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Imagine a street one-on-one basketball game between two heated rivals. Each player bets $500 that he will win. The money adds to the fun of the game, since the winner not only takes "bragging rights," but a significant amount of money as well. Both players play harder because each now has an even stronger motivation to win. Is this wrong?

A professional athlete who bets against himself can throw the match just to win the money, and these kinds of bets should always be flagged and the player should be banned. However, there is no way to boost performance past the athlete's peak, so an athlete that bets for his team is just expressing his confidence and adding to his motivation to win. The betting gives the player no unfair advantage over the other player or team, nor does the athlete's skill in the sport give him an edge in the bet. And if Tiger Woods wants to put some money on Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, there's no reason why he shouldn't be able to.

There are many people who oppose gambling on sports for many different reasons, some of which I agree with. This debate, however, isn't about whether gambling in general is right. It is clear that allowing anyone an unfair advantage in a bet is wrong, as is an unfair advantage in the sport. These advantages are usually a result of someone having special, internal information that other people do not, and it is assumed that the players in the sport have some kind of extra information. However, the only way this could give the player an advantage is if the player knew he had a handicap and was likely to lose the game and thus bet against himself. Otherwise, the only extra information the player would have is his own confidence in his training and practice, which would translate into a bet for himself. As long as no one has an unfair advantage, I don't see the problem with a professional athlete gambling on sports, and the only case in which this causes an unfair advantage is when the athlete bets against himself; in any other case, the bet does not affect the game and should be allowed. If putting money on a game adds motivation for the athlete to succeed, I think betting on games should even be encouraged. I think professional athletes in team sports should be paid depending on performance rather than presence. In single-player games like tennis and golf, the player gets paid depending on his ranking in various tournaments. While there is no clear way to rank players in a team sport, athletes could be paid based on shot averages or other objective measures of performance.

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