Speaker 1Lots of big questions coming up this fall in Washington.
Speaker 2Like, will Canada and the U.S. get back to negotiating? And what will change for President Donald Trump after November's midterms? We explore these themes and more on Two Blocks from the White House. Join me, Katie Simpson, with my fellow correspondents, Paul Hunter and Willie Lowry. We help you make sense of what's happening in U.S. politics and what it means for Canada. Find us every Wednesday on your favorite podcast app, including YouTube. This is a CBC Podcast.
Speaker 3Jonte Porter, also on the court. Jonte Porter once again at the foul line with a rebound. It's March 20th, 2024 at the Scotiabank Arena in downtown Toronto. The Raptors are playing the Sacramento Kings. Number 34, Jonte Porter, is out there for the Raptors. He's made some free throws. And had some misses. He was not a spectacular player. This is Anthony Milton, a journalist based in Toronto who has written extensively about Jonte Porter.
Speaker 4I first got interested in Jonte Porter when, well, when everything blew up with him on the Toronto Raptors.
Speaker 3The first thing you need to know is that Porter was a bench player. He was a big guy. He performed reasonably well. But he wasn't a star by any means. So when the second quarter begins and Porter stays rooted to the bench, it doesn't raise any eyebrows. When it comes to Jonte Porter, he is out for tonight and done for the night. He's out with an illness.
Speaker 4He'd been complaining of food poisoning. And he told everyone that. His friends, his coaches, members on the team, his own family, even.
Speaker 3He said he was sick. After playing for a few minutes, Porter had approached his coach and taken himself out of the game. We saw the Raptors training staff chat with
Speaker 2him during one of the timeouts, man. I want to tell you, I had some discomfort.
Speaker 3Athletes get sick. They get hurt, obviously, like anyone. If you were just watching that game, would anything have looked out of the ordinary?
Speaker 4Honestly, no. If someone was watching that game, they might have seen Jonte Porter, one rather insignificant player on the roster, slightly underperforming. Perhaps not feeling its best. But they'd have no idea what's actually going on.
Speaker 3What's actually going on is that almost 1,000 kilometers away, at a casino diner in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a group of guys, at least one of whom has ties to the mob, have a shot at winning $1,120,000 if Jonte Porter underperforms in this game. They are watching Porter very closely. And soon, the FBI will be watching them.
Speaker 4Unbeknownst to everyone else on the court there, Jonte is intentionally underperforming. He wagered $54,000 on NBA basketball while he was with the Raptors.
Speaker 3For decades, across most of the United States, sports betting was complete. And in Canada, severely restricted. So being able to download an app and wager on sports anytime, anywhere, that was unimaginable. But today, billions are wagered legally and openly, often through apps partnered with the leagues themselves. And the number of places where this is legal is growing. So how did sports gambling go from a taboo relegated to the shadows, to something so pervasive? Make every moment more with FanDuel.
Speaker 5At DraftKings, the crown is yours.
Speaker 6BetMGM Sports. Join Bet365. The game starts now.
Speaker 3I'm Danny Funt. I'm a journalist and the author of Everybody Loses, The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. I've been investigating the sports betting boom since 2021. And I've seen the legalization of sports gambling create a seismic shift that's reshaping the business of sports gambling. I've seen the legalization of sports gambling. which is huge. This season on Understood, we're going to tell the story of how we got here. Over the next four episodes, we'll meet the people who built the industry, the executives who saw an opportunity, the leagues that changed their minds, and the bettors who became obsessed. And throughout it all, we'll keep coming back to Jonte Porter. Because the night he walked off the court in Toronto wasn't the beginning of this story, but it may have been the moment when all of its consequences became clear. It became impossible to ignore. This is Understood, The Big Bet. Episode 1, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Speaker 7I always wanted to do something in sports. In high school, I played tennis and a little bit of soccer, a little bit of hockey. And so I dreamed of being an athlete. But I soon realized that wasn't going to be for me. Eventually, I got to a place where I was like, well, maybe if I can't find the perfect job for me, maybe I can create that job for me.
Speaker 3Nick Bonadio loved sports. He also loved numbers. And in the late 2000s, he had an idea for a company that would combine the two.
