The “woosh” of a dildo flying past your face. Tribalistic chants. Men making bets on your bodily functions.
This isn’t a cult—this is a day in the life of a modern-day WNBA player.
That last indignity on the list? It’s a sports betting strategy that’s been getting increasing play over the course of this WNBA season, which is wrapping up as the Las Vegas Aces and Phoenix Mercury face off in the finals. Dozens of dedicated gamblers online are making bets on players’ potential performance based on their “predictions” (or, rather, assumptions) about their menstrual cycles. Some actually call it “blood money,” because … of course they do.
One prominent figure making and predicting these wagers, who goes by FadeMeBets online, has garnered thousands of likes and shares on Instagram for his menstrual cycle betting strategy. He claims he’s been correct on 11 out of 16 of his period-related predictions, with about 68.75 percent accuracy. “What's kind of good, but also kind of bad, is it brings more people to watch the WNBA, but, on the downside of that, it's usually just all gamblers,” says FadeMeBets, who declined to be named, citing privacy concerns.
This WNBA season has been a record-breaker—more fans in the stands, more eyes on the screen, more viral moments. The league announced that attendance passed a historic 2.5 million earlier this summer. Meanwhile, high-profile players like Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers, and Caitlin Clark have added a boost and become household names.
The newfound interest in the league has more men watching the sport than women, and the overwhelming rise of sports gambling means some of them are betting on the games—and the players’ periods—which experts warn isn’t just pseudoscientific, but sexist, too.
“Not every woman is the same. Yes, there's the traditional 28-day cycle, but everyone's is different, and it varies person to person, month by month,” says Amy West, a sports medicine physician. “Someone being able to predict that? Someone who's not very close to the menstruating person? It’s actually kind of silly.”
Methods to the Madness
FadeMeBets admits that predicting WNBA player performance based on menstrual cycle assumptions is more art than science. His typical menstrual cycle prediction videos all start with the vaguely menacing phrase: “We’ve got a victim, boys.” (By this, he says the victim is the betting line—the odds set out by sportsbooks that determine a person's payout—not the player herself.) He then shares predictions about whether a specific player is menstruating, ovulating, or in their late luteal phase, which occurs after ovulation and before the period comes. For instance, he said this summer of Clark: “She is on the end of her late luteal phase, meaning a decrease in cardio, decrease in strength, decrease in aerobic system, she’s going to be tired more often than in a normal game.”
FadeMeBets told viewers to “bet the under” on Clark that game, projecting that she’d score lower than the number predicted by oddsmakers on sports betting apps, and, in this case, Clark did.
He looks at two major metrics over time: “Field goal %”—which is essentially how efficient a shooter is—and “Plus/minus,” measuring a player's impact on a team when they’re on the court vs. when they’re off.
From there, FadeMeBets analyzes players’ metrics over their history in the WNBA and even in college. He tracks players’ stats over the course of a 24- to 38-day menstrual cycle, looking for dips and surges over the monthlong cycle. If someone is missing a lot of baskets at a certain time every month, he might assume they’re on their late luteal phase, citing a study that showed menstruating athletes self-reported worse performance during this time. He hasn’t asked any players directly about their cycles.
From X to Reddit to gambling forums, his videos and others are gaining a foothold online. The morning radio show The Bert Show called out this strategy earlier this season, with the host Bert Weiss calling the tactic “off-putting,” though, possibly, effective.
Influencer Colin Myers has also spoken online about using this method to make bets, though he used more concrete evidence—a video of Indiana Fever Player Lexie Hull saying she was on her period. Myers saw her video and told his group chat to “hammer the under” for her. On the podcast Stuff Island, comedian James McCann said he had met a gambler who used injury reports, including those of “soreness,” to estimate menstrual cycles.
As a researcher working on a study of how menstrual cycles impact college athletes’ injury rates, West says birth control and other factors would make it difficult for a random bystander to predict actual athletes’ menstrual cycles. Some menstruators use contraception to skip their periods altogether.
FadeMeBets says he has taken this into account and only makes predictions for players he sees a real pattern with. If he misses, he stops making predictions on the cycle of that player, he adds.
As for the ideas he has based his predictions on—that menstruators are less “strong” and “fast” during certain times of the month—West says this isn’t proven and that it isn’t true across the board.
Although the study FadeMeBets referenced found that menstruating athletes self-reported their performance was relatively worse during the early follicular and late luteal phases, studies overall haven’t shown that this is consistent for all athletes who menstruate.
“Some data actually shows that when women are menstruating, that low progesterone, low estrogen state may actually be a good, from a sports performance perspective,” West notes. But, again, “everyone’s so different.”
Sexist Tropes
Nadya Okamoto, founder of the gender-inclusive menstrual product company August and author of Period Power, says that this emerging menstrual cycle betting strategy is adding to the long-standing stigma that menstruators are “emotional” or less efficient on their periods.
Okamoto says this trend also may lead sports bettors who watch these videos to belittle folks on their periods in their own lives. The ol’ “Bruh, she’s on her period” trope is standing strong.
FadeMeBets, too, acknowledges this. “A lot of gamblers, they aren't the nicest people,” he says. I point to a comment he left on one of his own videos in May about the Chicago Sky’s Courtney Vandersloot, in which he claimed she’d be on her period. “I also made sure to play with her feelings and manipulate her on an alt account to mess with her emotions before game time 😊,” he wrote.
This, he admits, was not his finest moment. “I was just lying to see if I could get a little more … more engagement on that post. And I did. But I should definitely not have said that.”
When WIRED asks if he’s worried about pushing forward the idea that menstruators can’t perform as well on their periods, he says: “I might start making a bunch of disclaimers under my videos.”
WNBA players make pennies compared to their NBA counterparts—top athletes make almost $250,000 per year while the NBA pays 200 times that much. “One of the big issues in women's sports is pay equity, right?” Okamoto says. “If there's this narrative that 25 percent of the month, women are not gonna be competing at the same level, there are very dangerous repercussions to such a negative stigma."
