The Spirit of Ashokan Fandom is at Stake: Ashoka, Sports, and Betting

“I walked into the screening on the day of India-Pakistan in the Champions Trophy. I saw some of my friends - they were putting ten bucks each on the sixth ball being a dot and a wicket in the ninth over. When I saw them make five times the money, I knew it was over for me.”

Aditya*, a second-year at Ashoka and an avid sports fan, is one of many Ashokans who revel in the hobby that has swept campus over the last year - small stakes gambling. Aryan*, a fourth-year Economics major, tells me: “I have been betting for two years, maybe more. I think recently it has gone much more mainstream than it used to be. These days, almost everyone in RH-3 has used Stake or Dream11.”

“Stake” here refers to Stake.com, an online betting provider that has brought gambling and sports betting into the mainstream. While older betting providers like BetWay and Bet365 found commercial success, a certain stigma was attached to using them. Not so for Stake. Through a series of viral marketing campaigns on social media (especially X/Twitter) and high-profile sponsorships like Drake and the F1 team formerly known as Sauber, Stake has positioned itself closer to a pickleball court than a casino. It offers bets on not just football & cricket, but also on horse racing, CounterStrike 2, and national elections. At the time of writing, the platform is offering bets on the next Prime Ministers of the UK and Australia, the next winner of Eurovision, and the onset of World War III.

Stake is popular for a simple reason - it just works. Aditya says, “I tried getting into betting during the IPL last year, but the payment wasn’t going through, and I didn’t really want to figure out crypto. This time it was really smooth.” Like pickleball, Stake’s branding and appeal is uniquely suited to Ashokans, resulting in its newfound dominance in the Ashokan sports fan’s consciousness.

Many started like Aditya, watching their friends put ten rupees on Virat Kohli to hit a century or on their favourite football team to score. For many, it is a harmless way to make the experience of watching more fun by getting a little skin in the game. Big tournaments like the IPL are when the betting frenzy peaks, when many students get into the habit of watching the match every day, motivated by small bets on random things like dot balls. Betting platforms are well aware of this pipeline and actively encourage it. Many Ashokans discovered Stake through its promotional “Early Six” offer during last year’s IPL, where your bet pays out even if your team loses, as long as they hit a six in the first two overs.

Ashoka and India’s new acceptance of gambling is visible everywhere, not just on Stake. In the dark alleyways of massive WhatsApp group chats, Dream11 has quietly become a national addiction. On the backs of millions of Indians playing small bets regularly, Dream11 has become India’s first “fantasy sports” (a form of sports betting) unicorn. Its success has pulled in many Ashokans and inspired imitators such as the Ashoka Premier League’s fantasy competition. The Ashoka Cricket Super Sixes run their own informal daily IPL Dream11 sweepstake, one of many on-campus daily “pots”. 

Betting culture has so pervaded the campus, in fact, that this year’s APL has followed in the grand tradition of football leagues around the world and gotten a betting company to sponsor them. Nox, this year’s sponsor, is an early-stage startup which brands itself as “helping people commit to their personal goals by putting real money on the line”. As part of the pre-tournament events and in the general fabric of Ashokan sports, Nox will provide an easy way for “slap bets”, challenges, bounties, and other forms of dares to become digital bets among friends. Just as with Dream11, it is a way to make everyday life more interesting by staking small amounts of money.

All of these small stakes bets, taken together, are not so small. “In a normal semester week, I probably put somewhere between a thousand to ten thousand in bets. You only win or lose a small percentage of that, though”, says Aryan. Unlike many others, Aryan is a betting veteran who started before Stake became popular, using accounts with now-banned sites like Bet365. Although he started with small bets on football, he eventually moved on to riskier “parlay” (chained, multiple bets) betting and regular games of poker.

As much as they become normalized, it is difficult to forget that platforms like Dream11 and Stake are still, fundamentally, gambling. The rush and thrill of a vice like that is difficult to shake, and innocuously branded platforms serve only as a gateway drug to more “real” gambling like poker and casinos. Aditya says, “I would say until last semester it was all calm for me. During the Champions trophy is when betting really took off for me and the people around me, just a hundred bucks at a time. Then this semester we started off playing poker, just the five of us, once in a week or two. Now there’s probably a poker table every day of the week, four hours at a time, you sit down at midnight and you don’t get up until sunrise.”

For many betting Ashokans, there comes a time when they wake up and wonder whether they’re really in control. “It’s really easy to keep it going as a friendly, social thing until one day you see people betting on Hong-Kong under-19 women’s table tennis”, says Aditya. Aryan admits, “I think there was definitely a point in second year where gambling was a pretty big part of my life. I used to stay up all night betting on second division Polish football because there was nothing else on. Poker would happen pretty much every day, with five hundred rupee buy-ins when we had money and fifty rupees when we didn’t.” Both Aditya and Aryan report that they have now quit most forms of gambling, at least temporarily. With the introduction of Nox’s social gambling as a mandatory part of the APL’s festivities, which they will both be involved in, it remains to be seen whether they can avoid relapsing. 

