If you want to understand the sports gambling world – read this story about the multi-millions-of-dollars spent betting on Polish table tennis. In some gambling markets it is bigger than the EPL, FIFA, NFL, NHL or any of the major sports leagues. Why?

This is a massively important story.

Like many important stories it is not being widely covered by the mainstream media.

However, understand the story and you understand much about the world of sports gambling and, more importantly, the direction of western societies in general.

It is about Polish table tennis.

What!!!!!!?????

Is this false advertising? How can a story about Polish table tennis be vitally important to know about?

Because the bookmakers are supplying the betting equivalent of crack cocaine to the gambling market and few people are discussing it.

The story comes from a small investigative unit within the National Public Radio (NPR) in the US State of Colorado. They went through the annual revenue numbers for sports gambling in their state and discovered that the people of Colorado bet $345 million a year on Table Tennis. That is approximately $57.50 per person in the state per year bet on an obscure league. It was more money than the sports bettors of Colorado gamble legally on NCAA College sports, professional golf or European soccer.

The NPR journalist could not understand what was going on, so one of their producers phoned me. They were, mostly, concerned about the integrity of this particular Polish table tennis league.

My response? Who cares!

Who cares whether a bizarre little league thousands of miles away from Denver is fixed or the games are played honestly? The games are probably played honestly but what really matters is that the NPR journalists had just discovered a mother load of crack cocaine.

Human Automatic Greyhound Racing

Back in my day, I self-exiled myself from Oxford to write my doctoral thesis and first book in a small town in the UK. As a graduate student I did not have a lot of money, so I took a flat in a working class neighbourhood, found a corner of an amazing Syrian cafe and spent the next 11 months writing.

On breaks, I would stroll across to the betting shop to have a cup of tea. This was in the days when no alcoholic drinks were allowed and the inside of the shop was deliberately dingy. The off-putting decor was supposed to discourage the habitual gamblers – the addicts who would spend all their money and their families’ money on gambling.

It did not.

They would walk across the road to the pub. Drink a pint. Come back and bet on a live feed of automatic dog racing. The bookmakers had a software generated feed of animated greyhound races complete with an authentic sounding commentator. The “races” happened every twenty minutes and the betting addicts would place their pounds, pence and occasionally hundreds of pounds on the outcome of these randomly generated greyhound races. It is difficult to overstate the perpetual misery of these places with the constantly sad gambling addicts starting at a computerized dog race while it ate up their savings.

This weird little sports leagues is the modern-day, human equivalent of those computerized greyhound racing. It is a bizarre spectacle. The league goes on almost every day of the year, for hours a day. Two players hit the ball back and forth to each other. There are thousands of matches a month. Gamblers around the world bet on the games.

In the name of veracity (my load-star as a researcher!), I got up at 4:00 a.m. New York time to watch the games. There were three other people somewhere in the world watching with me and, presumably, betting on the games. I hope they did not bet too much – the standards were so bad that a decrepit chap like me may have been able to win a few points.

The Tail

Here are two rarely-discussed secrets of the sports gambling world.

First, most of the profits of most bookmakers come from the addicts. There are honourable exceptions among bookmakers who gather the majority of their revenue from family entertainment and general punters but many gambling companies still seek out the “whales”, “big rollers”, “friends” or as their traders often call them privately – “degenerates”.

In a report presented to the UK House of Lords a gambling charity claimed that 86% of the profits of mainstream, legal bookmakers came from 5% of their customers.

It is called “Chasing the Addict”. You can write/produce countless documentaries on how gambling companies and casinos do that – including sometimes providing these poor lonely souls with “friends”. One of the most insightful documentaries on the subject is by Louis Theroux (click on the link).

Here is the second well-kept secret of the sports gambling market: to addict your bettors you attract them with the big games – the NCAA March Madness Tournament, the English Premier League, the National Football League but you keep them with the tail.

For a bookmaker, the ideal state of their customer is when they are constantly chasing a dopamine high. You do not want them thinking or having a break to come down from their self-induced drug cycle. So you offer them a perpetual cycle of games to bet on – the tail.

The great international baseball star Shohei Ohtani had a translator who lost $16 million this way. He is one of America’s most famous sports gambling addicts. Allegedly, he was at the centre of a network of illegal bookmaker who, allegedly, left the players and sports officials alone but, allegedly, concentrated only on the translator.

Like millions of sports fans I have doubts about that official story but what is certain is that the translator constantly bet on sports. He was constantly chasing his losses. He was constantly in a dopamine cycle. The official story is that he never bet on the one sport he knew a lot about – baseball – but he did lose millions of dollars in bets on minor league women’s European soccer. This official story makes no sense until you know about “the tail”. The deliberate practice by bookmakers of every day offering bets on obscure sports.

The Casinofication of Our Society

Why does it matter that a bunch of addicted gamblers lose money on an obscure sports league?

 Because this is about the casinofication of our culture. Because it is sports gambling crack cocaine. Because this is what is empowering all those personal bankruptcies, mortgage failures, car repossessions and gambling related suicides.

The bookmakers have lobbied hard to be allowed to offer these 24/7 services. They claim that all the taxes that they pay will help society.

No, they will not.

The social price of this new form of addiction is not covered by our tax revenues. It will effect a massive cost on us.

There is an easy solution. The government regulators should do what they are supposed to do and regulate the industry and ban these kinds of offerings.

They will not – and the carnage will carry on.

The original NPR story is here: https://www.cpr.org/2026/09/08/table-tennis-ping-pong-colorado-online-sports-bets-wagering