Speaker 7At the time, you'd go to ESPN or go to TSN, like you go to these websites, and you would read all this analysis, but that analysis was all very qualitative. It was all X players. I think this, I think that. And me being a big sports fan, me being a big math and numbers guy, I was like, well, that doesn't really make sense because sports is the most data-driven industry there is. Everything that happens gets tracked and gets stored somewhere. And so why can't I kind of use quantitative analysis on this?
Speaker 3Nick wanted to take that data, clean it up, and sell it to people who could use it to make calls based on numbers instead of opinions.
Speaker 7Now, it seems kind of passe, everyone knows the Moneyball story, but back in 2009, that was not the case.
Speaker 3If you missed Moneyball, the short version is that in 2002, baseball's underdogs, the Oakland Athletics, used math to construct a stellar roster of overachievers by choosing players based almost solely on their stats.
Speaker 8In 103 years of American League Baseball, the Athletics have accomplished what no one has before. They have won. They have won 20 consecutive games.
Speaker 3Their unlikely success broke minds and spawned two decades of people using the term Moneyball as shorthand for optimizing just about anything with data. Nick's idea was the next logical step. Take those tools out of the back office altogether, aggregate sports data, and sell it to anyone who wants it. It was a great business idea. But Nick had a small problem. Cash flow. One of
Speaker 7my largest goals in life was to start a company and sort of take the entrepreneurial path. I didn't have the family resources to go and do that.
Speaker 3So, Nick got creative.
Speaker 8Nick won the deal. Holy cow, what a dance you did.
Speaker 3It's 2009. Nick is 27 years old, wearing a suit and tie as he dances on the stage. It's 2009. He's been on to the set of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" toward a television icon, Regis Philbin.
Speaker 8But what I love is the fact that you didn't sleep for two nights. Correct. And what happened to you?
Speaker 9I was too nervous. In my head, I was thinking about what dance I was going to do and everything. Oh, really? Oh, nice!
Speaker 3"Millionaire" was a game about money, but under that, it was a game about risk. Every correct answer moved you closer to life-changing amounts of cash, Well, a single risk is a game about money, but under that, it was a game about risk. every wrong answer could wipe out your winnings.
Speaker 8So, are you ready, Nick? I'm ready. Yes, you are. Let's play "Millionaire" right now!
Speaker 3Nick plays, making it through questions about counting sheep,
Speaker 9B, insomnia, final answer. Yeah, you're right. all-American desserts, The answer is A, apple pie, final answer. Yes, it's apple pie.
Speaker 3even a sports question.
Speaker 9So, the final answer is A, Kim Raikkonen is a race car driver. He's got it again! I won $100,000 on
Speaker 3a show, and I quit my job the very next day and started my company. That company was called NumberFire. NumberFire is a sports data analytics company, or as Nick puts it,
Speaker 7Data for sports fans built by a sports fan.
Speaker 3because Nick had a very specific customer in mind.
Speaker 7I don't want to just sell this to teams. I want to go and speak to all of the millions of people out there who are playing fantasy sports,
Speaker 3Fantasy sports. Fantasy team.
Speaker 2The Fantasy Sports Hall of Fame. Fantasy football. Fantasy baseball.
Speaker 3Taking fantasy golf to the next level. In many ways, the story of modern sports gambling starts right here with fantasy sports. In fantasy sports, you, the fan, are the general manager of your very own imaginary team, which you assemble using actual professional athletes. You're competing against other fans based on the real-world statistical performance of these players, with points awarded for things like goals, yards, or home runs, over the course of a season.
Speaker 10We knew that fantasy sports itself was really popular. Like, if you know anybody who plays fantasy, they will bore you to tears, which is a great sign. They love it. And to me, that's like, I always want to build a business where people are passionate and excited, and so I was like, this is a great category.
Speaker 3This is Nigel Eccles. And in 2009, while Nick was winning $100,000 on Millionaire and starting Numberfire, Nigel, along with his wife and a small group of friends, founded another company. One that was going to, in startup parlance, disrupt fantasy sports. That company? It was called FanDuel. FanDuel Sportsbook. FanDuel. FanDuel. FanDuel. FanDuel.com. Unlike Nick Bonadio, Nigel didn't come to fantasy sports out of a love of sports. Nigel came from a love of gambling.
