Even Millionaire Pro Athletes Can Be Addicted Gamblers
Illegal gambling and game (and micro-event) fixing.
Updated November 21, 2025 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
The world of professional athletes is populated by hyper-competitive people who love sports, many with plenty of disposable income. Charles Barkley, former NBA star, has openly admitted losing millions gambling; in 2007, he said he lost $10 million, at one point losing $2.5 million in six hours of blackjack.
However, many were shocked In October 2025 by news of a federal probe resulting in 31 individuals arrested in two interrelated schemes involving the NBA and underground poker games. Among those charged were Chauncey Billups (head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers), Terry Rozier (star guard for the Miami Heat) and Damon Jones (former NBA player and assistant coach in Cleveland). Billups allegedly participated in a rigged high-stakes poker network backed by four New York mafia families. Rozier is charged with using non-public NBA information—such as player availability or injuries—to profit from illegal sports betting. Jones is accused of involvement in both schemes.
In November 2025, 14 current or former college athletes were charged in New Jersey with running a multimillion-dollar illegal sports-betting ring allegedly tied to the Lucchese crime family, using offshore websites and recruiting younger bettors and athletes as sub-agents. On November 9, Emmanuel Clase, relief pitcher for the Cleveland Guardians, and Luis Ortiz, a starting pitcher for the Guardians, were indicted for arranging specific pitches, informing bettors, and placing their own bets via associates. In one instance, bettors reportedly won $460,000 from bets tied to manipulated pitches. The unusual betting patterns triggered alerts, opening the investigation.
It's important to note that the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Murphy v. NCAA removed the federal prohibition on sports wagering. This decision, along with high-intensity betting products, continuous in-play wagering, and aggressive marketing , has triggered a wave of state-level legalization, rapidly expanding access to online and mobile sports betting. Got an iPhone? That’s enough.
Is Sports Gambling the New Cocaine?
Gambling is a recognized addictive disorder, and Marc N. Potenza is the Yale psychiatrist whose work helped establish gambling disorder as the first recognized behavioral addiction in the psychiatric manual, DSM-5 . His studies have shown that cocaine and gambling produce many of the same effects on the brain and dopamine levels. A high percentage of people with gambling disorders have other addictions. One meta-analysis suggests a mean co-occurrence rate of 57.5% between disordered gambling and substance addiction. Another study found that 73% of pathological gamblers had an alcohol disorder and 38% had a drug use disorder. Some studies show that up to 96% of individuals with a gambling disorder also have at least one other psychiatric disorder. Gambling problems are often discovered by clinicians treating people for alcoholism or other addictions.
The American Gaming Association (AGA) estimates Americans will wager $30 billion on legal U.S. sportsbooks during the 2025 NFL season.
In the 1970s and 1980s, numerous professional athletes were involved in drug scandals after using cocaine or steroids, particularly within Major League Baseball and the NFL. Keith Hernandez, Tim Raines, Willie Wilson, Bob Hayes, and others were caught using cocaine. Later, steroid use became an issue, and some athletes gained dramatic, pharmacologically-driven performance advantages with growth hormones and steroids. The introduction of leaguewide and team-based drug-testing programs—often guided by addiction specialists like me and Dr. David Martin—used drug-testing protocols to identify problem users and provide treatment.
Rutgers University’s Center for Gambling Studies recently cross-referenced 56 studies on gambling, discovering that most athletes gambled (79%). Former NBA star Michael Jordan gambled heavily on golf, cards, and other games. He stated in 1993: “I have a competition problem, not a gambling problem.” Jordan was seen gambling in Atlantic City during the 1993 playoffs, and faced scrutiny for losing $500,000 in one session. In a 1993 interview with Ahmad Rashad , Jordan described his gambling as a "hobby." Sure. He said he could quit anytime he wanted to.
Today, sports betting encompasses millions of bets on thousands of micro-events per game (the first foul committed, the number of rebounds, the outcome of the next play, and so forth).