The way someone approaches betting makes a big difference in how they experience it. Almost everyone who has had a journey with gambling recognizes very different attitudes to it. For some, it is purely about the thrill. They stay up betting for the same reason that someone stays up watching reels: the immediacy of the reward, the addictive experience, the experience of sharing something fun with your friends. The reason gambling is dangerous and addictive, of course, is equivalently the same as the reason reels and dangerous and addictive.

For others, betting can be an easy way to make a bit of money for the small luxuries. One student claims that he made more than a semester’s expenses by betting on Donald Trump in the recent American presidential elections. Many others feel that, by knowing more ball than the average bettor, or by spending more time learning betting patterns and gaining skill, they can beat the system.

For many more, betting is just a different avenue to fandom. Most Stake users are not degenerate gamblers watching random sports, but ordinary fans backing their favourite teams. “The best feeling is when I win a ton of money. The second best feeling is when all my friends bet one way and I bet the other, and I win. It shows that I know ball.” The fact is that betting is seen as cool, and winning is even cooler. A generation of boys raised on Harvey Specter’s “Don’t play the odds, play the man” and George Clooney’s ultra-cool gambling movies can hardly be faulted for falling for it.

But the big lie about Harvey Specter’s gambling is that he doesn’t lose. Even the best players lose half the time, and for everyone who earns their holiday budget or proves they know ball by winning, someone else loses big. Ashokans are no strangers to the stories of students on the verge of addiction losing massive sums on Stake or at poker tables. “A few weeks ago, my team was playing and I was really confident, so I put a big bet on them. We didn’t do well in the first innings, so the odds went up and I doubled down at half-time. There were a few side bets also. Of course, we lost. That was more than 2k gone.”, says Aditya. 

With higher stakes bets, losses are much higher. “Someone whom I sometimes play with once lost like a lakh in one night of poker”, says Aryan. “I know there are first-years who play with 10k buy-ins who lose 1 lakh, 1.5 lakh in one night”, says Aditya. The risk of addiction combined with the risk of losses makes for a dangerous habit that will only cause more grief as attitudes on campus and across the country change to accommodate today’s mainstream betting platforms.

The trend towards accepting gambling has been sharp in recent years. At one time, it used to be something restricted to pockets of friends playing among themselves. Today, it is part and parcel of the fan experience. IPL fans will have seen the ads for My11Circle, just one of the many Dream11 competitors trying to grab the growing betting market. With the IPL every year and big tournaments like the FIFA Club World Cup coming up, nobody would be surprised to see more and more casual fans on Stake.

At what cost does this shift come? ASPs and third-years will remember that screening culture on campus is not what it used to be. The hallowed weekend SEC screening, once a cornerstone of how Ashokans followed football, today happens only sporadically. When they do happen, the screams and groans that accompany every goal have shifted ever so slightly. The passion of watching your team score is now heightened or moderated by your accompanying bets. As more and more fans follow matches through their bets, the temptation rises to retreat to your room and watch in the company of only your immediate (also betting) friends. The loss, unfortunately, is of the community.

The new gambling phenomenon is anti-community in more ways than one. In all this talk about the rising popularity of betting and the mainstreaming of gambling, it is striking how absent women are from the conversation and Ashoka’s vibrant betting scene. In a university where almost 60% of undergraduates are women, I found that I was unable to speak to a single female Stake user. When asked why, Aryan noted, “Sports and gambling are both male-dominated fields. It’s natural that sports gambling would also be male-dominated.” 

The lack of representation is not just a reflection of broader societal perception but also a result of the culture that has developed around betting at Ashoka. Once a male-dominated space is established, it becomes difficult for women to break into it. As Aditya admits, “I know women who have expressed interest and might enjoy it, but have I actually played poker with a woman? Not yet. A big part of it is just that we all live on the same floor, most of us are of the same batch, play the same sports, so we'll go to RH-6 or RH-3 reading room to play, and you just tend to conflate the activities with these spaces.” 

Betting is clearly here to stay, not as a quirk of the Ashokan experience but as a part of life in modern society. As the stigma of gambling fades from our memories and more and more platforms like Stake pop up, it will unquestionably become as much a part of the fabric of fandom as half-time shows and xG analyses. What’s observable is the subtle shift towards a culture of gambling on sports inside our university. What’s undeniable is the devastating effect this culture has on mental health and bank balances. What remains to be seen, though, is the larger cultural effect that this trend will have on the carefully built sports-enthusiast community at Ashoka. 

P.S. Names with a * next to them are anonymized/changed names mentioned in this article, to protect the identity of the interviewees.