twelve years in the military, and I never wanted to get myself into any
trouble, so I never had a bookie and didn’t do anything illegal. It was
always in Vegas.” He found Hoboken Terminal and its solid cell ser-
vice, where he can fulfill a longtime wish without fear of repercussion.
For others, the convenience is a liability. Earlier, I met Chris,
twenty-eight, a SoundCloud rapper who goes by “Cristo from the
Bronx.” He’d figured out the way to save the return fare all on his
own, along with the cell-reception issue at the Jersey City station.
Now he can come place bets whenever he feels like it, and he feels
like it most strongly when his previous bets “are going left.” I ask
him to explain. If he’s back home, watching a game unfold, and he
knows he’s losing, “I’m like, Oh, hell no, I’m not trying to lose four
hundred bucks today. Let me go back and bet it back.”
Shortly after, I meet Dylan, twenty-nine, a political-campaign
operative from upstate New York who shares Chris’s instinct. He’d
already made the trip to New Jersey earlier in the summer to place
his NFL bets for the season, but after A. J. Green, wide receiver for
the Cincinnati Bengals, sustained an injury in training camp, Dylan
tells me, “I ended up back out here on a Sunday morning to change
all my bets.” He admits, “I definitely bet more now than before.”
With the betting scene now legal and regulated, the range of bets
has expanded. I approach a guy in a neon safety vest who’s furiously
typing away at his phone. Ahmed, thirty-seven, from Peekskill, New
York, is on his lunch break and looking to make it big on a parlay, the
Hail Mary pass of sports bets, in which the gambler picks the win-
ners of several games. The odds are much lower, so the payouts are
much higher, which is why local bookies don’t like taking parlays.
“They don’t want to take that risk,” Ahmed says. “The biggest par-
lay you could do with a bookie was four teams. The biggest parlay
you can do with these guys is fifteen.” Ahmed has a magic touch for
them. “I had a nine-team parlay last year for twelve grand. Two weeks
after that, I had an eight-team parlay for ten grand.” Lunch hour’s
nearly over, so he excuses himself to enter his bets, then he’s gone.
76
DraftKings, New Jersey’s
second-most-popular mobile-betting app,
holds a party in Hoboken...F irst
S u n d ay
S un day, Septemb er 8