Detecting Game Fixing or Micro-Event Gambling
Gambling is a whole other ballgame than drug use, leaving no metabolites or biomarkers . Instead, it is identified by behavior, decision-making patterns, and financial activity—FBI-like domains traditionally beyond the scope of monitoring. As a result, sports leagues had to construct an entirely new framework to identify problematic sports gamblers. And they did.
One significant advancement distinguishing the gambling era from the cocaine era was the compulsory integration of sportsbooks into athlete-monitoring systems. Nearly all major leagues now require players to disclose all personal betting. Geo-tracking and identity verification allow sportsbooks to detect proxy betting by teammates, roommates, or associates. This system is the behavioral equivalent of chain-of-custody drug testing: It ensures individual actions are traceable, verifiable, and cross-checkable against external data sources.
Sports teams also turned to in-market surveillance (IMS), a real-time monitoring system that identifies unusual sports betting activity. Gambling surveillance uses computer programs searching for statistical anomalies in betting markets, performance metrics, and wagering. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), these programs process information and adjust to new data in milliseconds during a live event (in-play betting), far beyond human capabilities.
Companies like Sportradar leverage AI to monitor thousands of sporting events for betting-related fraud. High-dollar bets placed minutes before a game provide one clue, as does correlated wagering activity among accounts tied to a specific location, IP address, or social media . The introduction of in-play wagering allows bets on micro-events within a game, significantly increasing impulsive betting. Particular wagers, like the number of rebounds by a player, are especially vulnerable to manipulation.
A final comparison between the cocaine era and today’s problem gambling is the involvement of federal agencies. Substance use can be handled internally by leagues, but match-fixing and gambling conspiracies cannot be addressed in-house. Instead, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and state gaming commissions hold investigative authority. This framework allows leagues to protect competitive integrity, but it is not as effective as drug testing in early identification and treatment of athletes with gambling disorders.
Gambling Disorder and Sports Betting
Sports betting is highly addictive because one's knowledge of sports creates an illusion of control, inflating confidence and leading individuals to overestimate their skill and underestimate dangerous risks.
Unlike annual events such as the Kentucky Derby, professional sports betting offers continuous opportunities—nightly games, matches, and micro-events across seasons and platforms, often while bettors are embedded in social environments like watch parties and team engagements. Sports media, logos, and betting apps become conditioned triggers.
Gambling disorder often develops rapidly and with severe impairment, and the growth of legalized betting has come with increased incidents of athletes wagering on their teams, sharing confidential data, and manipulating in-game outcomes. Potenza’s foundational brain-imaging studies demonstrated that gambling cues activate the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and ventral striatum—paralleling cue-reactivity patterns seen with cocaine, methamphetamine, and nicotine addiction .
Gambling addiction-related deficits in cognitive control mirror stimulant addiction, contributing to impulsivity, impaired learning from losses, and a “chasing losses” cycle driven by insula hyperactivation and striatal dopamine signaling. Genes and/or experiences may make some people more vulnerable than others. Treatment relies on cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) targeting distorted beliefs about skill, luck, and “one big win,” alongside relapse -prevention and trigger management . Gamblers Anonymous programs reduce shame and reinforce accountability for athletes.
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Potenza, M.N., Balodis, I.M., Derevensky, J. et al. Gambling disorder. Nat Rev Dis Primers 5, 51 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41572-019-0099-7
Avena NM, Gold MS, Gearhardt AN. Missed signals: How PET imaging may fail to capture the addictive potential of ultra-processed foods. Cell Metab. 2025 Aug 5;37(8):1621. doi: 10.1016/j.cmet.2025.06.007. PMID: 40769123.
https://nida.nih.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2025/11/gambling-disorder-in…
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Mark S. Gold, M.D., is a pioneering researcher, professor, and chairman of psychiatry at Yale, the University of Florida, and Washington University in St Louis.
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