This book pulls back the curtain on the alluring yet perilous world of American sports gambling. Built around interviews with the power players of the betting boom at FanDuel, DraftKings, and beyond, it reveals the troubling methods that are being used to bleed gamblers dry.
Funt’s writing about sports gambling’s 'winners' is almost as depressing as the look at its losers ... The only winners are a handful of sports books that are making billions ... Legal sports gambling promised easy money. Everybody Loses makes clear that it comes with enormous costs.
Mr. Funt, a journalist, keeps a reporterly distance throughout most of the book. It’s only in the final pages that he opines about what gambling is costing society ... Sports betting has indeed been brought out of the underground and into the sunlight. It’s quickly becoming the default way we relate to athletic competition. And the outcome is predetermined.
Everybody Loses is occasionally scattered, its chapters jumping from topic to topic, but it is deepened and enlivened by the many extraordinary and candid contacts and conversations that Funt makes with industry insiders ... Otherwise excellent.
