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    Opinion polls have Harris and Trump locked in a tight race. ‘Gambling polls’ say otherwise

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    Most gamblers might want to sit out the US election. It’s too close to call with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump neck and neck, according to official polls. But the former president’s campaign has latched on to signs he says prove he’s actually “leading”.In a close race, Trump and his allies claim some “gambling polls”, as he described them last week, put him significantly ahead of Harris. “Like, 65 to 35, or something like that.”The irony of touting an apparent lead in betting markets at a Believers and Ballots campaign event in Georgia aimed at Christian voters was not lost on Trump. “But nobody here gambles,” he continued. “Does anybody here gamble? No, no, no, no. Great Christians don’t gamble, do they? Oh no.”The “gambling polls” Trump cited are forecasts generated by several election betting platforms, which put his chances of regaining the White House markedly ahead of his Democratic rival’s. With many questioning the accuracy of political polling, supporters including Elon Musk, have started to claim such estimates are more accurate.As of Wednesday, Polymarket, one leading service, put Trump’s chances of winning back the presidency at about 67%, with Harris at 33%. Another, Kalshi, put Trump at 62% and Harris at 38%.And while Trump’s audience last Tuesday was not interested in gambling on the result of the presidential election, many others appear to be getting involved. High-profile legal battles, promotion by the likes of Musk and Trump, and growing media coverage, have helped propel the activity into the spotlight as the campaign gathered steam.Interest around betting on this election is “orders of magnitude larger” than previous ballots, according to Thomas Gruca, a professor of marketing at the University of Iowa, and director of Iowa Electronic Markets, an election-focused futures market first established in 1988.America’s gambling boom, led by the legalization of sports betting, “has increased the number of people who like to throw away their money on things they don’t understand”, said Gruca. “People think, ‘I picked the Raiders-Jets game, therefore, I can pick a president.’”He also pointed to opinion polling errors at previous elections, and how many polls this time around suggest the contest is extremely tight. “I haven’t looked at the polls in the last 15 minutes, so I don’t know who’s winning. In previous years there was a lot of clarity.”In the magazines and newspapers section of Apple’s iPhone store, Polymarket has reigned supreme in the top spot, leaving the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and, yes, the Guardian, in its wake. Another platform, Kalshi, has likewise surged up the store’s chart of financial apps.“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these markets have been becoming more popular as trust in the media has been declining,” said Harry Crane, a professor of statistics at Rutgers University. “The public wants information and is looking for sources of information it can trust.”

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    Should you have turned to, say, Polymarket, on Wednesday and bet on Trump, you would receive $1 for every 67 cents you wagered if he wins the election. If you bet on Harris, on the same platform, on the same day, you would receive $1 for every 33 cents wagered if she wins.These bets are bids on political futures contracts. Buying a contract drives its price – or the perceived probability of it happening – higher.This ecosystem spans far beyond the race for the White House. Other markets on Kalshi include the margin of victory in the Senate, which state will have the closest presidential election result and what the Federal Reserve will do with interest rates two days after the election.View image in fullscreenBut how reliable are the headline figures? “I think you should take them seriously,” said Grant Ferguson, political scientist at Texas Christian University. “The people who bet on these markets largely think they know more than the average person as to how things are going.”Leading platforms put Hillary Clinton ahead on election day in 2016 (she did win the popular vote if not the presidency), and Joe Biden in the lead in 2020, “but by less than the polling, in both cases”, said Ferguson. 2024 will be the biggest test of these predictions so far.“Broadly these markets are actually quite efficient – particularly they’re quite good at things that are 50:50, 60:40,” said Eric Zitzewitz, professor of economics at Dartmouth College. “In the sort of circumstance we’re in right now … I take that pretty seriously.”Provided a market is run “efficiently, or with good rules, the prices before the event happens will reflect what the smart people think, and not just random people”, suggested Gruca.The Iowa Electronic Markets allows participants to bet up to $500 on a given contract, and PredictIt, run out of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, has a $850 limit. But other platforms do not have such tight restrictions, and big bets may have moved the odds in Trump’s favor.Polymarket, which did not respond to requests for an interview, confirmed last week that one person – a French national – was behind four accounts which had placed bets on Trump worth around $28m, but insisted to the New York Times this was “based on personal views”, rather than an attempt to manipulate the market.“Without limits,” said Gruca, “you can have prices move away from what they should be.”If one person tries to tilt the odds toward their favored candidate, those betting would quickly back the other if their odds slipped too low, Ferguson suggested. “Does it probably happen? Yeah,” he said. “But I’m not real worried about it.”There is a small, but significant, difference in the question at the heart of election surveys, and election bets. While poll respondents are indicating which candidate they want to win, those gambling on the contest are saying who they think will. Veterans of the space like to say that polling participants focus on their heart, and bettors use their head.The betting markets “are asking the more relevant question”, argued Crane. “The polling information is in the markets. The people who are in the markets know what the polls are, but they have other information.”Regulators are not happy. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which fined Polymarket $1.4m in 2022 and ordered it to exclude US users as part of a settlement, has tried to shut down PredictIt and Kalshi.But Kalshi was recently cleared to take US bets on election outcomes, when a federal appeals court ruled that the CFTC had failed to show how the agency or public interest would be harmed by its event contracts.While the CFTC is appealing, the legal breakthrough appears to have set the stage for a further increase in bets placed on who will prevail in the presidential campaign – by both individual betters, and large institutions. Polymarket is also scrutinizing activity on its platform to ensure users are outside the US, amid reports of domestic usage.“The markets are only as smart as the people trading in them,” said Gruca. “If you are dumb as a rock and have a lot of money, you can move the markets in whatever direction you want by simply moving money.” More