Speaker 10I do remember my first bet, and I think it was 1987 Grand National, and I had a one pound on a horse called West Tip at 16 to 1, and it came in. It was a beautiful gray, and I remember thinking, wow, this is amazing. Why doesn't everybody do this?
Speaker 3Sports betting wasn't legal in the U.S., but fantasy sports were. And Nigel's team identified a major shortcoming, or perhaps opportunity, with how fantasy sports were being played.
Speaker 10We sort of thought, well, waiting three or four months to win is a very long time. What if we made it much faster?
Speaker 3They capitalized on a new idea floating around at the time. What if, instead of competing over a full season, contests took place over a single day?
Speaker 10Let's take a product people love, make it faster, make it mobile, and put real prizes around it. That should work. That was as simple as that.
Speaker 9Turns out, it was. Welcome to DFS, or daily fantasy sports. Daily fantasy sports.
Speaker 3And there was another major selling point of daily fantasy sports.
Speaker 2You could win a shipload of money. Be crowned a fantasy football millionaire. The
Speaker 6money is real, and with no season-long commitment, you only play when you want.
Speaker 3Instead of playing for a whole season and cashing out if you won after all those months, you could win or lose real cash every day. And if you're thinking, this sure sounds like gambling, in 2015, the comedians of late night television were right there with you. Daily fantasy is the best. I get to play every day.
Speaker 6You mean you get to gamble? It's not gambling. Oh, it's definitely gambling. You have a massive gambling problem. Play daily fantasy now. Just use promo code gambling or promo code obviouslygambling or promo code exploiting a legal loophole, but by any common sense definition, this is gambling.
Speaker 3But the companies, FanDuel and eventually their competitor DraftKings, argued it wasn't gambling. You weren't betting on one player or one final score. You were assembling a roster and making strategic decisions based on research. This was a game of skill, in other words, not a game of chance. Crucially, the laws of many states agreed with them, and so does Nick Bonadio. DFS really is a skill game.
Speaker 7And, you know, the fact that it existed in a real money space, that meant that, well, geez, I can leverage this skill and, you know, now I've got this second income stream, whereas I didn't have one before.
Speaker 3And that skill created a problem for FanDuel. The best players kept winning.
Speaker 7And the lower 90% just turn off. And no matter what you do to try to contest or lower state contests, it's really difficult to actually get them to do that because they're attracted by the potential of winning a million dollars.
Speaker 3To keep more customers happy, FanDuel needed to level the playing field. They couldn't make everyone equally skilled, but they could give everyone better information about the athletes in their fantasy lineups. So Nigel's team called up Nick, the sports data guy, acquired NumberFire, and made Nick FanDuel's VP of product.
Speaker 7And the industry was growing, you know, doubling, tripling year over year. And so it was really enjoyable.
Speaker 3In the 2010s, daily fantasy sports were booming. Money was pouring in from investors, and the leagues were happy. This wasn't gambling. It was skill-based engagement. So teams were striking partnerships with the apps. The NBA has an equity stake in FanDuel. MLB has won in DraftKings. And many NFL teams have advertising deals with the fantasy sites.
Speaker 10We were doing, you know, million-dollar deals with multiple teams. In fact, nearly every team in the league had a deal.
Speaker 3But beneath all of it, there was this question hanging over the industry. Could the daily fantasy sports apps, FanDuel, DraftKings, ever become something bigger? I asked Nigel about it. Was it in the back of your heads that, ultimately, this would be a great sports betting business, and maybe DFS could be a stepping stone?
Speaker 10Yeah, like, in a way, yes. Like, so, coming from the UK, which is where I was at the time, the US was always this great anomaly. Like, here we had a country, economically, you know, the most successful country in the world, where the population loved sports, loved gambling, right? But it was completely illegal. And we just sort of thought, this is crazy. Like, it seems weird that sports betting would be illegal. Other countries at the time were moving towards more regulation, liberalization. So why wouldn't the US do the same?
Speaker 3But as an American, Nick knew exactly why not.
