Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 law that prohibited sports gambling in the majority of states (Nevada enjoyed an exclusion ). When that happened, the floodgates for legalized sports gambling across the nation opened –Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to permit betting on the result of a game, but they’re not going 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 past six months immersed in the world of sports betting for his followup to that undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt director Luke Korem and fellow manufacturer Russell Wayne Groves (in addition to showrunner David Assess ), Jackson made the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, which monitored the winners and losers of this 2018-19 NFL season–maybe not the ones on the area, but those at the match, wagering a small fortune on the outcome of the matches being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson in advance of this series’ final episode to chat about sports gambling, daily dream, and what the odds are that Texas allows fans to place a bet on game day within the upcoming few decades.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this project?
Bradley Jackson: How big of a company this is. I meanyou see the amounts and they are just astronomical. From the opening sentence of this series, when we are showing all these individuals betting on the Super Bowl, that just on the Super Bowl alone, I think it’s like six billion bucks. But then the caveat to this stat is that only 3% of that is legal wagering. That means 97 percent of action wagered on the Super Bowl is prohibited. That amount 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 examine the real numbers of just how much is really bet in the usa, and it’s billions and billions of dollars–so much of this is illegal wagering. Therefore it seems like it is one of these things everybody is doing, however, 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 I’ve spent six months embedded in this world, I’ve made a couple–low-stakes stuff, just to get that feeling of what it’s like. And it’s fun, particularly when you’re wagering a sensible level –but the feelings are still there. I’m a really emotional person, so when I lost my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU bet, I felt awful for about one hour. Because naturally I wager on UT, so when OU won, it hurt not just because my team lost–it hurt even more that I dropped fifty bucks.
Texas Monthly: Do you have a feeling of when putting a bet like that in Texas could be legal?
Bradley JacksonWe are living in a country that is obsessed with sportsfootball especially. And nothing brings people’s attention over betting on soccer, especially the NFL. I think eventually Texas will do some sort of sport gambling. I really don’t know how long it’s likely to take. I believe that they’ll do it in mobile, because I don’t think we will see casinos in Texas, ever. I have been hearing that maybe Buffalo Wild Wings will do some sort of pseudo sports betting stuff, so you could go to Buffalo Wild Wings and put on your telephone and set a fifty-dollar bet on the Astros, and I think that will 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 believe gambling as a source of untapped revenue for the country plays into matters?
Bradley Jackson: That will play hugely into it. From a monetary point of view, it is huge. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, was sort of on the forefront of the. He wrote an editorial to the New York Times about four years ago where he stated we need to take sports betting from the shadows and then bring it into the light. And that way you may tax it, which is obviously good for the states, but then you may also make sure it’s done above board. Once the Texas legislature sniff really how much money may be taxed, it’s a no-brainer.
Texas Monthly: The illegal bookie that you talk to in the documentary states that legalization does not impact his organization. What was that like for you to understand?
Bradley Jackson: It blew me away. When we had been sketching out the figures we wanted to attempt to identify to spend the show, an illegal bookie was definitely at the top of our list. Our assumption was that this is going to hurt them. We thought we were going to obtain some New Jersey illegal bookie whose bottom line was going to be really hurt by all of this. After we met this man, it was the exact opposite. He was like,”I am not sweating at all.” It really shocked me. He’d say he thinks that if every state eventually goes, if this becomes 100 percent legal in every nation, then he think he might be impacted. However he works from the Tri-State area, and now it’s only legal in New Jersey, and just in four or five places. He breaks it down really well in the end of the first incident, where he just says,”It’s convenient and it is charge –the two C’s will never go off.” Having an illegal bookie, you are able to 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 not bet on credit through legal channels. If casinos start letting you wager on charge, I think his bottom line might get hurt. The longer it’s part of this national dialog, the more money he gets, as people are like,”Oh, it is right?”
Texas Monthly: Is daily fantasy one of the gateways to sports gambling? It feels like it’s just a slight variation on traditional gaming.
Bradley Jackson: In Episode 3, we follow one of the top five daily dream players in the us. He is a 26-year-old child. He makes millions of dollars doing that. He told us that the most he’s ever produced was $1.5 million in 1 week. Among our hypotheses for the show was that the pervasiveness of daily dream was a gateway into the leagues letting legalized gaming to really happen. For years, you saw the NFL state that sports gambling is the worst thing ever and they’d never let it. And then about four years back daily dream like DraftKings and FanDuel started, and they purchased, I think, 30,000 ad spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you’re watching the NFL, any commercial was DraftKings or FanDuel. And a lot of people were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say you think sports gambling is the worst thing ever. How is this not gambling?” It’s gambling. We actually join the CEO of DraftKings, and two of the high-up individuals at FanDuel, and I think that it’s B.S., but they say daily dream is not gambling, it is a game of skill. But I really don’t think that is true.
Texas Monthly: The way people who make money do it tends to involve conducting substantial numbers of teams to win against the odds, rather than picking the guys they believe have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our daily fantasy player over a weekend of making his bets, and he does not do well that weekend. And he talked about how what he’s doing is a lot of skill, but every week there are two or three plays that are entirely arbitrary, and they either make his week ruin his week, and that is 100 percent chance. That really is an element of gaming, because you are putting something of monetary value up with an unknown result, and you have no control on how that is given. We see him literally shed sixty million dollars on a three-yard run by Ezekiel Elliott. It’s the Cowboys-Eagles, and he says,”All I need is for the Cowboys to do nicely, but minus Ezekiel Elliott producing any gains, and then you see Zeke get, for example, a four-yard pass and he is like,”If one more of those happens, then I am screwed.” And then there’s this little two-yard pass from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”I simply dropped forty thousand dollars .” And you observe $60,000 jump out of an account. There.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has contended that daily fantasy is illegal in Texas. Are there any cultural factors in the country which may make this more difficult to pass, or is something similar to that just a way of staking a claim to the money involved?
Bradley Jackson: It could just be the pessimist in me, but think in the end of the day, a lot of it just comes down to money. A fascinating case study is exactly what occurred in Nevada. In Nevada they made daily dream illegal, which can be mad, because gaming is legal in Nevada. But they made it illegal because the daily fantasy leagues wouldn’t cover the gambling tax. So it was just like a reverse position, in which Nevada said,”Hey, this is betting, so pay the gaming taxes,” and DraftKings and FanDuel were like,”It is not gambling.” And so they did not come to Nevada. I really don’t think Texas will necessarily take action right off the bat, but I think it in a few years, when they see how much money there will be made, and that there are smart ways to start it, it’ll happen.

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