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      Pete Rose, Baseball Star Who Earned Glory and Shame, Dies at 83

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      One of the sport’s greatest players, he set a record with 4,256 career hits. But his gambling led to a lifetime ban and kept him out of the Hall of Fame.Pete Rose, one of baseball’s greatest players and most confounding characters, who earned glory as the game’s hit king and shame as a gambler and dissembler, died on Monday. He was 83. His death was confirmed by the Cincinnati Reds, the team with which he spent most of his career. No cause was given.For millions of baseball fans, Rose will be known mainly for a number, 4,256, his total of hits, the most for any player in the history of the game. But he was a deeply compromised champion.Rose, of the Cincinnati Reds, on the field before his game against the New York Mets in 1978.Gary Gershoff/Getty ImagesFew sports figures have been the lightning rod for controversy and public opinion that he turned out to be, an athlete who maximized his gifts, earned a legion of fans with his competitive zeal and achieved wide celebrity and acclaim — only to fall from grace with astonishing indignity.Had Shakespeare written about baseball, he might well have seized on the case of Rose, whose ascent to the rarefied heights of sport was accompanied by the undisguised hubris that undermined him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Should Betting on Elections Be Legal?

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      Election wagers have long been banned in the United States. But for a brief period on Thursday, a regulated prediction market was permitted to offer them to Americans.As pundits were sharing sometimes wildly different takes on how Kamala Harris and Donald Trump performed in Tuesday’s presidential debate, traders were putting money on which candidate would win the election. Those bets also told a story about the debate: On both PredictIt and Polymarket, two so-called prediction markets, the odds were swinging toward Harris.Screenshots of the markets were seemingly everywhere — across social media, embedded in news articles, and cited by television anchors.You’ll be hearing more about them. Platforms that facilitate wagers on politics have largely operated offshore because they were prohibited in the United States. But on Thursday, a company called Kalshi was briefly allowed to take bets from Americans on November’s elections.Within hours of a U.S. District Court giving Kalshi the green light to offer election contracts — which regulators had tried to block — the company had posted what its C.E.O. called “the first trade made on regulated election markets in nearly a century.”Shortly after that, the popular trading platform Interactive Brokers announced that it planned to allow similar wagers.A federal appeals court has since temporarily blocked the bets. But the U.S. District Court decision has essentially opened the door for legal gambling on politics.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mark Cuban backs Biden. Why was he so keen to sell the Mavs to Trump megadonors?

