Jontay Porter said he wagered more than $50 million at FanDuel over roughly 18 months, a figure that helps explain why his gambling case became one of the most startling in recent NBA history. The former player, who was banned from the league for life in April 2024, described a betting spiral that ranged from major NFL wagers to Russian ping-pong.
The details landed in a profile by Nick Berardini for The New Yorker, which put fresh scale on a scandal the NBA had already treated as a line-crossing offense. Porter said his betting began with day-trading and online casinos while he was with the Memphis Hustle, then escalated into a $125,000 bet on the Chiefs against the Ravens in Week 2 of the 2021 NFL season. Over a four-day span that included that game, he said he placed 144 wagers totaling $1.2 million.
Porter said the numbers kept climbing from there. He said he took out a $500,000 loan on a house he owned in Memphis and lost it gambling, then later sold the house and turned to Russian ping-pong, where he said he was up more than $1 million before the run ended. He also said a FanDuel VIP host named Frank Cardenas gave him bonus bets over a five-day span that left him down more than $400,000 by the end.
What stands out is not just the size of the bets but the gap between Porter’s memory and the record he now describes. He said he did not remember placing 144 wagers over those four days, even as he talked about being pulled deeper into the rush of winning and losing. In his telling, he would delete the app, suspend his account, then return the next morning angry and looking for revenge.
That account matters because it shows how Porter’s gambling debts did not stay on the margins of his career. He has said those debts with bookies were part of why he rigged his own performance when he got another shot at the NBA with the Raptors in 2024, and the league’s lifetime ban followed in April 2024 once it uncovered his betting activity. Porter’s story now sits at the center of a broader post-PASPA era in which the scale, speed and brazenness of sports betting can reach far beyond the odds screen.
Porter has described addiction not as a moment of recklessness but as the pursuit of the brief high between a bet and its result, the instant when uncertainty feels almost like relief. That is why the most revealing part of his account is not the $50 million figure alone, but the way he says he kept chasing the next jolt even as the losses stacked up and the league moved in to end his career.