Speaker 7For so long, there was this air of degeneracy to it, and this air of, you know, oh, this is taboo, and this is verboten. And then Adam Silver comes out and says, hey, this is something that we're looking into. In
Speaker 3November of 2014, the newly installed commissioner of the NBA, Adam Silver, writes an op-ed in the New York Times. The headline is a five-word bombshell, legalize and regulate sports betting. It was huge.
Speaker 5The moment it all went wrong, not by accident, not from poor planning, but because someone chose to do wrong and others chose to do nothing. Find and follow When It All Went Wrong, wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3To understand why the professional leagues had for so long been so resistant to sports betting, you have to go back. There's no one specific moment, but there is one that crystallizes their aversion. In 1919, eight members of baseball's Chicago White Sox were accused of conspiring with gamblers to throw the World Series.
Speaker 11As the impact of the confession sank in, the American people were at first shocked and then sickened.
Speaker 3That's author Elliot Asanoff on the Studs Terkel show in 1963, reading an excerpt from his book about the scandal, Eight Men Out. What came to be known as the Black Sox scandal was so significant that we still know some of the players' names. Lefty Williams, shoeless Joe Jackson. Say it ain't so, Joe. Public trust in the game nearly collapsed.
Speaker 11Baseball was in dire trouble, trouble that the American people would think of it as a dishonest thing. And in response,
Speaker 3baseball said, never again. The office of the commissioner was established to protect the state of the state. And that's what it was.
Speaker 11And people started thinking that if you could fix the World Series, then by gosh, you could fix anything. And it could conceivably happen again.
Speaker 3Sports gambling was already illegal. In fact, it wasn't until 1992 that Congress, under pressure from the leagues, felt obligated to make that explicit to individual states. That year, Congress passed a law that allowed sports gambling to be passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, or PASPA, effectively banning sports betting across the entire U.S., with one notable exception, Nevada. And that was that. So when Adam Silver, commissioner of the NBA, came out as the first league executive to endorse legalizing sports gambling, Nigel Echols, the CEO of the daily fantasy sports company FanDuel, was floored. We
Speaker 10had spent the last several years saying, we're not sports betting, we're a game of skill. And so at the very same moment that we do a deal with the NBA, he also right to think that sports betting should be legal. So that was like a little bit of a shock.
Speaker 3Adam Silver has never taken me up on interview requests, but here's part of what he wrote in that bombshell op-ed in 2014, read here by one of my colleagues.
Speaker 12For more than two decades, the National Basketball Association has opposed the expansion of legal sports betting, as have the other major professional sports leagues in the United States. But despite legal restrictions, sports betting is widespread. It is a thriving underground business that operates free from regulation or oversight.
Speaker 3He had a point. Bookies had been taking bets illegally since the earliest days of American sports, and Adam Silver used this black market to make his case.
Speaker 12Because there are so few legal options available, those who wish to bet resort to illegal bookmaking operations and shady offshore websites. There's no solid data on the volume of illegal sports betting activity in the United States, but some estimate that nearly $400 billion is illegally wagered on sports each year.
Speaker 3Adam Silver wanted that money to stay in the country, and he called out PASPA, the law that blocked states from legalizing sports betting, for being out of touch.
Speaker 12Times have changed since PASPA was enacted. Gambling has increasingly become a popular and accepted form of entertainment. In the United States, most states offer lotteries. Over half of them have legal casinos. In light of these domestic and global trends, the laws on sports betting should be changed.
Speaker 3Nick Bonadio, Fandle's VP of Product.
Speaker 7Adam Silver is a strong voice. It's one thing if a columnist says something about it, or maybe a representative from some state. It's another thing when the commissioner of the NBA says it. It lends this level of legitimacy to it. It lends this authority to it that was really, really big.
Speaker 3For the gambling lobby, that op-ed was the opening
Speaker 13they'd been waiting for. That was really enough for the American Gaming Association and their constituents, the casinos, to say, hey, maybe we should kind of start digging into if there's a way that we could get legalized sports betting in the United States.
Speaker 3This is Steven Master. He used to work for the NFL, but by the time Adam Silver's op-ed came out, he was a big fan of sports betting. He was a big fan of sports betting. , he'd moved on to a position at Nielsen, , he'd moved on to a position at Nielsen, , he'd moved on to a position at Nielsen, the company famous for calculating TV ratings.