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      In another era it might have been hailed as a laudable example of bipartisan bridge-building – a Republican megadonor partnering with a staunchly anti-Donald Trump entrepreneur.But in today’s politically polarised environment it looks odd, or even hypocritical: Mark Cuban selling the Dallas Mavericks, who are currently flying high in the NBA playoffs, to Miriam Adelson, perhaps the Trumpiest billionaire of them all.At the end of last year, Cuban, who has called Trump a “snake oil salesperson” and pledged to vote for Joe Biden over Trump even if Biden were on his deathbed, offloaded a majority stake in the NBA team for a reported $3.5bn to the Adelson and Dumont families, controllers of the Las Vegas Sands casino company.Adelson is the widow of Sheldon Adelson, a gambling tycoon and munificent patron of right-wing causes who died in 2021. He was the largest donor to the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, giving $25m. He added $5m for the inauguration festivities, a record such individual contribution.The Adelsons spent over $91m in support of Trump’s failed re-election effort in 2020, Politico tallied, as part of a long-term half-a-billion dollar spending spree on Republican causes. Miriam Adelson recently dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Politico reported in March. In 2018 Trump awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the US’s highest civilian honour, alongside posthumous decorations for Babe Ruth, Elvis Presley and the conservative supreme court justice Antonin Scalia.Why would Cuban unite with a family that has arguably done more than any other in the donor class to advance the interests of a man he feels is loathsome and bad for America? Well, like any successful entrepreneur, Cuban is flexible.Cuban and Trump have a long history of mutual antipathy dating back to their days as blustery, duelling reality TV stars with a blunt social media presence; Trump has called Cuban “dopey”, among other insults. Their rivalry predictably intensified when Cuban mulled launching his own White House bid. But Cuban is no inveterate Democrat: in 2017 he said he would run as a “Republican before Democrat and most likely Independent” and earlier said that the nascent Trump campaign was “probably the best thing to happen to politics in a long time” because of the real estate mogul’s “honest answers”.Cuban has long been friendly with the Adelsons, who saluted him in 2017 with an In Pursuit of Excellence Award at a gala in Las Vegas. And they offered him a tempting deal. The sale price represents a vast profit for Cuban, who bought the Mavericks in 2000 for $285m. He also retains considerable influence in the day-to-day running of the franchise, preserving a 27% stake and control of basketball operations and acting as alternate governor.More than anything, the sale is a big bet on the future direction of Texas politics and puts the Mavericks at the vanguard of the latest money-making strategies embraced by major league franchises as they diversify income streams at the intersection of sports, real estate and gambling.Another politically-fungible owner, Steve Cohen of the New York Mets, gave $1m to the Trump inauguration fund. More recently he has been hanging out with and donating to the campaign of New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, as he seeks approval for a massive entertainment district anchored by a casino next to the Mets’ ballpark.New York is one of 38 states where sports betting is legal, following a 2018 US supreme court decision that struck down a federal ban. Among the exceptions: Texas. Should that change the Adelsons and Cuban will be poised to take advantage, with the Mavericks handily situated in the fourth-biggest urban area in the country, in the nation’s second-most populous state.The company that built the Venetian resort in Las Vegas appears to envision something similarly grandiose for Dallas. “If you look at destination resorts and casinos, the casino part of it is tiny, relative to the whole bigger destination aspect of it. Could you imagine building the Venetian in Dallas, Texas? That would just change everything,” Cuban told the Associated Press.“The advantage is what can you build and where and you need to have somebody who’s really, really good at that. Patrick [Dumont, Miriam Adelson’s son-in-law and president of Las Vegas Sands] and Miriam, they’re the best in the world at what they do,” he added. “When you get a world-class partner who can come in and grow your revenue base and you’re not dependent on things that you were in the past, that’s a huge win.”View image in fullscreenThough there are no guarantees in the real-estate and casino sectors – as Trump could confirm – expansion should provide the Mavericks with new and daily sources of income, reducing reliance on ticket sales and media rights as player salaries soar while the market for regional TV rights is in turmoil.Casinos and sportsbooks are likely to become tempting additions to now-ubiquitous mixed-used development plans for shops, restaurants, hotels and apartments among team owners who view sports as a property play and seek to monetise land around their stadiums.“I think this is kind of the next step, opening the door for legalizing gambling in a state like Texas then being at the forefront – since you already own an NBA team in Texas – to develop and integrate that sports team with a casino, a resort,” says Stephen Shapiro, a professor in the Department of Sport and Entertainment Management at the University of South Carolina.“Some of the barriers between sport and gambling, between the sport leagues and teams and the sport gambling industry have come down, and that’s why you’re seeing these opportunities.”The St Louis Cardinals have explored adding a sportsbook to their Ballpark Village development next to Busch Stadium should Missouri legalise sports betting, according to the Columbia Missourian. Another MLB team, the Oakland Athletics, aim to move to Las Vegas and have partnered with the gaming company Bally’s to develop a site on the Strip that would house a ballpark and a casino resort. The Ilitch family, who run the Detroit Tigers and Detroit Red Wings, already own a casino-hotel in Detroit.Cuban told the Dallas Morning News he wants to build a new arena “in the middle of a resort and casino”. The team’s lease on its current home, the American Airlines Center, expires in 2031. That gives Cuban and Adelson a few years to persuade Texas lawmakers – and then Texas voters, who would need to approve a constitutional amendment – before negotiating for a new venue with civic leaders.Adelson is estimated by Forbes to have a net worth of over $30bn to Cuban’s $5.4bn. Amid a high-powered years-long lobbying effort, she has spent over $4m this year on a political action committee, Texas Sands PAC. In 2022 Adelson gave $1m to the successful re-election campaign of Greg Abbott, Texas’ Republican governor.Meanwhile, Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and ex-Republican presidential hopeful, has acted as a spokesman for an industry advocacy group, the Texas Sports Betting Alliance, whose partners include leading gambling firms and professional sports teams such as the Dallas Cowboys, Houston Rockets and Houston Astros. The Rockets are run by another Vegas casino-owning billionaire, Tilman Fertitta, whose interests include the Golden Nugget chain, while the Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, has tried to build a casino in Arkansas.Yet previous efforts to convince the Republican-dominated and increasingly ideologically extreme Texas legislature to legalise gambling have failed, and the state has lately run a budget surplus, meaning anti-wagering lawmakers are unlikely to shelve their opposition on the basis that legalised gaming is a valuable source of tax revenue.But the ongoing normalisation and growing popularity of gambling across the US puts pressure on Texas and the other holdouts to fall in line and lobbying efforts are sure to intensify ahead of the next state legislative session, which begins in January.This is where Cuban needs Adelson. Logically, a push led by a well-connected billionaire with real-estate and gambling expertise, impeccable right-wing bona fides and a history of largesse towards the Republican Party has a better chance of persuading sceptical conservatives than one spearheaded by the unconventional, Trump-averse, Biden-backing star of Shark Tank.“It’s a partnership,” Cuban told the AP. “They’re not basketball people. I’m not real estate people. That’s why I did it. I could have gotten more money from somebody else. I’ve known these guys for a long time. They’re great at the things I’m not good at.”Equally, since sports franchises are widely viewed not as mere businesses but as beloved community assets, linking with the Mavericks could prove uniquely useful for the casino tycoons.“I feel like having a sports team already provides credibility and legitimacy within the market that maybe the Adelsons wouldn’t have,” Shapiro says. “I certainly could see them being able to leverage the brand and the relationship that the brand already has with the community to open the doors for opportunity that maybe wouldn’t have existed otherwise.” More

