coach Chauncey Billups, whose playing career ended with his induction in the hall of fame, and Miami...

The FBI has arrested Chauncey Billups, NBA champion, Hall of Famer, and coach of the Portland Trail Blazers for his association in a rigged poker game operated by some of New York City’s most notorious crime family. “Why would Chauncey do it?” the world of sports is asking. He’s already worth tens of millions of dollars. That’s a question for Billups, his attorneys, his God, and, presumably, Blazers ownership to answer. But as someone who regularly plays a lot of low and micro-stakes poker, I have a pretty good idea. The games I play in are monitored by security cameras,...

ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith has gotten more and more involved in politics in recent years and is not afraid to speak his mind when it comes to national issues. That trend continued Thursday morning as he discussed NBA star Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups being arrested as a part of a major FBI gambling investigation.

Rest assured that Gov. JB Pritzker’s $1.4 million gambling win last year didn’t snatch away state tax revenue from any Illinois casino. The billionaire Democrat’s surprise windfall came from Las Vegas blackjack tables, Pritzker said Thursday, a day after his hot streak was revealed in 2024 income tax returns released by his political campaign. “I was incredibly lucky,” a smiling Pritzker said while being quizzed by reporters on his jackpot during an otherwise somber Loop press conference about the potential deployment of troops in Chicago. “You have to be to end up ahead, frankly, going to a casino anywhere.” Fortune...

The Nobel Peace Prize has become mired in scandal today after suspicious bets were placed before a longshot was announced as the winner. Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was an obscure candidate just 12 hours before she was announced as winner on Friday. Her victory stunned the world after Donald Trump secured a peace deal in Gaza, ending a two-year war that has killed more than 70,000 people. Machado had just a 5 percent chance of claiming victory, according to prediction market Polymarket. But then a buying spree, from a newly created account '6741', rocketed her chances to 70...

Ole Miss was close to a win and cover, but Kentucky kicked down the back door with a late field goal Robby Kalland By Robby Kalland 3 hrs ago • 1 min read A year ago, Ole Miss missed out on the College Football Playoff due in no small part to an ugly home loss to Kentucky early in the season. On Saturday, the Rebels went to Lexington seeking a bit of revenge and found themselves in a dog fight again, trailing 10-0 early, before rallying to a 30-23 win. The line moved from Ole Miss as a 10.5-point favorite...

Mohegan Sun, a popular casino in Connecticut, is suing a former Hollywood bigwig for failing to pay his gambling debts. Ronald Meyer, 80, the former President and COO of Universal Studios, co-founder of the Creative Artists Agency and vice chairman of NBCUniversal, has an alleged $2.8 million in outstanding debt to the casino. A judge must decide if Meyer is entitled to a jury trial before the case can proceed. Recovering lost debt Meyer resigned from his position and $25 million annual salary at Universal in 2020 after he was supposedly blackmailed over an affair he had with then-20-year-old actress...

NFL bettors are expected to wager approximately $30 billion on the league this season with legal sportsbooks in the United States, according to an estimate released Thursday by the American Gaming Association. The $30 billion figure is approximately an 8.5% increase from a revised estimate of $27.5 billion last year and is based on the national growth of wagering in 2025 and statistics from states that report football-specific betting data, according to the AGA, which represents the gaming industry in the U.S. The amount includes money bet on futures wagers, such as the odds to win the Super Bowl, and...

Texas Democrat James Talarico has built a national profile railing against GOP billionaires in politics — but has quietly accepted funds from a PAC backed by one of the wealthiest donors in the Republican Party.The single biggest donor to Talarico’s state House reelection bid last year was a group funded by casino mogul Miriam Adelson, according to state campaign finance data.Adelson, the widow of the late Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson, is one of President Donald Trump’s largest financial supporters and seen as a boogeyman by much of the left. Talarico is now considering a run for Senate, which would test...

