A prominent journalist lost nearly $10,000 gifted from his employer as an experiment to cover gambling in America and the pitfalls of the growing sports betting industry.
The Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins penned a lengthy feature, “Sucker: My year as a degenerate gambler,” in which the suburban dad and practicing Mormon “prohibited from indulging in games of chance” was given $10,000 by the publication to wager during the 2025 NFL season.
Since the cash belonged to The Atlantic, it did not interfere with his religious constraints, and the magazine planned to cover his losses and split any winnings with him to ensure his “emotional investment.”
Coppins, who consulted his bishop to make sure the arrangement wasn’t frowned upon, had heard plenty of stories about American men who let an “initially modest gambling habit” upend their lives and families. In his feature, he laid out how gambling became a near obsession for him.
“With the door locked behind me, I pulled out my phone and downloaded the DraftKings betting app,” he wrote of his first bet. “I felt a certain thrill as I typed in my debit-card information and deposited $500. The first game of the NFL season was a few minutes away. Anything seemed possible.”
Coppins previously thought gambling was a “waste of time” but was well aware that made him an outlier.
“Since 2018, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports, and roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook,” Coppins wrote.
His first time wagering was during a game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys, an experience he called “strangely mesmerizing.”
“For 200 bucks, I had purchased an artificial rooting interest in a game I had no reason to care about. I kept watching even after a weather delay pushed it late into the night, scrolling frenetically next to my sleeping wife in search of angles to exploit with late-game bets,” Coppins wrote.
He lost a few bets but hit a prop parlay and finished the night up a whopping $20.
He explained that the opening-night profit resulted in daydreaming inside the Coppins household and tried not to dwell on the bishop cautioning him to “be careful.” He studied up on the history of gambling in society, sought advice from famed data analyst Nate Silver and kept at it.
“One rainy evening, I found myself parked outside a big-box store in Northern Virginia where my wife had sent me on an errand, obsessively scavenging for lines on my phone and jotting down favorites in my Notes app. When I looked up, 45 minutes had passed. I would be late for dinner,” Coppins wrote.
“Doing all of this homework heightened my investment in the games,” he added. “But it also conjured something disconcerting and primal in me.”
He explained that a tough loss, or “bad beat,” caused him to despise the player responsible, and he became “unnerved” by the intensity it caused him to feel.
“I was surprised at how quickly and extensively the experiment was bleeding into the rest of my life,” Coppins wrote, explaining that his family quickly accused him of being addicted.
It irritated his wife because watching sports late into the night became a habit, and even his own boss wondered if it was affecting his mental health.
“Four months of burying myself in gambling apps had apparently made me twitchy in ways that were perceptible to my colleagues,” he wrote.
Throughout the feature, he weaved in stories of gambling addicts, professional bettors and the rapid rise of the practice in America, from $4.9 billion in legal gambling in 2017 to at least $160 billion last year.
By the time Coppins bet on the losing New England Patriots in this year’s Super Bowl, he’d lost $9,891 of the original 10 grand.
At that point, he sought to prevent himself from legal wagering in his home state of Virginia by filling out a “self-exclusion” form, a way of preventing online sportsbooks from taking his bets for a specific period.
“When I’d started this project, I had presented it to my bishop as journalism; at some point, it had veered into obsession,” he wrote.
