A devout Mormon journalist said he turned into a “degenerate gambler” after his bosses at The Atlantic magazine gave him $10,000 to wager on sports.
McKay Coppins, a politics reporter for the highbrow mag, was asked by his editors to prepare a first-person account on the pitfalls of sports betting.
He said his bishop reluctantly signed off on the assignment — which let him wager the full $10,000 on NFL, NBA and college sports with losses covered, while splitting any winnings 50-50 with the magazine.
“I promised the bishop that I would steer clear of slippery slopes,” wrote Coppins, a married suburban dad of four.
“’This will really just be a journalistic exercise,’ I assured him.”
Within weeks, the self-described non-gambler was staying up past midnight scrolling betting apps in bed, his face lit by flashing promos as his wife slept beside him.
He juggled multiple games at once — one on his phone, four on TV — and listened to gambling podcasts in the shower as the experiment consumed his daily routine.
“The dopamine system in my brain had been hijacked,” Coppins wrote.
“I needed money on the game to care about it.”
The scribe reported that he quickly expanded beyond a single platform, starting with DraftKings before downloading multiple sportsbook apps as his betting intensified.
Following advice to shop for better odds, he added FanDuel and ESPN Bet to his rotation, bouncing between them to track lines and place wagers — often scrolling through all three late into the night as notifications and promotions kept pulling him back in.
“It was now common for my family to catch me furtively tapping in wagers,” Coppins wrote.
The habit quickly seeped into his home life. His kids began picking up betting jargon, with his 10-year-old asking, “Who are we betting on?” and his 7-year-old daughter learning the difference between a point spread and a moneyline.
At one point, his son caught him sneaking wagers in the pantry and blurted out: “Dad is hiding again!”
His wife, Annie, watched the shift in real time — from a novelty to something darker.
She accused him of being addicted after spotting him checking bets in church and grew frustrated as late-night games left him sleeping in while she handled the kids alone.
“I can’t wait for your gambling experiment to be over,” she told him.
But even Annie grew exhilarated when her spouse began wagering bets that netted him a profit.
Coppins reported that he fired off a series of wagers before kickoff, including a bet that the Eagles would beat the Cowboys by more than a touchdown, another that quarterback Jalen Hurts would throw for over 200 yards, and a risky “same-game parlay” that required both Hurts and running back Saquon Barkley to score touchdowns — a long-shot combination that would only pay out if every leg hit.
After informing his wife that he won $20, she “high-fived” him and “immediately began to fantasize about how we would spend my winnings for the season.”
“Could we replace our dying KitchenAid mixer? Remodel the kitchen pantry?” Coppins wrote.
“Like so many wives before her, she had looked upon my foray into sports gambling with a bemused air of exasperation; now she was seeing a potential upside.”
By the end of the experiment, Coppins had wagered nearly $11,000 across more than 100 bets — and was up just $156.
The losses eventually snowballed into something far more serious. In just under two weeks, Coppins blew through more than $2,500 as he chased bad bets with bigger wagers, abandoning his earlier discipline in a frantic bid to recover.
By the end of the season, the experiment had fully unraveled — leaving him down $9,891 and confronting the reality that what began as a controlled assignment had spiraled into a costly obsession.
After months of chasing losses and burning nearly $10,000, Coppins hit a breaking point — searching for a Virginia self-exclusion forum used by problem gamblers to ban themselves from betting.
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