Action’ Producer Bradley Jackson on the Odds of Texas Legalizing Sports Gambling

Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 legislation that illegal sports betting in most states (Nevada enjoyed an exclusion ). When that happened, the floodgates for legalized sports gambling across the country opened –Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to allow gambling on the outcome of a match, but they’re not going to be the final.
Texas-based documentary filmmaker and UT grad Bradley Jackson, who made 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 followup to that undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt manager Luke Korem and fellow producer Russell Wayne Groves (as well as showrunner David Check), Jackson produced the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, which tracked the winners and winners of the 2018-19 NFL season–maybe not those on the field, but those in the match, wagering a small fortune on the results of the matches being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson ahead of the series’ final episode to chat about sports betting, daily dream, and what the chances are that Texas allows fans to place a bet on game day in the upcoming few decades.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this project?
Bradley Jackson: Just how big of a company this is. I mean, you see the numbers and they’re simply astronomical. From the opening paragraph of the series, when we’re showing these people gambling on the Super Bowl, which just on the Super Bowl alone, I think it’s like six billion bucks. But the caveat to that stat is that just 3 percent of this is legal wagering. That means 97 percent of action wagered on the Super Bowl is illegal. That amount from Super Bowl weekend was one of the very first stats I saw when we were getting into this project, and it blew my mind. Then you examine the real numbers of how much is really bet in America, and it’s billions and billions of dollars–and so much of this is illegal wagering. Therefore 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 hadn’t ever done it, and now that I’ve spent six months embedded in this world, I have made a couple–low-stakes stuff, simply to find that sense of what it is like. And it is fun, particularly when you’re wagering a sensible amount–but the emotions are still there. I’m a really mental person, so when I dropped my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU wager, I felt awful for approximately an hour. Because naturally I bet on UT, so when OU won, it hurt not just because my team dropped –it hurt more that I dropped fifty dollars.
Texas Monthly: Do you have a feeling of when putting a bet like that in Texas could be lawful?
Bradley Jackson: We are living in a country that is obsessed with sportsfootball especially. And nothing brings people’s attention more than gambling on football, especially the NFL. I believe eventually Texas will do some kind of sports gambling. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I believe that they’ll do it in cellular, because I do not think we’ll see casinos in Texas, ever. I’ve been hearing that perhaps Buffalo Wild Wings will do some sort of pseudo sports gambling stuff, so you could go to Buffalo Wild Wings and put on your telephone and place a fifty-dollar wager on the Astros, and I think that would be lawful one day. Probably sometime in the next five years.
Texas Monthly: With this industry being huge, prohibited, and so largely untaxed, to what extent do you think gambling as a source of untapped revenue for your country plays into matters?
Bradley Jackson: That will play hugely into it. From a monetary point of view, it’s enormous. 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 stated we need to take sports betting out of the shadows and bring it into the light. And that way you can tax it, which is always good for the states, but you can also make sure it’s done above board. When the Texas legislature sniff really how much money can be taxed, it is a no-brainer.
Texas Monthly: The illegal bookie which you talk to in the documentary states that legalization does not affect his organization. What was that like for you to understand?
Bradley Jackson: It blew me away. When we were sketching out the figures we wanted to try and determine to put in the show, an illegal bookie was unquestionably on top of our listing. Our premise was that this is going to hurt them. We thought we were going to obtain some New Jersey illegal bookie whose bottom line was likely to be really hurt by all this. After we met this guy, it was the specific opposite. He was just like,”I am not sweating at all.” I was stunned by it. He’d state he believes that if each state eventually goes, if that becomes 100 percent legal in every nation, he then think that he could be impacted. However he operates out of the Tri-State area, and now it is only legal in New Jersey, and just in four or five spots. He breaks it down really well in the end of our first incident, where he simply says,”It’s convenient and it’s charge –both C’s will never go off.” Having an illegal bookie, you can lose fifty thousand dollars on credit, and that can really negatively impact your life. Sometime you can still hurt yourself gambling legally, but you can not bet on credit through lawful channels. If casinos begin letting you bet on credit, then I believe his bottom line could get hurt. The more it is a part of this national conversation, the more money he gets, because people are like,”Oh, it is right?”
Texas Monthly: Why is daily dream among those gateways to sports gambling? It seems like it is just a small variation on traditional gambling.
Bradley Jackson: In Episode 3, we follow one of the top five daily fantasy players in the us. He is a 26-year-old kid. 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 daily dream was a gateway into the leagues allowing legalized gaming to actually happen. For years, you saw the NFL say that sports betting is the worst thing ever and they’d never allow it. And then about four years ago daily fantasy like DraftKings and FanDuel began, and they purchased, I believe, 30,000 ad spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you’re watching the NFL, every other commercial was DraftKings or FanDuel. And a lot of folks were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say you think sports gambling is the worst thing ever. What’s this not gaming?” It is gambling. We really join the CEO of DraftKings, and two of the high-up people at FanDuel, and I think that it’s B.S., but they say daily fantasy isn’t gambling, it is a game of skill. But I don’t think that is true.
Texas Monthly: The way individuals who make money do it tends to involve conducting substantial quantities of teams to win against the odds, instead of picking the guys they believe have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our everyday dream player over a weekend of creating his stakes, and he does not do well that weekend. And he spoke about how what he’s doing is a good deal of skill, but every week there are just two or three plays which are entirely arbitrary, and they make his week ruin his week, and that is 100 percent chance. This really is an element of gambling, as you’re putting something of monetary value up with an unknown result, and you have no control over how that is awarded. 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 want is to get the Cowboys to do well, but without Ezekiel Elliott making any profits, after which 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’s this little two-yard pass from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”I just lost sixty thousand dollars .” And you observe $60,000 jump from an account. There.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has contended that daily dream is illegal in Texas. Are there any cultural factors in the country that might make this more difficult to maneuver, or is something similar to that just a way of staking a claim to the cash involved?
Bradley Jackson: It might just be the pessimist in me, but believe in the end of the day, a great deal of it just comes down to money. An interesting case study is exactly what happened in Nevada. In Nevada they made daily fantasy illegal, which is mad, because gaming is legal in Nevada. But they made it illegal since the daily fantasy leagues would not cover the gambling tax. So it was just like a reverse position, where Nevada said,”Hey, this is gambling, so cover the gambling taxes,” and DraftKings and FanDuel were like,”It’s not gambling.” And so they did not come to Nevada. I really don’t think Texas will inevitably do it right off the bat, but I presume it in a couple years, once they determine just how much cash there is to be made, and that there are smart ways to go about it, it’ll happen.

Read more: http://blogozine.net/se/teaser/england-prop-mako-vunipola-ahead-of-schedule-in-recovery-at-rugby-world-cup/

Comments

comments

Jimmy Hanna

Entreprenör och skådespelare som älskar att underhålla. Nyfiken och lite rastlös, vill uppleva allt. Sätter upp min första pjäs 2.0 om livet efter döden och artificiel intelligens på fotografiska i Stockholm.

No Comments Yet

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>