The key is to establish sovereignty early on. The wins, the ones that count, will arrive to you by way of your triumphant individual choices. Autonomy is the long game. Petty cash, more and more and more of it, is the short one.

If you inoculate yourself against loss (and remember, loss is just another word for acquiescence) early enough, you will be successful, so be young. Be very young, teetering on the cusp of adulthood. Be young enough to have been born in the year that George W. Bush signed the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act into law. Hopefully, you’re so new to this that you don’t have to know about John Kennedy’s 1961 Federal Wire Act, which prohibited gambling over the phone and through wires, thrusting the responsibilities of wagering legislation into the open palms of secular state governments, ensuring one couldn’t gamble across state lines. For the sake of your success, I hope you were 12 years old when the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, doubling down on rights reserved by states to govern their own wager economies.

The more precisely you are able to isolate your specific choices into discrete, contextless actions, the easier it will become to bypass these incomprehensible governmental prohibitions. If you were sprouting soft tufts of body hair when Facebook incurred the largest-ever penalty imposed on any company by the government for violating consumer privacy, good for you. Less to worry about, because the data that’s been collected on you since before you were conceived allows you seamless access to information tailored just to you.

Learn expeditiously, please, that everything can be gamified: what to eat, who to talk to, how to talk to them. All of these social intricacies can be pared down into particulate equations that, if you follow the advice supplied to you by way of your internet, can yield impeccable results. Consume higher protein, receive higher testosterone, win higher-value women. Risks that normal people take are childish. You can hack it all.

The choice is, of course, yours. Don’t become subsumed by multimillion-dollar partnerships between your academic institution and Caesars Entertainment. Don’t fall prey to the DraftKings ads interspersed between innings, sandwiched between quarters, flashing quickly on the home screen between posts. Don’t let the FanDuel logo stretched across the LED screen in stadiums across the country interfere with your ability to succeed for yourself. 

Or do—it really does only take $20 down to win thousands.

You can get even more granular with your selection if you so choose: Fliff, or Stake. Robinhood. Roobet is great, too, because it allows you to bet on yourself. .01 cents at a time; bet that your avatar won’t be hit by a car on your in-app game. Tap the cash-in button before it’s too late. Five-dollar winnings while you fiddle with your phone on the bus to campus. Three dollars lost while your friends fight over the aux cord. I have 400 on this game, can you wait a couple of minutes before we go to get food? I have to see what my quarterback does. It’s on me if we win. Actually, fuck it, I’ll win either way. I like to spread out my assets. Fuck my life. Can I get you back in like fifteen minutes?

There are humps to get over, sure. Now that the federal government has entrusted betting policies into the purview of individual states, you might have to scramble your VPN to ensure your IP address is registered in an area that allows 18+ bets. Drive across the river and find $20 on the ground and put it in the slot machines at the gas station. Stay in your dorm and make it seem like you’re betting from Nevada. Small wins are up to you.

Is it not glorious that the states are the ones to decide, now, what you can do? Who you can play with? You don’t know how hard it was when PASPA was still constitutional; when the moralistic whims of national party lines were still the arbiter of your individual choice. When states get to choose, you get to win.

Also, distribute your risk so your shorts don’t feel enormous. Don’t fall prey to the inundation of statistics that prove emotional cues can be amplified by loss. It is of no issue to you, that in states where online betting is legal, intimate partner violence rises 10% when a home team has lost.This is of no issue to you because you don’t have a home team and your bets are small. Crimes of passion, punches to the throat on a Sunday morning—these are statistics that can be localized to time and place. Who wants to put in the effort to understand the negative behavioral effects of adolescents betting across days of the week and paychecks, across imaginary state lines, and into the hours of the late afternoon? Crime stats can’t rise because of you, your scrumptious, untraceable microwagers. Whatever issues you may have can only be proved anecdotally, anyway.

You can’t even comprehend how free you are now. The government, your state, another state, the internet, has allowed you the liberty to choose your own way. Go on, take it now. You can’t lose when you have the choice. Go. Choose. Win.

Photographed by Christiaan van Heijst

Written by Annie Bush