Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 law that prohibited sports betting in the majority of states (Nevada enjoyed an exclusion ). When that happened, 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 going 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 follow-up to this undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt manager Luke Korem and fellow producer Russell Wayne Groves (in addition to showrunner David Check), Jackson made the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, that monitored the winners and winners of this 2018-19 NFL season–maybe not those on the area, but the ones at the match, wagering a small fortune on the outcome of the games being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson in advance of this series’ final episode to chat about sports gambling, daily fantasy, and what the chances are that Texas enables fans to place a bet on game day within the upcoming few years.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this job?
Bradley Jackson: How large a business this is. I mean, you see the amounts and they are just astronomical. In the opening paragraph of this series, when we are showing all these individuals betting on the Super Bowl, that only on the Super Bowl alone, I think it’s like six billion bucks. But then the caveat to this stat is that only 3 percent of this is legal wagering. Meaning 97 percent of all action wagered on the Super Bowl is illegal. That amount from Super Bowl weekend was one of the very first stats I watched when we were getting into this project, and it blew my mind. Then you examine the actual numbers of just how much is really bet in America, and it has billions and billions of dollars–so much of this is illegal wagering. Therefore it seems like it’s one of those things everybody is doing, but 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 in this world, I have made a couple–low-stakes stuff, simply to get that feeling of what it is like. And it’s fun, especially when you’re wagering a sensible level –but the feelings are still there. I am a very mental person, so when I lost my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU bet, I felt awful for approximately an hour. Because of course I bet on UT, so when OU won, it hurt not only because my team dropped –it hurt even more that I lost fifty bucks.
Texas Monthly: Can you have a sense of when putting a bet like that in Texas might be legal?
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 think finally Texas can perform some sort of sport betting. I don’t know how long it’s likely to take. I think that they’ll do it in cellular, because I don’t think we will see casinos in Texas, ever. I have been hearing that perhaps Buffalo Wild Wings will do some sort of pseudo sports gambling stuff, so you might go to Buffalo Wild Wings and put on your phone and place 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 industry being enormous, illegal, and so largely untaxed, to what extent do you think gaming 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’s huge. 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 said we will need to take sports betting 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 may also make sure it’s done over board. When the Texas legislature sniff 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 business. 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 determine to spend the series, an illegal bookie was definitely at the top of our list. Our assumption was that this is going to hurt them. We believed we were going to find some New Jersey illegal bookie whose bottom line was likely to be really hurt by all of this. After we met this guy, it was the exact opposite. He was just like,”I am not sweating at all.” It shocked me. He did state he thinks that if every state eventually goes, if this becomes 100% legal in every state, then he think that he might be affected. However he operates out of this Tri-State region, and right now it’s only legal in New Jersey, and only in four or five places. He breaks it down quite well at the end of the first episode, where he just says,”It is convenient and it’s credit–the two C will never go off.” Having a 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 legally, but you can’t bet on credit via lawful channels. If casinos start letting you bet on charge, then I think his bottom line might get hurt. The more it’s part of the national dialog, the more money he gets, as people are like,”Oh, it’s right?”
Texas Monthly: Why is daily fantasy among 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’s a 26-year-old kid. He makes millions of dollars doing this. He told me that the most he’s ever produced was $1.5 million in one week. One of our hypotheses for the show was that the pervasiveness of daily dream was a gateway to the leagues allowing legalized gaming to actually happen. For years, you saw the NFL state that sports betting is the worst thing ever and they would never allow it. And then about four years back daily fantasy like DraftKings and FanDuel began, and they bought, I think, 30,000 advertisement spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you were watching the NFL, every other commercial was DraftKings or even FanDuel. And a lot of people were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say that you think sports gambling is the worst thing ever. What’s this not gaming?” It’s gambling. We really join the CEO of DraftKings, and two of the high-up people at FanDuel, and I believe it’s B.S., however they state daily fantasy is not gambling, it is a game of skill. However, I really don’t think that is true.
Texas Monthly: The way individuals who make money do it tends to involve conducting substantial numbers of teams to beat the odds, instead of choosing the men they think have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our everyday dream player over a weekend of creating his bets, and he doesn’t do well that weekend. And he spoke about how what he is doing is a good deal of ability, but every week there are two or three plays that are completely arbitrary, and they make his week or ruin his week, and that is 100 percent luck. This really is an element of gaming, as you’re putting something of financial worth up with an unknown result, and you don’t have any control over how that is awarded. We watch him literally lose sixty thousand dollars on a three-yard run by Ezekiel Elliott. It’s the Cowboys-Eagles, and he states,”All I need is to get the Cowboys to do well, but without Ezekiel Elliott making any profits, and then you see Zeke get, for example, a four-yard pass and he is like,”If one more of these happens, then I am screwed.” And then there’s this tiny two-yard pass from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”Well, I just dropped forty thousand dollars right there.” And you watch $60,000 jump out of an account. There is no way that’s not gaming.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has argued that daily fantasy is illegal in Texas. Are there any cultural factors in the state which may make this more difficult to pass, or is something like that just a means of staking a claim to the money 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 boils down to cash. A fascinating case study is exactly what happened in Nevada. In Nevada they left daily fantasy illegal, which is mad, because gambling is legal in Nevada. Nevertheless, they made it illegal since the daily fantasy leagues wouldn’t pay the gaming tax. So it was like a reverse place, where Nevada said,”Hey, this is betting, so pay the gambling taxes,” and DraftKings and FanDuel were like,”It’s not gambling.” And so they didn’t come to Nevada. I really don’t think Texas will necessarily do it right off the bat, but I presume it in a few years, when they see how much money there will be made, and there are smart ways to go about it, it is going to happen.

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