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      Ohtani’s Former Interpreter Is Said to Be Negotiating a Guilty Plea

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      Ippei Mizuhara stands accused of covering his gambling debts by stealing millions of dollars from Shohei Ohtani’s bank account.Ippei Mizuhara, the former translator for Shohei Ohtani who was fired late last month amid allegations he stole millions of dollars from the baseball star’s bank account to cover debts that Mizuhara owed to an illegal bookmaker, is in negotiations to plead guilty to federal crimes in connection with the purported theft, according to three people briefed on the matter.The investigation, which began about three weeks ago after news of the alleged theft broke while Ohtani’s team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, was opening its season with two games in South Korea, is rapidly nearing a conclusion, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry is continuing.A guilty plea from Mizuhara before a federal judge — likely to include an admission of a range of facts related to any illegal conduct — could confirm the account that Ohtani gave to reporters two weeks ago, in which he said he had no knowledge of what happened to the money. Those briefed on the matter claim that prosecutors have uncovered evidence that Mizuhara may have stolen more money from Ohtani than the $4.5 million he was initially accused of pilfering, the people said. In particular, the authorities think they have evidence that Mizuhara was able to change the settings on Ohtani’s bank account so Ohtani would not receive alerts and confirmations about transactions, the three people said.Ohtani’s lawyers initially alerted the federal authorities about the alleged theft, and Ohtani pledged publicly to cooperate with the federal investigation and one being conducted by Major League Baseball. According to one of the people briefed on the investigation, the federal authorities interviewed Ohtani in recent weeks to learn more about his relationship with Mizuhara.By quickly pleading guilty, Mizuhara would increase his chances of receiving a more lenient sentence, as federal prosecutors and judges often look more favorably upon defendants who make the government’s job easier by expeditiously admitting their guilt.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sports Leagues Bet on Gambling. Now They’re Facing Its Risks.

