Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 legislation that illegal sports gambling in the majority of states (Nevada appreciated an exclusion ). When that happened, the floodgates for legalized sports gambling across the country opened up–Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to allow gambling on the result of a match, but they’re not likely 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 previous six months immersed in the world of sports gambling due to their followup to that undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt manager Luke Korem and fellow manufacturer Russell Wayne Groves (as well as showrunner David Assess ), Jackson produced the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, which tracked the winners and losers of the 2018-19 NFL season–maybe not those on the area, but those in the casino, wagering a small fortune on the outcome of the games being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson in advance of the series’ final episode to chat about sports gambling, daily dream, and what the odds 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: Just how large a business this is. I mean, you find the numbers and they’re simply astronomical. In the opening sentence of the show, when we are showing all these people betting on the Super Bowl, which only on the Super Bowl alone, I think that it’s like six billion dollars. But then the caveat to that stat is that just 3 percent of that is legal wagering. That means 97 percent of all 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 undertaking, and it blew my mind. Then you look at the real numbers of how much is actually bet in America, and it’s billions and billions of dollars–so much of that is illegal wagering. So it seems 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 put 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 feeling of what it’s like. And it is fun, particularly when you’re wagering a reasonable amount–but the emotions are still there. I’m a very mental person, so when I dropped my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU bet, I felt awful for about an hour. Because naturally I wager on UT, so when OU won, it hurt not only because my team dropped –it hurt even more that I lost fifty dollars.
Texas Monthly: Can you have a feeling of when placing a wager like that in Texas might be legal?
Bradley Jackson: We are living in a state that is obsessed with sports–football especially. And nothing brings people’s attention over betting on football, particularly the NFL. I believe finally Texas can perform some kind of sports betting. I don’t know how long it’s likely to take. I believe they’ll do it in mobile, since I do not think we’ll see casinos in Texas, ever. I’ve been hearing that perhaps Buffalo Wild Wings is going to do some sort of pseudo sports gambling stuff, so you might go to Buffalo Wild Wings and put on your telephone and set a fifty-dollar wager on the Astros, and I feel that would be legal one day. Probably sometime in the next five years.
Texas Monthly: With this business 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 matters?
Bradley Jackson: This will play hugely right into it. From a financial perspective, it’s enormous. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, was sort of on the forefront of that. He wrote an editorial to the New York Times about four years ago where he said we need to take sports betting from the shadows and then bring it into the light. And that way you can tax it, which is obviously great for the countries, but you may also make sure it’s done above board. Once 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 organization. What was that like for you to learn?
Bradley Jackson: It blew me off. When we were sketching out the characters we wanted to try and determine to put in the show, an illegal bookie was definitely on top of our listing. Our assumption was that this will 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 of this. When we met this man, it was the exact opposite. He was like,”I’m not sweating at all.” I was stunned by it. He’d state that he believes that if every state goes, if this becomes 100 percent legal in every nation, he then think he could be affected. But he works from the Tri-State region, and right now it is only legal in New Jersey, and only in four or five places. He breaks it down really well at the end of the first incident, where he just says,”It is convenient and it’s charge –the two C’s will never go away.” Having an illegal bookie, you can lose fifty thousand dollars on credit, and that may really negatively affect your life. Whereas you can still harm yourself gambling legitimately, but you can not bet on credit through legal channels. If casinos begin letting you bet on credit, I think his bottom line might get hurt. The longer it’s a part of this national dialog, the more money he gets, because people are like,”Oh, it is legal, right?”
Texas Monthly: Why is daily fantasy among the gateways to sports gambling? It feels like it’s only a small variation on traditional gambling.
Bradley Jackson: In Episode 3, we follow one of the top five daily dream players in America. He is a 26-year-old child. He makes millions of dollars doing that. He advised us that the most he has ever made was $1.5 million in 1 week. One of our hypotheses for the show was that the pervasiveness of everyday dream was a gateway into the leagues letting legalized gaming to actually happen. For many years, you saw the NFL say that sports gambling is the worst thing ever and they’d never allow it. And then about four years back daily dream 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 FanDuel. And a lot of people were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say that you believe sports gambling is the worst thing ever. What’s this not gambling?” It’s gambling. We actually interview the CEO of DraftKings, and two of the high-up people at FanDuel, and I think it’s B.S., but they state daily dream isn’t gambling, it is a game of skill. But I really don’t think that’s true.
Texas Monthly: The way individuals who make money do it will involve running huge quantities of teams to beat the odds, instead of choosing the men they believe have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our everyday fantasy player over a weekend of creating his bets, and he does not do well that weekend. And he talked about how what he is doing is a lot of ability, but every week you will find just two or three plays which are entirely arbitrary, and they either make his week ruin his week, which is 100 percent luck. This is an element of gambling, as you are putting something of financial worth up with an unknown result, and you have no control over how that is awarded. We watch him literally shed 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 well, but without Ezekiel Elliott producing any profits, after which 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 tiny two-yard pass away from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”Well, I just lost sixty thousand dollars .” And you observe $60,000 jump out of an account. There.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has argued that daily fantasy is illegal in Texas. Are there cultural factors in the state that might make this more challenging 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 at the end of the day, a lot of it just boils down to cash. A fascinating case study is exactly what occurred in Nevada. In Nevada they made daily dream illegal, which is crazy, because gaming is legal in Nevada. Nevertheless, they made it illegal because the daily fantasy leagues wouldn’t pay the gambling tax. So it was like a reverse position, where Nevada said,”Hey, this is gambling, so cover the gaming taxes,” and DraftKings and FanDuel were like,”It is not gambling.” And so they didn’t come to Nevada. I really don’t think Texas will inevitably take action right off the bat, but I think it in a couple years, when they see how much money there is to be made, and there are clever ways to go about it, it is going to happen.

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