Over the course of a dozen years, the gambler had progressed from video games simulating betting, to online roulette and blackjack, to a particularly volatile form of stock trading called options trading.

The Johns Hopkins University graduate seemed not to grasp the destructive nature of his habit. Like hundreds of thousands of other Marylanders, as casino and online gambling boomed, he felt almost imperceptibly pulled into betting, like a rip current carrying him out to sea. He was 14 when he made his first bet.

Seeking a gambler’s high, he made the worst — but perhaps most fortuitous — bet of his life, paying $150,000 from his Robin Hood account in 2024 for a disastrously timed option to invest in a fund called SPY tied to the short-term fortunes of the S&P 500. The market tanked, and

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