Speaker 13They were the de facto currency for measuring TV viewership.
Speaker 3Steven's business was attention. Who watches what, how much, for how long, specifically when it came to sports broadcasts.
Speaker 13My group really worked with every single league, the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, and then all of the TV networks, whether that be ESPN or Turner or anyone that showed sports, really, to help them understand TV ratings. Which meant if you wanted to get
Speaker 3sports betting legalized, then Steven Master was the guy to call, which came as news to Steven. The UGA knew exactly where they wanted Steven to start.
Speaker 13They said, well, the NFL is really the league that benefits most if we have legalized sports betting.
Speaker 3The study was straightforward. All they needed were a thousand avid football fans.
Speaker 13500 of those fans were folks who said, you know what, I don't bet, I don't play fantasy, I don't do anything where I put any money or any stakes. I just love to watch football for the sake of watching. 500, they said, hey, yeah, I do play fantasy football. I do play daily fantasy, which is exploding at the time. Or I bet with a bookie, really, or in Nevada. So we kind of had those two buckets.
Speaker 3Over the course of an entire football season, he tracked what happened.
Speaker 13And the results were unbelievable.
Speaker 3The gambling and fantasy group didn't watch a little more football. They watched a lot more football.
Speaker 13Of the 500 who were avid fans but don't necessarily have anything riding on the game, watched about 15.8, 15.9 games a year, which is one a weekend. The other group had around 36 games that they watched.
Speaker 3That's more than twice as many games. Fantasy players and bettors also watched more of each game.
Speaker 1350, 60 percent more minutes per game were watched amongst that crowd, which all again makes sense because if you're a player who's in the fantasy team, you'll watch to the end.
Speaker 3And with that, the casinos had their golden carrot to tempt the leagues toward embracing sports gambling.
Speaker 13More viewers means more advertisers, means more money in media rights, means more sponsorship, means more data rights, means more jerseys sold.
Speaker 3Means more money. So Stephen and the American Gaming Association took their findings on the road. Executives, networks, owners. And to the league offices.
Speaker 13The NFL was a big client of mine, right? So, you know, I called some of the senior executives. Hey, I've got some really interesting stuff I wanted to show you on a study that we did around fantasy and betting and TV viewership. And of course, they were intrigued. And they said, sure, come on in. And I said, if you're I would like to take, you know, some folks from the American Gaming Association with me. And they pushed back and they said, you know what? We're fine to have you come in, but we really don't want anyone from the Gaming Association.
Speaker 3That's how radioactive gambling was to the sports leagues. They wouldn't even let the casino lobbyists into the building. So they met at a cafe instead, where Stephen walked them through the presentation.
Speaker 13There was probably about a 15 page PowerPoint.
Speaker 3And the response, it surprised him. No outrage or anger or even fear. There was curiosity. There was curiosity. And Stephen. Stephen had a sense that what he was saying actually confirmed something for the leagues.
Speaker 13They've never admitted it to me, but they like they kind of knew that it was always driving. Gambling was, you know, always driving viewership. But they just couldn't believe to what extent how many more minutes and how many more games were tuned in by gamblers.
Speaker 3And after a stop at the NFL, Stephen repeated the process for Major League Baseball, the NHL, league after league and network after network. And Nielsen projected. How much money each league stood to make if sports gambling were legalized across the country?
Speaker 13We did a whole bunch of meetings and they were very hesitant. But when they started looking at the numbers and diving in and they just kind of nodded their heads quite a bit and said, wow, this could really fundamentally change our business.
Speaker 3So with the NFL, which, as you said, is the the league that stood to make the most from the spread of legalization. Do you remember what that final figure was when you added up the direct? And indirect projections?
Speaker 13Yeah, they were close to about five billion dollars.
Speaker 3Five billion a year?
Speaker 13Yeah, annually. Wow.
Speaker 3Wow. That's real money.
Speaker 13Yeah. Right. And I would think they're probably even making more than that now. But it was about five billion dollars.