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      A string of gambling situations involving athletes leaves leagues in a tough spot.Major League Baseball held its season openers this week under the shadow of a gambling scandal. Reports surfaced that the National Basketball Association is investigating a player over irregular bets. And college basketball fans await results from a review into unusual betting on a men’s basketball game.The incidents have highlighted a trade-off that professional sports leagues made when they embraced gambling.Leagues have signed lucrative marketing deals with betting apps like FanDuel and DraftKings and use gambling to amp up fan engagement. But this new source of revenue has also opened the doors to a fundamental danger: that an explosion of sports betting could threaten the assumption of fairness at the core of athletic competitions.“The risk is that the game becomes like professional wrestling — which is rigged. And nobody bets on professional wrestling,” said Fay Vincent, the M.L.B. commissioner from 1989 to 1992. “And if baseball becomes professional entertainment the way wrestling is, it’s dead.”Leagues are unlikely to abandon gambling completely. But is there a way for them to protect their image as they profit from betting?Clubs can no longer blame gambling itself for scandals. When Pete Rose was barred from baseball in 1989 for betting on games, in one of the most famous gambling scandals in sports history, Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, Vincent’s predecessor, denounced gambling as corrosive. But after a 2018 Supreme Court decision paved the way for states to legalize betting, leagues are now working directly with sports books. The N.B.A. signed an estimated $25 million contract with MGM Resorts in 2018, and M.L.B. has an exclusive multiyear deal with FanDuel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shohei Ohtani Is Home and Focused on Baseball. Dodgers Fans Are Relieved.

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      Los Angeles finally got a close look at baseball’s megastar on Thursday as a gambling situation involving his former interpreter took a back seat to opening day.The top deck of Dodger Stadium is far from the action but may have the best view in baseball. Straight ahead are the San Gabriel Mountains. During night games, as the sun goes down, the sky glows pink. Down below, the full choreography of the game is on display, offering a panoramic view shunned by the movie stars and moguls who fill the sections behind home plate.And on Thursday morning, fans heading to those cheap seats passed a new addition to the ballpark: an eight-foot stone lantern given as a gift to the Dodgers in the 1960s by a famous Japanese sports columnist, Sotaro Suzuki, who helped draw the Dodgers to Japan for a good-will tour in 1956, two years before the team left Brooklyn for Los Angeles.For Kimi Ego, a longtime Dodger fan, the lantern has a special meaning, and she cried when she saw it: Her father was a close friend of Suzuki’s, and for years, before her father died in 2000, he took care of the stone lantern, which was then tucked into a hillside beyond the outfield bleachers, and trimmed the plants and shrubs surrounding it.“Tears of joy,” said Ego, a retired schoolteacher who has been coming to Dodgers game since the 1960s. “My father worked so hard maintaining the garden.”The monument is a homage to the team’s past, and also its present.In December, the Dodgers signed the world’s biggest baseball star, the two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani, to the richest contract in sports history, $700 million over 10 years. For good measure, the team signed another Japanese superstar, the pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, for $325 million over a dozen years. It was the most lucrative contract ever for a pitcher.On Thursday, as Los Angeles got a glimpse of its newest megastar, Ohtani’s impact was apparent before he even stepped on the field: New advertisements for Asian companies — an airline, a retail chain, yogurt drinks, skin care products — dotted the stadium. One local newscaster — in pregame coverage that began when most Angelenos were having breakfast, or stuck in traffic — compared Ohtani to Taylor Swift, saying that the Dodgers were baseball’s version of the Eras Tour. And a new addition to the stadium menu is a Japanese fried octopus fritter being promoted as one of Ohtani’s favorite dishes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift, Usher and a Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl Win in Las Vegas

