Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 law that illegal sports gambling in the majority of states (Nevada appreciated an exception). When that occurred, the floodgates for legalized sports gambling across the country opened –Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to permit gambling on the result of a game, but they’re not going to be the last.
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 for his follow-up to this undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt director Luke Korem and fellow manufacturer Russell Wayne Groves (as well as showrunner David Assess ), Jackson produced the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, that tracked the winners and winners of this 2018-19 NFL season–not the ones on the field, but the ones at the match, wagering a small fortune on the results of the games being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson in advance of the series’ final episode to talk about sports betting, daily dream, and what the chances are that Texas allows fans to put a bet on game day in the next few decades.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this job?
Bradley Jackson: Just how large a company this is. I mean, you see the amounts and they’re simply astronomical. From the opening sentence of this series, when we’re 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 that stat is that only 3% of this is legal wagering. Meaning 97 percent of action wagered on the Super Bowl is illegal. That amount from Super Bowl weekend was among the first stats I saw when we were getting into this project, and it blew my mind. Then you look at the actual numbers of how much is really bet in the usa, and it has billions and billions of dollars–and so much of that is illegal wagering. Therefore it feels like it is one of those things everyone 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 I’ve spent six months embedded within this world, I’ve made a few –low-stakes stuff, simply to find that sense of what it is like. And it’s fun, particularly when you’re wagering a sensible amount–but the feelings are still there. I am a very mental person, so when I dropped my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU wager, I genuinely felt awful for approximately an hour. Because naturally I wager on UT, so when OU won, it hurt not just because my team lost–it hurt more that I lost fifty dollars.
Texas Monthly: Do you have a sense of when placing a bet like that in Texas might be lawful?
Bradley JacksonWe are living in a country that’s obsessed with sportsfootball especially. And nothing draws people’s attention more than betting on football, particularly the NFL. I believe finally Texas can perform some sort of sport gambling. I really don’t know how long it’s going to take. I believe that they’ll do it in mobile, because I don’t think we’ll 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 might go to Buffalo Wild Wings and put in your telephone 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 industry being enormous, illegal, and thus largely untaxed, to what extent do you think gaming as a source of untapped revenue for your state 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 kind 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 from the shadows and bring it into the light. That way you can tax it, which is always good for the states, but then you can also make sure it’s done above board. When the Texas legislature sniff how much money can be taxed, it is a no-brainer.
Texas Monthly: The illegal bookie that you talk to in the documentary says that legalization does not impact his business. What was that like for you to learn?
Bradley Jackson: It blew me off. When we had been sketching out the characters we wanted to attempt to determine to put in the show, an illegal bookie was unquestionably at the very 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 very hurt by all of this. When we met this man, it was the specific opposite. He was just like,”I am not sweating at all.” I was really shocked by it. He’d state he thinks that if each state eventually goes, if this becomes 100 percent legal in every state, he then think he might be impacted. But he operates out of this Tri-State region, and right now it is only legal in New Jersey, and just in four or five places. He breaks it down really well at the end of the first incident, where he just says,”It’s convenient and it is credit–the two C will never go off.” Having an illegal bookie, you can lose fifty thousand dollars on credit, and that can really negatively affect your life. Sometime you can still hurt yourself betting legitimately, but you can not bet on credit via lawful channels. If casinos start letting you wager on credit, I think his bottom line might get hurt. The longer it’s part of this national dialog, the more money he makes, as people are like,”Oh, it is legal, right?”
Texas Monthly: Why is daily fantasy one of those gateways to sports betting? It feels like it’s 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 is a 26-year-old kid. He makes millions of dollars doing this. He told me that the most he has ever made was $1.5 million in one week. Among our hypotheses for the series was that the pervasiveness of daily fantasy was a gateway to the leagues allowing legalized gaming to really happen. For many years, you noticed the NFL say that sports betting is the worst thing and they’d never allow it. And about four years back daily dream like DraftKings and FanDuel started, and they purchased, I think, 30,000 advertisement 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 folks were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say you believe sports betting is the worst thing ever. What’s this not gambling?” It’s gambling. We actually join the CEO of DraftKings, and two of the high-up people at FanDuel, and I think it’s B.S., however they say daily fantasy is not gambling, it’s a game of skill. But I really don’t think that is true.
Texas Monthly: How people who make money do it tends to involve running huge quantities of teams to beat the odds, rather than picking the guys they believe have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our everyday dream 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 lot of ability, but each week there are just two or three plays which are completely random, and they either make his week or ruin his week, which is 100 percent luck. That really is an element of gaming, as you are putting something of monetary value up with an unknown outcome, and you have no control on how that’s given. We see him literally shed sixty thousand 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 minus Ezekiel Elliott producing any gains, after which you visit Zeke get, like, 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 just lost sixty thousand dollars .” And you watch $60,000 jump from an account. There.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has contended that daily dream is prohibited in Texas. Are there cultural factors in the country that might make this more difficult to pass, or is some thing like that just a way of staking a claim to the cash involved?
Bradley Jackson: It could just be the pessimist in me, but think in the end of the day, a great deal of it just comes down to cash. An interesting case study is exactly what happened in Nevada. In Nevada they made daily fantasy illegal, which is crazy, because gambling is legal in Nevada. Nevertheless, they made it illegal since the daily fantasy leagues would not pay the gaming tax. So it was like a reverse place, in which Nevada said,”Hey, this is betting, so pay the gaming 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 do it right off the bat, but I presume it in a couple years, once they see just how much money there will be made, and that there are clever ways to start it, it is going to happen.

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