Today is Final Four Weekend.
It's also the three year anniversary of the weekend I hit rock bottom.
I don't say that for sympathy. I say it because what happened three years ago is directly connected to what's about to happen this summer. And I think you deserve to know the full story.
On Friday, March 31st, 2023, I received a commission check from work. A deal I had spent nine months closing had finally paid out. $26,000 hit my direct deposit. The first thing I did was use a nice chunk of it, around $6,000, to pay off gambling debts I had been accumulating for months. I was in the grip of a crippling addiction, and I had convinced myself (the way a gambling addict often does) that I could gamble my way out of it. That the Final Four was the perfect opportunity to reverse my fortunes, reclaim my financial footing, and win it all back.
Instead, over the next 48 hours, I zeroed it all out.
I lost everything. Didn't win a single bet. Then I overextended every line of credit I had with my bookie. By Sunday afternoon I was alone in my apartment with no money left and no way out. I caught myself in my bathroom mirror and didn't recognize the person in the glass. I cried on my couch. Then I called Mollie (my girlfriend at the time) and came clean. It was time to face the music.
I self-excluded from FanDuel, DraftKings, and every other app I had been losing money on. I stopped watching sports. I stopped drinking. I started going to meetings. I even volunteered as a companion to elderly folks who had lost their wives or husbands and were looking for someone to talk to. I basically did the opposite of everything I used to do.
I also did a lot of walking around New York City thinking about when I would be ready to try and watch sports again. Every time I thought I could make it through a Knicks game without being triggered, I'd turn on the TV and get hit in the face with a FanDuel ad. It was on the jerseys. It was on the courts. It was on every panel, every broadcast, every halftime show. The sports experience was infested with gambling.
Three years later, I'm sad to report: it's only gotten worse.
Way worse.
The sportsbooks have found new entry points. The prediction markets; Kalshi & Polymarket, have reframed gambling as information, as finance, as something sophisticated. And so now the FanDuels and DraftKings of the world have followed them through the legal loophole, launching their own "prediction" products in states where traditional sports gambling was previously banned. They're not a gambling operation, they'll tell you. They're a prediction market. Right.
Here's a prediction; they're lying.
Meanwhile, you have LeBron James and Kevin Hart ribbing each other in a DraftKings commercial. You have logos on patches, names on arenas, integrations baked into broadcasts. The leagues themselves are so far in, so reliant on the sponsorship dollars, that they cannot break away. They are structurally dependent on an industry that is, I believe, hollowing out the thing that made sports worth watching in the first place.
And then there's this; "DK Replay", DraftKings newest product is a Black Mirror episode come to life via anonymized at-bat simulation. You don't know who the batter is. You don't know who the pitcher is. You're betting on balls and strikes in real time, on an AB being masked from you, and then at the end they reveal who it was. I don't know what to call that other than a body shaped slot machine wearing a baseball jersey. Who is playing this? Why??
Now before you go calling me names like "Negative Nicky" or "Nearly Winless Nick" (shoutout Harry Potter), let me get to the good stuff.
In the last 90 days, these first three months of 2026, we have had four sporting events that reminded me why I built RateGame. Four moments that, I think, revealed something important about where this is all headed.
I - The Winter Olympics Gold Medal GameUSA vs. Canada is the kind of game that doesn't need a backstory and yet it had one.
By now you've probably heard of the tragic deaths of Johnny Gaudreau aka "Johnny Hockey" and his brother Matty who were killed by a drunk driver in New Jersey in the fall of 2024. Johnny had been one of the most beloved players in the NHL. He was 31. He left behind a wife, Meredith, and two children: Noa, who was 3, and Johnny Jr., who was 2.
From the moment Team USA arrived in Milano Cortina, there was an extra jersey hanging in their locker room. No. 13.
When the final horn sounded after Jack Hughes iconic overtime goal, Matthew Tkachuk, Zach Werenski, and Auston Matthews carried Johnny's jersey onto the ice. Then Dylan Larkin and Werenski walked over to Meredith and brought Noa and Johnny Jr. out to join the team. Two-year-old Johnny Jr. in the middle of the Olympic ice, surrounded by gold medalists, wearing his father's number.
Meredith said afterward: "It's the classiest thing. They do all these really kind gestures and include our kids in everything, because I know that's exactly what John would want."
The Olympics have a strict zero tolerance gambling policy. No sports betting sponsors, no gambling commercials, nothing. So the coverage was just...get this...the game. The way it's supposed to be. NBC's Mike Tirico gave us a sign off for the ages and left the next generation of American Olympians inspired saying,
"So for all you young people out there...those dreams are formed now. Go chase them and go get them. Because our country loves sports and it brings us together unlike anything else."
And wouldn't you know it, Sports Fans on RateGame responded accordingly: the Gold Medal Game is now the highest rated game in the history of our app. The best game we have ever measured. Free Bird goddamnit.
