Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 law that prohibited sports gambling in the majority of states (Nevada appreciated an exception). When that occurred, the floodgates for legalized sports gambling across the nation opened up–Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to permit betting on the result of a match, but they are not likely to be the final.
Texas-based documentary filmmaker and UT graduate Bradley Jackson, who produced the surprise hit Dealt, about a blind San Antonio card shark, spent much of the previous six months immersed in the world of sports gambling due to their followup to this undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt director Luke Korem and fellow producer Russell Wayne Groves (in addition to showrunner David Check), Jackson produced the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, that monitored the winners and losers of the 2018-19 NFL season–not those on the area, but those at the casino, wagering a small fortune on the results of the matches being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson ahead of this series’ final episode to talk about sports gambling, daily dream, and what the odds are that Texas enables fans to place a wager on game day within the next few decades.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this job?
Bradley Jackson: How big of a company this is. I mean, you see the numbers and they’re just astronomical. In the opening sentence of the series, when we’re showing all these people gambling on the Super Bowl, which only on the Super Bowl alone, I think it’s like six billion dollars. But the caveat to this stat is that only 3% of that is legal wagering. That means 97 percent of all action wagered on the Super Bowl is prohibited. That number from Super Bowl weekend was among the first stats that I watched when we were getting into this project, and it blew my mind. Then you look at the real numbers of how much is really bet in America, and it’s billions and billions of dollars–so much of that is illegal wagering. So it feels like it is one of those things everybody is doing, but nobody really talks about.
Texas Monthly: Did working on this job inspire you to place any bets?
Bradley Jackson: Yeah. I had never done it, and now that I’ve spent six months embedded within this world, I have made a couple–low-stakes things, just to find that sense of what it is like. And it’s fun, particularly when you’re wagering a sensible level –but the emotions are still there. I’m a very mental person, so when I dropped my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU wager, I genuinely felt awful for about one hour. Because of course I wager on UT, so when OU won, it hurt not only because my team lost–it hurt even more that I lost fifty bucks.
Texas Monthly: Can you have a feeling of when placing a wager like that in Texas could be lawful?
Bradley JacksonWe live in a country that’s obsessed with sports–football especially. And nothing brings people’s attention over gambling on soccer, especially the NFL. I think eventually Texas can perform some kind of sports betting. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I believe that they’ll do it in mobile, since I don’t think we’ll see casinos in Texas, ever. I have been hearing that perhaps Buffalo Wild Wings will do some type of pseudo sports gambling stuff, so you could go to Buffalo Wild Wings and get on your telephone and set a fifty-dollar wager on the Astros, and I think that will be legal one day. Probably sometime in the next five years.
Texas Monthly: With this business being huge, illegal, and thus largely untaxed, to what extent do you think gambling as a source of untapped revenue for your state plays into matters?
Bradley Jackson: That will play hugely right into it. From a monetary perspective, it is huge. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, was kind of on the forefront of that. He wrote an editorial to the New York Times about four years ago where he said we need to take sports betting out of the shadows and bring it into the light. That way you may tax it, which is always great for the countries, but then you can also make sure it’s done above board. When the Texas legislature sniff how much money can be taxed, it’s a no-brainer.
Texas Monthly: The prohibited bookie that you talk to in the documentary states that legalization does not affect his business. What was that like for you to learn?
Bradley Jackson: It blew me away. When we were sketching out the figures we wanted to try and identify to put in the series, an illegal bookie was unquestionably at the top of our list. Our premise was that this will hurt them. We believed we were going to find some New Jersey illegal bookie whose bottom line was likely to be very hurt by all of this. When we met this guy, it was the specific opposite. He was just like,”I am not sweating in any way.” I was really shocked by it. He did say he thinks that if every state goes, if this becomes 100 percent legal in every state, then he think he might be impacted. However he works from this Tri-State region, and now it’s only legal in New Jersey, and just in four or five places. He breaks it down really well in the conclusion of our very first incident, where he simply says,”It is convenient and it’s credit–both C will never go away.” With a illegal bookie, you can lose fifty million dollars on credit, and that can really negatively affect your life. Whereas you can still harm yourself gambling legally, but you can’t bet on credit via lawful channels. If casinos begin letting you bet on charge, then I believe his bottom line could get hurt. The more it is a part of the national conversation, the more money he makes, because people are like,”Oh, it’s right?”
Texas Monthly: Is daily fantasy one of the gateways to sports betting? It feels like it is just a small variant on traditional gambling.
Bradley Jackson: In Episode 3, we follow one of the top five daily dream players in America. He is a 26-year-old child. He makes millions of dollars doing this. He advised us that the most he’s ever produced was $1.5 million in 1 week. One of our hypotheses for the show was that the pervasiveness of everyday fantasy was a gateway into the leagues allowing legalized gambling to actually happen. For years, you saw the NFL say that sports betting is the worst thing and they’d never let it. And then about four years ago daily dream like DraftKings and FanDuel began, and they purchased, I believe, 30,000 ad spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you were watching the NFL, any commercial was DraftKings or FanDuel. And a great deal of people were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say you think sports betting is the worst thing ever. How is this not gambling?” It is gambling. We actually join the CEO of DraftKings, and two of the high-up individuals at FanDuel, and I think it’s B.S., but they say daily dream is not gambling, it is a game of skill. However, I really don’t think that’s true.
Texas Monthly: The way individuals who make money do it tends to involve running huge numbers of teams to beat the odds, rather than choosing the men they believe have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our everyday fantasy player over a weekend of making his stakes, and he doesn’t do well that weekend. And he spoke about how what he’s doing is a good deal of skill, but every week you will find just two or three plays that are entirely random, and they make his week or ruin his week, and that is 100 percent luck. That really is an element of gambling, as you’re putting something of monetary value up with an unknown outcome, and you don’t have any control over how that is given. We watch him literally shed sixty million dollars on a three-yard run by Ezekiel Elliott. It’s the Cowboys-Eagles, and he states,”All I need is for the Cowboys to perform well, but without Ezekiel Elliott producing any profits, and then you see Zeke get, for example, a four-yard pass and he’s like,”If one more of these happens, then I am screwed.” And then there is this tiny two-yard pass away from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”I simply lost sixty thousand dollars .” And you watch $60,000 jump from an account. There.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has contended that daily fantasy is illegal in Texas. Are there cultural factors in the state that might make this more difficult to pass, or is some thing like that just a way of staking a claim to the money involved?
Bradley Jackson: It could just be the pessimist in me, but think at the end of the day, a great deal of it just boils down to money. A fascinating case study is what happened in Nevada. In Nevada they made daily dream illegal, which is mad, because gambling is legal in Nevada. But they made it illegal since the daily fantasy leagues wouldn’t cover the gambling tax. So it was just like a reverse place, where Nevada said,”Hey, this is gambling, so pay the gaming taxes,” and DraftKings and FanDuel were like,”It is not gambling.” And so they did not come to Nevada. I don’t think Texas will necessarily do it right off the bat, but I presume it in a couple years, when they see how much money there will be produced, and there are clever ways to go about it, it’ll happen.