Speaker 3I later went back and checked and the original projection was closer to two point three billion dollars. But still, that's quite a windfall about the value of the average NFL franchise. At the time, certainly enough to get their attention. But while Stephen was carrying those numbers from meeting to meeting and while league executives were nodding along that sports betting could drive billions in new revenue, the leagues were officially still very opposed to sports betting. In fact, in 2015, while they were taking meetings with Stephen, the NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL and NCAA were all fighting to stop. New Jersey from legalizing it. In 2012, led by Governor Chris Christie, New Jersey passed a law allowing sports betting in their state. The leagues sued and years of litigation followed. By 2017, New Jersey's fight made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. You'll hear argument first this morning in case 16476, Christie versus N.C. By this point, the case wasn't really about sports betting anymore. It had become a fight over who gets to decide. Could Congress effectively freeze sports betting policy in place? Or did individual states have the right to chart their own course?
Speaker 14So the citizens of the state of New Jersey are bound to obey a law the state doesn't want, but the federal government compels the state to have. That seems commandeering. You know, Justice Kennedy, we don't. We don't think PASPA operates in that way.
Speaker 3The leagues had repeatedly prevailed before the lower courts to keep sports betting outlawed. This was New Jersey's last chance. Thank you, counsel. The case is submitted. For months, the industry waited. Everyone understood that if New Jersey prevailed, sports betting in America would be unleashed. And at least one group had a lot riding on the outcome. Because while all of this was happening in court in front of the world, and while the casinos were lobbying the leagues behind the scenes, daily fantasy sports, which had been shot out of a cannon just a few years earlier, were plummeting back to earth. Here's Nick Bonadio, then FanDuel's VP of product.
Speaker 7The rosy projections that everyone had for DFS weren't really coming true. And so DFS had plateaued.
Speaker 3FanDuel wasn't failing. But it wasn't. It was battling lawsuits that claimed daily fantasy was a form of illegal gambling and losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year while spending a fortune on ads. And there was another problem. They'd run out of new users.
Speaker 7We had saturated the market for people who wanted that product. So I don't know if it was like our tombstone was already written, but it certainly wasn't growing in the way that it was before.
Speaker 3FanDuel had already tried to save money by merging with its main business, its main rival, DraftKings. But U.S. regulators blocked the deal, saying it would have created an illegal monopoly. So instead, FanDuel accepted a deal to be bought by a U.K. company.
Speaker 7When Flutter bought us, it was not a guarantee that Passman was going to get repealed. Like, you know, they sort of took it, you know, no pun intended here. Like, they took a bet on us that like, OK, you know, there's a chance this might happen. And here's this company, FanDuel, that is kind of plateauing. Toad, from a growth perspective, like, if Passman does get repealed, then here is a massive asset that is undervalued. I think that's sort of what Flutter was thinking.
Speaker 3And then, on May 14th, 2018, the Supreme Court delivered its answer. Justice Alito has the opinion of the court. The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected New Jersey's argument, and we now reverse. In a 6-3 decision, after years of litigation, New Jersey had won. So if a state wanted sports betting, it could now authorize it.
Speaker 6Scores on the field could soon be leading
Speaker 9to bigger paydays off the field. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law on Monday that effectively banned sports gambling
Speaker 4in most of the U.S. The Supreme Court said that states can allow gambling on sports if they would like.
Speaker 7The court could not have made its admonishment more clear. PASPA was, in fact, not constitutional under their analysis. We were actually, all of us were in Dublin, Ireland, and then word gets out that PASPA gets repealed, and I think everyone in the room sort of, like, looked around, and you'd be like, well, holy crap, you know, here we go.
Speaker 3A lot of people assumed when sports gambling got legalized, the biggest winners would be the casino giants. You know, Caesars or MGM, these legacy companies, the companies that have been taking bets for decades, the ones that have been repped by the American Gaming Association.
Speaker 7Whereas I thought 100%, no doubt in my mind, FanDuel and DraftKings were going to win.
Speaker 3For years, FanDuel had been building technology for daily fantasy sports, and that tech turned out to have a lot in common with sports betting.
Speaker 7Regardless of whether you're building a DFS product or a sports betting product, you need an onboarding flow. You need. You need your location. You need responsible gaming. You need. You know, there's all of these things that were already built. And so we are already coming to it on second base.
