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 betting across the nation opened –Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to allow gambling on the result of a match, but they are not going to be the final.
Texas-based documentary filmmaker and UT grad Bradley Jackson, who produced the surprise hit Dealt, about a blind San Antonio card shark, spent much of the previous six months immersed in the world of sports betting for his followup to that undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt director Luke Korem and fellow producer Russell Wayne Groves (as well as showrunner David Assess ), Jackson produced the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, that 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 games being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson ahead of the series’ final episode to talk about sports betting, daily dream, and what the chances are that Texas enables fans to put a wager on game day in the next few decades.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this job?
Bradley Jackson: Just how big of a business this is. I mean, you see the numbers and they are just astronomical. In the opening sentence of this series, when we’re showing all these individuals gambling on the Super Bowl, which just 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% of this is legal wagering. That means 97 percent of action wagered on the Super Bowl is illegal. That amount from Super Bowl weekend was one of the first stats I saw when we were getting into this project, and it blew my mind. And then you examine the real numbers of how much is really bet in the usa, and it’s billions and billions of dollars–so much of that is illegal wagering. Therefore it feels like it is one of those things everybody 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 in this world, I’ve made a couple–low-stakes things, just to find that sense of what it is like. And it is fun, particularly when you’re wagering a sensible level –but the feelings are still there. I am a really mental person, so when I lost my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU wager, I genuinely felt awful for approximately an hour. Because of course I bet on UT, therefore when OU won, it hurt not only because my team lost–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 Jackson: We live in a state that is obsessed with sportsfootball especially. And nothing draws people’s attention more than betting on soccer, particularly the NFL. I believe finally Texas will do some kind of sports gambling. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I believe that they’ll do it in mobile, since I do not think we will see casinos in Texas, actually. I have been hearing that perhaps Buffalo Wild Wings will do some sort of pseudo sports gambling stuff, which means you could go to Buffalo Wild Wings and put in your phone and set a fifty-dollar bet on the Astros, and I think that would be lawful one day. Probably sometime in the next five decades.
Texas Monthly: With this industry being huge, illegal, and thus largely untaxed, to what extent do you think gambling as a source of untapped revenue for the state plays into matters?
Bradley Jackson: That will play hugely right into it. From a financial point of view, it’s enormous. 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 stated we need to take sports gambling from the shadows and bring it into the light. That way you may tax it, which is obviously good for the countries, but you can also make sure it’s done over board. Once the Texas legislature sniff really how much money can be taxed, it is a no-brainer.
Texas Monthly: The illegal bookie which you talk to in the documentary says that legalization does not impact his organization. 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 identify to spend the show, an illegal bookie was unquestionably on top of our list. Our premise 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 this. When we met this guy, it was the exact opposite. He was like,”I am not sweating in any way.” It shocked me. He’d state he thinks that if each state eventually goes, if this becomes 100 percent legal in every state, he then think that he might be impacted. But he operates from 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 our first incident, where he simply says,”It’s convenient and it is charge –the two C will never go away.” Having a illegal bookie, you are able to lose fifty thousand dollars on credit, and that can really negatively impact your life. Whereas you can still hurt yourself betting legitimately, but you can not bet on credit via lawful channels. If casinos begin letting you bet on credit, I believe his bottom line could get hurt. The longer it is a part of the national dialog, the more money he makes, because people are like,”Oh, it is legal, right?”
Texas Monthly: Is daily dream one of those gateways to sports betting? It feels like it is just a slight 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 kid. He makes millions of dollars doing that. He told me that the most he has ever made was $1.5 million in one week. Among our hypotheses for the show was that the pervasiveness of everyday dream was a gateway to the leagues letting legalized gaming 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 then about four years ago daily fantasy like DraftKings and FanDuel started, 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 folks were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say that 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 believe that it’s B.S., however they state daily dream is not gambling, it is a game of skill. However, I don’t think that’s true.
Texas Monthly: The way people who make money do it tends to involve conducting substantial numbers of teams to win against the odds, instead of choosing the guys they think have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our daily fantasy player above 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 good deal of skill, but each week you will find 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, because you are putting something of monetary value up with an unknown result, and you have no control over how that’s awarded. 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 to get the Cowboys to do nicely, 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 those happens, then I’m screwed.” And then there’s this tiny two-yard pass away from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”Well, I just dropped forty thousand dollars .” And you observe $60,000 jump from an account. There.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has contended that daily fantasy is prohibited in Texas. Are there cultural factors in the state that might make this more difficult to pass, or is some thing similar to that just a means 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 lot 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 can be mad, because gaming is legal in Nevada. Nevertheless, they made it illegal since the daily fantasy leagues would not pay the gambling tax. So it was just like a reverse position, in which Nevada said,”Hey, this is gambling, so cover the gambling taxes,” and DraftKings and FanDuel were like,”It’s not gambling.” And so they did not come to Nevada. I don’t think Texas will necessarily do it right off the bat, but I think it in a couple years, when they determine how much money there is to be produced, and there are clever ways to start it, it’ll happen.

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