II - The World Baseball Classic FinalVenezuela vs. Team USA. No gambling sponsorships. Twenty countries, pure national pride, and a 9th inning that I don't think anyone who watched will forget.
It was tied 2-2 heading into the top of the ninth. Javier Sanoja reached second on a stolen base. And then Eugenio Suárez, the 35 year old journeyman who has played 12 seasons in The Show and never quite gotten his moment stepped in against Garrett Whitlock and ripped a 3-2 pitch into the left-center-field gap. Double. Go ahead run scores. Venezuela leads, 3-2.
When the final out was recorded, Suárez fell to his knees in the middle of the field. Venezuela's first ever World Baseball Classic championship.
In his postgame interview with Ken Rosenthal, when asked what made the Venezuelan Team so special he was barely able to hold it together: "...we are family, we play with passion, with love!" His teammates were crying on the field. The raw emotion of what it meant not just to win, but to win for Venezuela was so overwhelming and so real that it cut through everything. The thought that the scene above could instead cut to commercial and have Jamie Foxx shilling Caesar's stupid sportsbook from a Lion's cage or some slop equivalent seems incomprehensible.
III - March MadnessThe NCAA Tournament does not take gambling sponsorships. I appreciate that more today than I ever did when I was in freefall. Through gritted teeth I will watch the confused quartet of Jennifer Garner, Samuel L Jackson, Charles Barkely, and Spike Lee cringe it up on whatever weirdness Capital One has planned for them.
For real this tournament has been breathtaking from start to finish. And on March 29th, it gave us Braylon Mullins.
The reaction videos from UConn fans across the country. The pure, unfiltered chaos of that moment. And then Cayden Boozer's postgame locker room interview: composed, shouldering the weight of that turnover with the kind of quiet accountability that a 19-year-old shouldn't have to carry, saying simply, "I let our team down." Somber. Controlled. One of the most emotionally mature postgame interviews I have ever seen from a college player.
IV - World Cup QualifiersAnd then this week.
I want to offer you a sneak preview of what's coming. Because in the last seven days, before any of us were quite paying attention, the final six countries qualified for the World Cup. And what happened in the streets of the world gives us plenty of reasons to be excited.
Like in DR Congo who qualified for the World Cup for the first time since 1974. That's fifty two years. The government immediately, and wisely, declared a national holiday.
Denied a visa, DR Congo superfan Lumumba Vea watched the playoff final in Kinshasa, in front of a giant screen set up in a city neighborhood - standing in his signature pose for the entire match. I am told that if a Kalshi or Polymarket employee sees this photo on the timeline their skin starts to burn the way a crucifix does to Vampires.
Bosnia and Herzegovina beat Italy on penalties. They qualified for just their second World Cup ever. On Tuesday night in Sarajevo, nearly 100,000 people came out to greet the players. An elderly man from Zenica told reporters that he had doubted he would live long enough to see this. Flares lit up the sky over the city. The streets ran with a kind of joy that doesn't have an English translation for it. But this photo below comes close.
And Iraq. Iraq qualified by beating Bolivia 2-1, their first World Cup since Mexico '86. Nearly 40 years. Baghdad erupted. Fireworks and music and people in the streets at dawn. The Prime Minister suspended official work for two days. The players donned Sombreros at the behest of their gracious Mexican hosts and danced in pure delight.
Three countries. Three completely different corners of the world. One shared feeling and not a single gambling ad in sight. Beautiful.
We are 70 days away from the biggest sporting event on the planet. It's the thing we have been working toward for the past two years, the moment I've had circled since we launched Version 1.0 in 38 days back in March of 2024.
And on the weekend that represents the worst 48 hours of my life, three years later, I get to sit here and write that we are ready for it.
I'm not going to pretend the path has been straight. It hasn't. There have been months where I questioned everything. A summer where I tried something (RIP, Sports in 60) that went nowhere and taught me a hard lesson about the difference between content and community. A gap between where I thought we'd be and where we actually are that I've had to make peace with more than once.
But we are here. And as I've said before "here" is a lot better than, well, not here.
So for every Sports Fan who has downloaded RateGame and rated a game instead of placing a bet, that means something to me. More than I can really articulate. I built this app in the year after I stopped gambling, and I built it because I wanted a way to get back what gambling nearly took from me; my love of the game.
And that is why we say it simply; Rate the games you love.
That's it. No spreads. No odds. No markets.
If that resonates with you, if you've ever felt like the version of sports you grew up loving has gotten harder to find, I'm asking you to bring one more person into this community before the World Cup starts.
One more fan who rates games instead of betting them.
We are absolutely underdogs right now.
But I like our chances.
Sincerely a Sports Fan,
Nick
nick@rategame.io
Sincerely a Sports Fan,
Nick
nick@rategame.io
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