Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 legislation that illegal sports gambling in the majority of states (Nevada appreciated an exception). When that occurred, the floodgates for legalized sports betting across the country opened –Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to permit betting on the outcome of a match, but they're not likely to be the last.
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 this project. Reteaming with Dealt manager Luke Korem and fellow producer Russell Wayne Groves (in addition to showrunner David Check), Jackson produced the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, which monitored the winners and winners of the 2018-19 NFL season–not those 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 ahead of this series' final episode to talk about sports gambling, daily dream, and what the chances are that Texas allows fans to place a bet on game day in the next few years.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this job?
Bradley Jackson: How big of a company this is. I meanyou find the amounts and they're just astronomical. From the opening paragraph of this show, when we are showing these individuals gambling on the Super Bowl, which just on the Super Bowl alone, I think that it's like six billion dollars. But the caveat to that stat is that just 3 percent of that is legal wagering. Meaning 97 percent of action wagered on the Super Bowl is prohibited. That amount from Super Bowl weekend was among the very first stats I watched when we were getting into this undertaking, and it blew my mind. Then you look at the actual numbers of just how much is actually bet in the usa, and it's billions and billions of dollars–and so much of this is illegal wagering. So it feels like it is one of those things everybody is doing, however, nobody really talks about.
Texas Monthly: Did working on this project inspire you to place any bets?
Bradley Jackson: Yeah. I hadn't ever done it, and I've spent six months embedded within this world, I've made a few –low-stakes stuff, just to find that feeling of what it's like. And it is fun, especially when you're wagering a reasonable amount–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 an hour. Because naturally I wager on UT, so when OU won, it hurt not just because my team dropped –it hurt even more that I lost fifty dollars.
Texas Monthly: Do you have a sense of when putting a wager like that in Texas could be legal?
Bradley Jackson: We are living in a country that is obsessed with sports–football especially. And nothing brings people's attention over betting on soccer, especially the NFL. I think eventually Texas can perform some sort of sports betting. I don't know how long it's likely to take. I believe they'll do it in cellular, since I don't think we will see casinos in Texas, actually. I have been hearing that maybe Buffalo Wild Wings is going to do some type of pseudo sports gambling 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 feel that will be legal one day. Probably sometime in the next five years.
Texas Monthly: With this industry being huge, illegal, and so largely untaxed, to what extent do you believe gaming as a source of untapped revenue for your state plays into things?
Bradley Jackson: That will play hugely right into it. From a monetary point of view, it's enormous. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, was kind of on the forefront of the. He wrote an editorial to the New York Times about four years ago where he stated we will need to take sports gambling from the shadows and then bring it into the light. That way you may tax it, which is always good for the countries, but then you may also make sure it's done above board. Once the Texas legislature sniff how much money may 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 business. What was that like for you to learn?
Bradley Jackson: It blew me away. When we were sketching out the characters we wanted to try and determine to spend the series, an illegal bookie was definitely at the very top of our list. Our premise was that this is going to hurt them. We thought we were going to find some New Jersey illegal bookie whose bottom line was going to be really hurt by all this. After we met this man, it was the exact opposite. He was like,"I am not sweating at all." It shocked me. He did state that he believes that if every state eventually goes, if that becomes 100% legal in every state, he then think he might be impacted. But he operates out of the Tri-State area, and right now it's only legal in New Jersey, and just in four or five spots. He breaks it down really well at the end of the very first episode, where he simply says,"It's convenient and it is credit–both C's will never go away." Having an illegal bookie, you can lose fifty thousand dollars on credit, and that can really negatively affect your life. Sometime you can still harm yourself gambling legally, but you can not bet on credit via lawful channels. If casinos start letting you wager on charge, I believe his bottom line could get hurt. The longer it's a part of the national dialog, the more money he gets, as people are like,"Oh, it's right?"
Texas Monthly: Why is daily dream among those 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 fantasy players in America. He's a 26-year-old child. He makes millions of dollars doing this. He told me that the most he has ever made was $1.5 million in 1 week. Among our hypotheses for the series was that the pervasiveness of daily fantasy was a gateway into the leagues allowing legalized gambling to actually happen. For many years, you noticed the NFL state that sports betting is the worst thing ever and they'd never let it. And about four years ago daily fantasy like DraftKings and FanDuel began, and they purchased, I believe, 30,000 advertisement spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you were watching the NFL, any commercial was DraftKings or even FanDuel. And a great deal 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 interview the CEO of DraftKings, and two of the high-up people at FanDuel, and I think that it's B.S., however they say daily fantasy 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 will involve running huge numbers of teams to beat the odds, rather than picking the men they think have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our everyday dream player over a weekend of making his stakes, and he does not do well that weekend. And he talked about how what he's doing is a lot of ability, but each week there are two or three plays that are completely arbitrary, and they either make his week or ruin his week, which is 100 percent luck. This is an element of gambling, because you are putting something of monetary value up with an unknown result, and you have no control on how that is awarded. We see him literally lose sixty thousand dollars on a three-yard run by Ezekiel Elliott. It's the Cowboys-Eagles, and he says,"All I want is to get the Cowboys to perform nicely, but minus Ezekiel Elliott making any profits, after which you visit 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 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's no way that's not gaming.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has contended that daily dream is illegal in Texas. Are there cultural factors in the country which may make this more difficult to maneuver, 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 at the end of the day, a great deal of it just comes down to cash. An interesting case study is exactly what occurred in Nevada. In Nevada they made daily fantasy illegal, which is crazy, 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 position, in which Nevada said,"Hey, this is gambling, so cover the gaming 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 necessarily take action right off the bat, but I presume it in a few years, when they determine just how much cash there is to be produced, and there are smart ways to start it, it'll happen.
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