Speaker 3FanDuel and DraftKings had millions of sports fans already using their apps, the kinds of fans primed to go from risking money on daily fantasy sports to placing old-fashioned wagers right from the palms of their hands. Throughout 2018, states began legalizing sports betting one after another.
Speaker 15Delaware becomes the second state behind Nevada to allow full-scale sports betting as of today. California lawmaker is introducing a constitutional amendment to make sports gambling legal in our state. Mobile sports betting launched over
Speaker 6the weekend in New York, and it already looks like a big win for the state and the casinos.
Speaker 3Soon, Canada would get in on the action too, massively relaxing the country's rules. And FanDuel was ready.
Speaker 7We would have been ready way before we actually got the thumbs up to launch. From front to back, we probably were online in New Jersey
Speaker 3six months, nine months, maybe. Nick estimates that in places where sports betting was legalized, FanDuel managed to convert about 90% of its daily fantasy customers into sports bettors. Watching that migration from the inside, for Nick, it came with mixed feelings.
Speaker 7DFS is a peer-to-peer game. It's me versus you. Sports betting is not like that. Sports betting is versus the house. And so now we are shifting to a company that is adversarial to its own users. Like we win when they lose. And any product person, any designer, they have deep empathy for their users. We want them to be happy. We want them to love our product. And it's hard to do that when they are losing and you're taking their money.
Speaker 3The league's embraced it. MGM will have access to MLB logos and official data for its sports betting operation. Broadcasters embraced it. Another initiative, Todd's Odd, with our friend Todd Furman, our sports betting expert. Teams embraced it. So DraftKings is now the official sports betting partner of the Cubs. And fans embraced it. Do you bet on sports?
Speaker 16Well, if my fiance's watching, I don't bet at all. But if she's not watching, we might bet a little too much.
Speaker 3Some of them, anyway.
Speaker 16Every other ad is sports betting.
Speaker 3It's brutal. And eventually, athletes would have to figure out how to live inside this new world, too. Including one NBA player named Jonte Porter. I've never really liked to use my basketball platform to gain anything. And I felt like that'd kind of be cheating. Coming up next time on Understood the Big Bet. So the bells go off. Bing, bing, bing. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Woo, woo, woo, woo.
Speaker 16That's losses disguised as a win. Once it gets legalized, I kind of start saying, okay, well, if they're thinking we should gamble and they think it's okay, well, then why don't we all gamble? Like, we should all be gambling. It was funny because we didn't care if we won or not. It was more sowing it in that group chat and being able to come back and replying to the message being like cash. Or dropping a money sign emoji or something. I kind of just started looking at money differently. I almost treated it like a video game. Almost looking at it just like numbers on a screen. But no, Jonte.
Speaker 4It's not just numbers on a screen. Like, that is your money.
Speaker 3You've been listening to Understood the Big Bet. Our lead producer is A.C. Rowe. The producers are Arman Agbali and Hadil Abdel-Nabi. The sound designer is Julian Uzielli, who also voiced the Adam Silver op-ed. Our story editor and senior producer is Veronica Simmons. I'm Danny Funt. This episode featured archival evidence. Archival tape from CBC and NBA TV, MLB TV, FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Batano, ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, PGA, Odds Shopper Sports Betting, Linemaker Sports, Jedi Modi Sports Network, ESPN, Yahoo Sports, Business Insider, HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO's Real Sports with Brian Gumbel, The Wall Street Journal, PBS, KPIX, Scripps News, The Associated Press, and The New York Times. Bayou Barristers, Fox Business, The Studs Terkel Radio Archive, The Supreme Court of the United States, Legal Sports Report, TSN, Toronto Maple Leafs, and CNBC. The executive producers of CBC Podcasts are Chris Oak and Cecil Fernandez. The senior manager is Tanya Springer, and the director of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani. For more from Understood, check out Season 5, Who Broke the Internet? Cory Doctorow traces how the internet went from a place of endless possibility to what he now calls the Enshitternet, and investigates whose fault it is. You can find that right here in the Understood feed. Just scroll back and hit play.
Speaker 2For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.
PodcastTranscript AI