ClassicSounds.pl

Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 law that illegal sports gambling in most states (Nevada appreciated an exception). When that happened, the floodgates for legalized sports betting across the country opened --Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to allow betting on the outcome of a game, but they're not going to be the last. Texas-based documentary filmmaker and UT grad Bradley Jackson, who produced the surprise hit Dealt, about a blind San Antonio card shark, spent much of the past six months immersed in the world of sports betting due to their follow-up to that undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt director Luke Korem and fellow manufacturer Russell Wayne Groves (in addition to showrunner David Check), Jackson produced the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, that tracked the winners and winners of the 2018-19 NFL season--not the ones on the area, but the ones in the match, wagering a small fortune on the results of the matches being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson in advance of the series' final episode to chat about sports gambling, daily fantasy, and what the odds are that Texas allows fans to put a bet on game day in the upcoming few years. Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this project? Bradley Jackson: Just how large a business this is. I meanyou see the numbers and they are just astronomical. From the opening paragraph of this show, when we're showing these individuals gambling on the Super Bowl, which only on the Super Bowl alone, I think that it's like six billion bucks. But the caveat to that stat is that just 3 percent of that is legal wagering. Meaning 97 percent of all action wagered on the Super Bowl is prohibited. That amount from Super Bowl weekend was among the very first stats that I watched when we were getting into this undertaking, and it blew my mind. And then you look at the real numbers of just how much is really bet in America, and it has billions and billions of dollars--so much of this is prohibited wagering. So it feels like it's one of these things everyone is doing, but nobody really talks about. Texas Monthly: Did working on this project inspire you to put any bets? Bradley Jackson: Yeah. I had never done it, and I've spent six months embedded in this world, I have made a couple--low-stakes things, just to find that sense of what it is like. And it is fun, particularly when you're wagering a sensible level --but the feelings are still there. I'm a really emotional person, so when I dropped my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU bet, I felt awful for approximately one hour. Because of course I wager on UT, therefore when OU won, it hurt not just because my team dropped --it hurt more that I dropped fifty bucks. Texas Monthly: Do you have a sense of when putting a bet like that in Texas could be lawful? Bradley Jackson: We live in a country that is obsessed with sports--football especially. And nothing draws people's attention over betting on football, particularly the NFL. I think eventually Texas can perform some kind of sports gambling. I don't know how long it's likely to take. I think that they'll do it in mobile, because I don't think we'll see casinos in Texas, actually. I have been hearing that perhaps Buffalo Wild Wings will do some sort of pseudo sports betting stuff, so you could go to Buffalo Wild Wings and put in your phone and place a fifty-dollar wager on the Astros, and I think that would be legal one day. Probably sometime in the next five years. Texas Monthly: With this business being enormous, illegal, and so largely untaxed, to what extent do you believe gaming as a source of untapped revenue for your country plays into things? Bradley Jackson: That will play hugely into it. From a financial point of view, it's huge. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, was sort of on the forefront of the. He wrote an editorial for the New York Times about four years ago where he said we need to take sports gambling out of the shadows and then bring it into the light. That way you may tax it, which is obviously great for the countries, but you may also make sure it's done above board. When the Texas legislature sniff really how much money can be taxed, it's a no-brainer. Texas Monthly: The illegal bookie that you talk to in the documentary says that legalization doesn't impact his organization. What was that like for you to learn? Bradley Jackson: It blew me off. When we had been sketching out the figures we wanted to try and identify to put in the show, an illegal bookie was unquestionably on very top of our listing. Our assumption was that this will hurt them. We believed we were going to obtain some New Jersey illegal bookie whose bottom line was likely to be really hurt by all of this. When we met this guy, it was the exact opposite. He was just like,"I'm not sweating at all." It shocked me. He'd state that he thinks that if every state eventually goes, if that becomes 100% legal in every nation, he then think that he might be impacted. But he operates out of the Tri-State area, and right now it is only legal in New Jersey, and just in four or five spots. He breaks it down quite well in the end of our very first incident, where he just says,"It is convenient and it's credit--the two C's will never go away." Having an illegal bookie, you are able to lose fifty thousand dollars on credit, and that may really negatively impact your life. Sometime you can still harm yourself gambling legally, but you can't bet on credit through lawful channels. If casinos begin letting you wager on charge, then I think his bottom line could get hurt. The more it is part of this national dialog, the more money he makes, as people are like,"Oh, it's right?" Texas Monthly: Is daily dream among those gateways to sports gambling? It seems like it is just a small variation on traditional gaming. Bradley Jackson: In Episode 3, we follow one of the top five daily fantasy players in the us. He's a 26-year-old child. He makes millions of dollars doing that. He told me that the most he has ever made was $1.5 million in one week. Among our hypotheses for the show was that the pervasiveness of daily fantasy was a gateway into the leagues letting legalized gambling to actually happen. For many years, you saw the NFL state that sports gambling is the worst thing and they'd never let it. And then about four years ago daily fantasy like DraftKings and FanDuel began, and they purchased, I think, 30,000 ad spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you're watching the NFL, every other commercial was DraftKings or even FanDuel. And a great deal of people were like,"Wait a minute, you guys say that you think sports betting is the worst thing ever. How is this not gaming?" It's gambling. We really join the CEO of DraftKings, and two of the high-up individuals at FanDuel, and I think that it's B.S., however they state daily dream isn't gambling, it is a game of skill. However, I don't think that is true. Texas Monthly: How people who make money do it tends to involve conducting huge numbers of teams to win against the odds, rather than picking the guys they think have the best matchups this week. Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our everyday dream player over a weekend of making his bets, and he doesn't do well that weekend. And he spoke about how what he's doing is a good deal of skill, but each week there are just two or three plays which are entirely arbitrary, and they either make his week or ruin his week, which is 100 percent luck. That really is an element of gaming, as you're putting something of monetary value up with an unknown result, and you have no control on how that's awarded. We watch him literally lose sixty million dollars on a three-yard run by Ezekiel Elliott. It is the Cowboys-Eagles, and he says,"All I need is for the Cowboys to perform well, but minus Ezekiel Elliott producing any gains, and then you visit Zeke get, for example, a four-yard pass and he's like,"If one more of those happens, then I am screwed." And then there's this tiny two-yard pass from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,"I just dropped forty thousand dollars right there." And you observe $60,000 jump from an account. There is no way that is not gaming. Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has contended that daily dream is prohibited in Texas. Are there any cultural factors in the country that might make this more difficult to pass, or is something like that just a means of staking a claim to the cash involved? Bradley Jackson: It might just be the pessimist in me, but think in the end of the day, a lot of it just comes down to cash. An interesting case study is exactly what occurred in Nevada. In Nevada they left daily fantasy illegal, which is mad, because gambling is legal in Nevada. But they made it illegal since the daily fantasy leagues wouldn't pay the gambling tax. So it was like a reverse place, in which Nevada said,"Hey, this is betting, so pay the gambling taxes," and DraftKings and FanDuel were like,"It's not gambling." And so they didn't come to Nevada. I don't think Texas will necessarily take action right off the bat, but I think it in a few years, when they see just how much cash there is to be made, and there are clever ways to start it, it'll happen. Read more: