Action’ Producer Bradley Jackson on the Odds of Texas Legalizing Sports Gambling
Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 legislation 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 betting on the outcome of a match, but they are not likely to be the final.
Texas-based documentary filmmaker and UT graduate 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 gambling due to their followup to this undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt manager Luke Korem and fellow manufacturer Russell Wayne Groves (as well as showrunner David Check), Jackson produced the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, which monitored the winners and losers of this 2018-19 NFL season–maybe not the ones on the area, but those at the casino, wagering a small fortune on the results of the games being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson ahead of this series’ final episode to talk about sports gambling, daily fantasy, and what the odds are that Texas allows fans to place a bet on game day within the next few years.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this project?
Bradley Jackson: How big of a business this is. I mean, you find the amounts and they are just astronomical. From the opening sentence of the series, when we are showing all these people betting on the Super Bowl, that just on the Super Bowl alone, I think it’s like six billion dollars. 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 prohibited. That number from Super Bowl weekend was among the very first stats I saw when we were getting into this project, and it blew my mind. And then you look at the real numbers of just how much is really bet in the usa, and it’s billions and billions of dollars–and so much of this is prohibited wagering. Therefore it seems like it’s 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 hadn’t ever done it, and I’ve spent six months embedded in this world, I have made a few –low-stakes stuff, simply to find that sense of what it’s like. And it’s fun, especially when you’re wagering a reasonable amount–but the emotions are still there. I’m a very emotional person, so when I dropped my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU wager, I felt awful for approximately an hour. Because naturally I bet on UT, therefore when OU won, it hurt not only because my team lost–it hurt more that I dropped fifty bucks.
Texas Monthly: Do you have a feeling of when placing a bet like that in Texas could be lawful?
Bradley Jackson: We are living in a country that’s obsessed with sportsfootball especially. And nothing brings people’s attention over betting on soccer, especially the NFL. I think finally Texas can perform some sort of sport betting. I really don’t know how long it’s going to take. I think they’ll do it in cellular, since I don’t think we will see casinos in Texas, actually. I have been hearing that maybe Buffalo Wild Wings is going to do some type of pseudo sports betting stuff, which means you might go to Buffalo Wild Wings and get in your phone and set a fifty-dollar bet on the Astros, and I feel that will be lawful one day. Probably sometime in the next five years.
Texas Monthly: With this industry being huge, illegal, and so largely untaxed, to what extent do you think gaming as a source of untapped revenue for the country plays into things?
Bradley Jackson: This will play hugely into it. From a monetary perspective, it is 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 will need to take sports gambling out of the shadows and then bring it into the light. That way you can tax it, which is obviously good for the states, but then you can also make sure it’s done above board. Once the Texas legislature sniff really how much money can be taxed, it is a no-brainer.
Texas Monthly: The prohibited bookie that you talk to in the documentary says that legalization doesn’t impact his organization. What was that like for you to understand?
Bradley Jackson: It blew me away. When we were sketching out the characters we wanted to try and determine to put in the show, an illegal bookie was unquestionably 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 going to be very hurt by all of this. After we met this man, it was the specific opposite. He was just like,”I’m not sweating in any way.” I was really shocked by it. He’d say he thinks that if every state eventually goes, if that becomes 100 percent legal in every nation, then he think he could be impacted. But he works out of the Tri-State region, and now it is only legal in New Jersey, and only in four or five spots. He breaks it down quite well in the end of our first episode, where he just says,”It’s convenient and it is credit–both C will never go off.” Having an illegal bookie, you are able to lose fifty thousand dollars on credit, and that can really negatively impact your life. Sometime you can still hurt yourself gambling legitimately, but you can’t bet on credit through lawful channels. If casinos start letting you wager on credit, I believe his bottom line could get hurt. The longer it’s a part of this national dialog, the more money he gets, as people are like,”Oh, it is right?”
Texas Monthly: Is daily dream among those gateways to sports betting? It seems like it is only a slight variation on traditional gaming.
Bradley Jackson: In Episode 3, we follow one of the top five daily fantasy players in the us. He’s a 26-year-old kid. He makes millions of dollars doing this. He told us that the most he has ever produced was $1.5 million in one week. Among our hypotheses for the series was that the pervasiveness of everyday dream was a gateway to the leagues letting legalized gaming to really happen. For many years, you saw the NFL say that sports betting is the worst thing ever and they’d never allow it. And about four years ago daily dream like DraftKings and FanDuel began, and they purchased, I think, 30,000 advertisement spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you’re watching the NFL, any commercial was DraftKings or even FanDuel. And a lot of people were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say that you believe sports betting is the worst thing ever. What’s this not gaming?” It’s gambling. We really interview the CEO of DraftKings, and a couple of the high-up people at FanDuel, and I believe it’s B.S., however they say daily fantasy is not gambling, it’s a game of skill. However, I really don’t think that’s true.
Texas Monthly: How individuals who make money do it will involve running substantial quantities of teams to win against the odds, instead of picking the guys they believe have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our everyday fantasy player over a weekend of making his stakes, and he does not do well that weekend. And he spoke about how what he is doing is a good deal of ability, but each week there are just two or three plays which are completely random, and they either make his week ruin his week, and that is 100 percent chance. This really is an element of gaming, as you are putting something of financial worth up with an unknown outcome, and you have no control on how that’s given. We watch 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 making any gains, and then you visit Zeke get, like, a four-yard pass and he is like,”If one more of these happens, then I am screwed.” And then there is this tiny two-yard pass from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”I simply lost sixty thousand dollars right there.” And you watch $60,000 jump out of an account. There.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has contended that daily fantasy is illegal in Texas. Are there cultural factors in the country which may make this more difficult to maneuver, or is some thing similar to that just a way of staking a claim to the money involved?
Bradley Jackson: It might just be the pessimist in me, but believe at the end of the day, a lot of it just comes down to cash. A fascinating case study is exactly what occurred in Nevada. In Nevada they made daily dream illegal, which is mad, because gaming is legal in Nevada. But they made it illegal because the daily fantasy leagues wouldn’t pay the gaming tax. So it was just like a reverse place, in which Nevada said,”Hey, this is betting, so cover the gaming 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 think it in a few years, when they determine just how much money there will be made, and that there are smart ways to start it, it is going to happen.
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