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      Take America’s biggest game, add Taylor Swift and Usher, and put it all in Las Vegas, and Kansas City’s repeat as Super Bowl champion makes perfect sense.At some point, the Super Bowl stopped being entirely about football and evolved — or is it devolved — into a corporate carnival with lavish parties, halftime extravaganzas and commercials whose budgets seemed to rival a blockbuster movie.The apex of that transformation arrived with the N.F.L. planting this year’s event in Las Vegas, where the prevailing ethos might well be that a bellyful of anything is barely enough.But Super Bowl LVIII, with its attendant flash — and America’s favorite football fan, Taylor Swift, chugging a beer in a private box — demonstrated on Sunday night how sports stands apart from other types of entertainment.If the Kansas City Chiefs’ 25-22 overtime victory over the San Francisco 49ers was as tightly scripted as Usher’s elaborate choreography, the teams might have been pelted with rotten tomatoes or booed off the stage by halftime. It was mostly an evening of stumbles and bumbles: two fumbles, an interception, a muffed punt, a blocked extra point, a raft of untimely penalties — and for the 49ers enough regrets to last a lifetime.But all the mistakes and all those field goals — seven in all — would eventually be subsumed by the tension that unfolded in the fourth quarter and continued on into overtime of what became the longest game in Super Bowl history.Kansas City receiver Mecole Hardman caught the winning touchdown with three seconds left in the first overtime period.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Out of control’: Congresswoman sounds alarm over ‘unchecked’ gambling boom

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      America’s “unchecked” gambling boom risks exacerbating a nationwide mental health crisis, according to a congresswoman pushing for federal government support. The industry is pushing back hard.Operators must be held “accountable” for rising addiction rates, Andrea Salinas told the Guardian, after lawmakers proposed legislation that – if approved – would provide tens of millions of dollars in funding to help those affected.Sports betting is “proliferating like never before”, she said. “Rather than try to put the genie back in the bottle, let’s make sure we have the research and the treatment before it does become out of control.”The supreme court struck down a decades-old law in 2018 that had banned sports betting across much of the nation. The market is now legal in 38 states, attracting billions of dollars in wagers every month. Its rapid growth has coincided with a spike in addiction cases, according to clinicians, counsellors and campaigners.Diverting taxes already raised on sports wagers towards compulsive gambling support services would make “the entire industry healthier”, said Salinas, a Democrat representing Oregon’s sixth district. “I, as much as anybody, enjoy the recreation of gambling, in a fun casino. When done, like everything, in moderation, it’s fun, right?“But the access to these applications for sports betting has taken us in a direction that is harmful. Nearly 7 million Americans are struggling with the gambling addiction.”The Grit (Gambling addiction Recovery, Investment and Treatment) Act, proposed this month by Salinas and the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, is pinned around the federal sports excise tax. Receipts from the tax, which dates back to the early 1950s, have surged in recent years as the legal market expanded; it raised an estimated $271m last year.Under the proposed law, half of the revenues raised by the tax would be set aside for gambling addiction treatment, prevention and research. Taxes would not rise and the funds for treatment would go through an existing federal grant program.Researchers have identified close links between gambling addiction and other mental health disorders, like alcoholism. “If we let this go unchecked, this could be one of the sources” of an escalating mental health crisis, said Salinas. “We would be ignoring an upstream problem that we could start to address.”Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, which has been pushing for the Grit Act, has said it would “significantly bolster” addiction prevention, research and treatment resources.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut gambling operators are against the proposal. “Our industry’s growth means that there’s never been more attention paid to, or money invested in, problem gambling support than there is today,” Chris Cylke, senior vice-president at the American Gaming Association, said.Suggesting the Grit Act would “give criminals a leg up”, Cylke argued that the excise tax – upon which it is based – should be repealed. “Today, this antiquated policy puts the nascent legal market at a competitive disadvantage against offshore illegal operators, who do not pay any taxes and prey on vulnerable customers.”Advocates for greater compulsive gambling support criticised the “predictable, shortsighted objection” of operators. “The gambling sector can no longer reasonably expect to evade external responsibility,” said Derek Webb, founder of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling. “The Grit Act is our best chance to save lots of lives by doing what’s responsible, fair and inevitable.”But Salinas is braced for a long campaign to pass the Grit Act. Politicians in Washington and beyond “aren’t really paying attention” to gambling addiction rates, she said. Congress is “not doing a lot of substantive work right now. So, yeah, it could take a while.” More