Brent doesn't have the same luck as most sports gamblers. He's the first to admit it.
I've been blessed
you could say said Brent, who didn't want to use his last name. Not a lot of people win doing this.
Brent, a junior at Ohio University, started out small, like most do when they place their first bet. A lot of his friends had been doing it for a while, so Brent figured he'd try it out, throwing down $20 each on a couple of college basketball games.
As his income grew from this new, profitable hobby, $20 a game soon turned into $50, and $50 soon became $100 and more. His income has continued to grow as well. On a good night, he makes $400 to $500.
What makes Brent different from other sports gamblers is that he knows the odds are against him, yet he continues to succeed.
It's pretty much set up so the house always wins Brent said. The house wins 75 percent of the time.
Like Brent, many college students gamble on sports games. The National Collegiate Athletic Association reports that one out of every three college males bet regularly on college sports. Fueled by the Internet and combated by legislation, this practice leads some students to debt and addiction.
High stakes
Christian Berlovan, a Cleveland area resident, knows exactly what happened to the $15,000 he's lost from gambling on sports.
Berlovan, 26, is still trying to recover from one year of excessive sports gambling that not only put a hurt on his bank account, but also his academic career.
Seven years ago, Berlovan received a scholarship from Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. He had to maintain good grades if he wanted to keep that scholarship, but it became very difficult because he had other things on his mind.
If you look at all my college notebooks
you'll see they were just filled with point spreads
Berlovan said. I wasn't taking any notes.
Unlike Brent, Berlovan bet big from the start. To generate a large spending pool, he would withdraw the maximum balance from his two credit cards, giving him $3,000 to play with. Because of his early success, Berlovan was able to pay his credit card bills in full and on time, which led to more credit card offers with higher limits.
This spelled trouble for Berlovan, especially when he found himself $5,000 in the hole after a series of bad bets. Attempting to find a way to break even, Berlovan dumped another $5,000 of loaned money into a fund that he used to make bets with an expert gambler. This introduced him to the uglier side of sports gambling.
After he made $2,000 through pooling money with picks made by this expert
Berlovan was ready to call it quits and cut his losses. The expert wouldn't let it be that easy.
I'll never forget that call
Berlovan said. He told me 'don't bite the hand that feeds you.' I thought he was going to kill me or something.
So instead of pulling out, Berlovan was convinced to let the rest of his money ride on one football game. He lost. Again. He had to drop out of school because he was now $10,000 in the hole.
It was terrible
Berlovan said. My credit was ruined at 19. I couldn't even get department store credit cards.
Cashing the chips
Stories like Berlovan's are what the NCAA thinks of when it voices its disapproval against sports gambling.
If the NCAA had its way, these males would not have the opportunity to bet on their own school. In 2000, the association formed a committee to try to make a law that would ban all legal gambling on college sports. It has yet to happen.
But what has made it much simpler for students to place a bet is the emergence of off-shore gambling sites on the Internet. It is illegal in the United States to gamble online, so most of these sites use their non-U.S. location as a loophole to permit American citizens to gamble.
These sites took a hit last July when the House passed legislation that would force banks and credit card companies to cut off payments to the estimated 2,300 gambling sites located outside of U.S. jurisdiction.
This has made the sites much more difficult to use, Berlovan said.
It was too easy when I started
he said. The only thing you can use on these sites now is a credit card or you can wire money
which is just a pain.
But no matter what the NCAA encourages or what Congress legislates, stopping an addiction can only be done by the person himself.
Berlovan, who after four years off from sports gambling recently started up again, even after taking a few Gamblers' Anonymous courses, can attest to that.
Even though I said I'd stop
I knew I wouldn't