Tucker Carlson took aim at the major sports betting companies for their “predatory” behavior that has led to massive gambling debt on Tuesday. In a new episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, Carlson and guest Saagar Enjeti drew parallels between the issues of gambling debt and credit card debt. The conversation first began with Enjeti giving a brief history lesson detailing how sports betting became so popular in the last few years. Then, Carlson compared the sports betting giants to credit card lenders and explained why, in his opinion, Americans simply shouldn’t pay the debts he deemed predatory: CARLSON: Why...

Last April, the NBA issued its first lifetime ban for gambling in 70 years to Jontay Porter after finding that “Porter disclosed confidential information about his own health status to an individual he knew to be an NBA bettor. Another individual with whom Porter associated and knew to be an NBA bettor subsequently placed an $80,000 parlay proposition bet with an online sports book, to win $1.1 million, wagering that Porter would underperform in the March 20 game.” Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that a 2023 game played by then-Charlotte Hornets guard Terry Rozier was under federal...

Osceola County Sheriff Marcos R. Lopez was arrested on charges related to racketeering on Thursday morning. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has suspended Lopez from his role. Christopher A. Blackmon was immediately appointed to fill Lopez's position.

Hall of Fame Chairman of the Board Jane Forbes Clark issued a statement on Tuesday regarding MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred's policy decision about individuals losing their permanently ineligible status after death. "The National Baseball Hall of Fame has always maintained that anyone removed from Baseball’s permanently ineligible list will become eligible for Hall of Fame consideration," Clark said in the statement. "Major League Baseball’s decision to remove deceased individuals from the permanently ineligible list will allow for the Hall of Fame candidacy of such individuals to now be considered. The Historical Overview Committee will develop the ballot of eight names...

his is the fascinating tale of a twentysomething suburban Chicago man who won $800,000 in sports bets, which he traveled as far as Iowa to place. When it came time to cash in, the casinos refused. Thomas McPeek, 24, shares a home with his parents. The basement is a shrine to their favorite teams, including the Cubs and the Bears. McPeek read a stack of books to make some educated sports wagers. He placed stacks and stacks of bets last year, complicated wagers on football called parlays, where several events all have to happen for the gambler to win. "It...

A Democratic official in New Jersey and several reputed mobsters have been charged for their alleged roles in a major illegal gambling ring in the state, Democratic New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin announced Friday. Democratic Prospect Park Councilman Anand Shah, aged 42, is alleged to have illegally run poker games and a sportsbook tied to suspected members of the Lucchese crime family, one of the five major mafia families of New York, Platkin’s office announced Friday. The alleged mobbed-up gambling scheme operated out of restaurants and homes across the state and generated approximately $3 million in illicit cash. Today...

Institutions like the military and colleges are sometimes said to mirror society. One can only wonder where we are headed as a Country, but more importantly we must ask if individual schools are trend setters. Take the Ivy Leauge schools and their affinity for foreign students who hate America, or how they pushed degrees without merit until DEI created a need for the degrees. In sports cheating is usually limited to gaining an edge on the field... sometimes fame, power or money are additional motivators. Take Michigan University and the Athletic Program as a whole. Multiple team sports were cheating...

Gambling addiction has soared since the legalization of sports betting in most American states, reveals a new study. Researchers found a “dramatic” increase in sports betting and gambling addiction help-seeking since the landmark Murphy v. NCAA Supreme Court decision in 2018 paved the way for states to legalize gambling on sports. Since the ruling, researchers from the University of California San Diego Qualcomm Institute and School of Medicine found a “staggering” growth in the sportsbook industry. The number of states with operational sportsbooks grew from one in 2017 to 38 last year while total sports wagers skyrocketed from US $4.9...

The only thing hotter than a ticket for the Bills-Chiefs AFC title game might be football fans' hatred for referees' perceived partiality toward the Chiefs. I caught wind of a penalty trend from Warren Sharp (Sharp Football Analysis) via ESPN and had to see for myself just how rare it was historically. Turns out, Kansas City is in rare air. The Chiefs have gone 11 straight playoff games without committing more penalties than their opponents, the longest streak by any team in the last 30 years. The only teams with longer streaks in playoff history were the 1970-82 Dolphins (18)...