We Are Not FanDuel Stock Experts | Sports Betting News Today | LSR Podcast 192
Join us today on the Legal Sports Report podcast for the latest sports betting news and updates. The parent company of FanDuel approves a stock listing in the United States, but what does it mean for the market leader? Plus, a total reset for Bally Bet, a dive into Colorado’s anti-harassment program, and a look at the regulated market catching a potential college baseball betting issue.
Full transcript
Matt Brown (00:10):
Hello, and welcome to episode number 192 of the LSR Podcast. My name is Matt Brown. I’m joined each and every week by the brightest minds in all of the gaming industry. With me, I got my two main men here in Dustin Gouker and Adam Candee. You can follow them on the Twitter machine for absolutely free, and you should, @DustinGouker, @AdamCandee, two E’s, no Y. If you hate yourself, you can follow me @MattBrownM2.
(00:30):
If you want to take two seconds to hit the pause button, go down, five-star review, leave us a little good rating in there and a nice little couple of words. That would help us climb the charts, as well. We certainly want to get as many listeners to this as we possibly can.
(00:44):
We’ll talk Bally’s. We will talk Colorado. We will talk, oh, some weirdness going on in college baseball, as well. But, Dustin, here’s our disclaimer. We are not stock experts. We are not financial advisers. We are none of these things. We are not telling you what to do with your money, what not to do with your money, or what anyone else is going to do with their money. This is just news, and we have some fairly big news when it comes to gaming stocks.
Dustin Gouker (01:07):
No, buy all the stocks. Where’d he go? Which one. No, don’t do that. We are, yeah, provide you just information here, but this is really interesting news because you’re going to be able to finally trade, looks like the market leader in sports betting here in the United States, in FanDuel. We had the annual general meeting of Flutter, the parent company of FanDuel. Shareholders overwhelmingly voted to have a secondary stock listing here in the United States, which means, right now, obviously, Flutter publicly traded overseas.
(01:39):
You now are going to be able to, they’re spinning it off and have the secondary listing in the United States. You will be able to go out and buy FanDuel stock, possibly as early as the fourth quarter of this year if everything goes according to plan. But this is the access to capital that they’ve been waiting for. Obviously, they’ve been doing well overseas in that market. But having access to people who understand the North American market a little bit better, in terms of investors and all of that, I’m sure this is going to be additional capital for FanDuel as they plot their world domination plans here in the United States.
Matt Brown (02:20):
Adam, we can only guess, but we don’t know for sure, but we can only guess. We saw as every new gaming stock was getting listed and getting going there, that there was a little bit of excitement. People were coming in and there was a lot of action going on. One of the things you talked about a few weeks ago on this when this first started to come out was just the fact that just the volume of trading over here. People just getting involved is just so much higher than it is overseas. I could see where Flutter is, one, I’m surprised it actually took this long, but I can see why Flutter wants to get going over here.
Adam Candee (02:57):
Yeah, keep in mind that Flutter has been listed in London for quite a long time, but we’re talking about a secondary US listing for Flutter here, which would give people access to FanDuel stock. To the volume point that you’re making, Matt, the trading volume here would be significantly higher. I’m going to quote this number directly. The company’s average volume, according to Yahoo Finance, as of, I believe, February of this year, was 632,000 trades daily. The average daily volume of DraftKings here in the US with its NASDAQ listing is 12.8 million.
(03:35):
So you obviously are getting a much, much higher volume here in the US, and, perhaps more importantly, you’re getting the company that has, for the first five years of legal US sports betting, been the clear and unquestioned leader in this space. There’s a fair amount of hope built into the DraftKings narrative when you talk about being able to participate in that stock. We saw it get very high. We saw it get very low. Now, we’ve seen it have a mild bounce back this year. I believe yesterday it closed around $22 a share. As Dustin said, as Matt said, we are not stock experts by any stretch of the imagination. But let me ask you guys this. Do you think we could just change one letter and call ourself stonk experts? Could we at least try to say that we know a little bit about the stonks?
Matt Brown (04:29):
You know what’s funny? After one episode of this show two years ago, I went in and registered legalstockreport.com just for fun just to have it. I actually still have that. I still actually have that domain. So if we ever do want to make a full pivot outside of this, we do at least have the domain to get going with it, guys, just that’s out there. Dustin, when you want to make the full pivot over to stonk expert. Adam, when you want to get out of the industry, we want to start pimping whatever the new penny stocks are and things like that, I’ve got the domain for us already.
Adam Candee (05:05):
That’s the forward thinking that has made you the industry leader among industry leaders, Matthew.
Matt Brown (05:10):
More one of those things where it’s like, hey, for $11.99, won’t I do for a laugh. It cost me $11.99 to get the domain. Yeah, it’s like, yeah, I’m going to do that every single time.
Adam Candee (05:23):
I’ll give you a quick side story that goes along with that. During the pandemic, when I got my dog, all the dog training was on Zoom. I couldn’t meet anyone in person, and part of the training work that I did with the trainer required me to crate the dog and walk away. But the only place I could walk away was to go into the bathroom. I was basically in the bathroom waiting out the dog freaking out being in his crate. The trainer loved it. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world. He’s like, “Oh, are you doing it from your bathroom today?” The guy’s name was Mike. I decided the nicest gift I could give Mike for the work that he did for me was to register mikesbathroomwork.com.
Matt Brown (06:00):
See, see? There you go.
Adam Candee (06:01):
And give it to him as a gift. He was very grateful.
Matt Brown (06:06):
I was going to say he probably loved it, right?
Dustin Gouker (06:09):
We all buy domains just for funsies. I don’t play Barstool still. If anybody out there at Penn Entertainment wants my domain, it was $4.99. Yes. Maybe I’ll do something with it someday. You never know.
Matt Brown (06:24):
I think I have three other ones where every year it comes up and it’s like, hey, you need to … It’s going to automatically renew. I’m like, “I should probably just cancel that this year.” Then I never do, and then it just renews. Then it just renews and then it just renews, and it renews.
Adam Candee (06:36):
Nah.
Matt Brown (06:37):
We should have started GoDaddy years ago.
Adam Candee (06:39):
Channel99.com
A total reset for Bally Bet
Matt Brown (06:41):
We should’ve started GoDaddy, by the way, if anyone was wondering. We definitely should’ve. We should’ve done that back in the day. All right. Adam, let’s head over to a company in which we were curious as to the direction of everything. Listen, they were a topic of many a podcast that we had here because there was acquisitions fast and furious. We were thinking that it was going to make a big splash. Then basically launches were delayed and/or didn’t happen somewhere along the way. Now we have a major, major pivot for Bally’s.
Adam Candee (07:13):
We do, and we expected there to be a shift in strategy considering the previous CEO of the parent company of Bally Bet, Bally’s Lee Fenton, resigned at the beginning of the year. A new CEO, Robeson Reeves, was installed by the board following what you could rightly call close to $3 billion in unsuccessful acquisitions by Bally’s. They spent more than $2 billion on Gamesys, the online gaming space. They also purchased Monkey Knife Fight and Bet.Works. What ultimately happened, well, none of those things worked out for Bally in the long term. They ended up shuttering the Monkey Knife Five product, and the Bet.Works acquisition never worked out.
(07:55):
They launched one version of the platform; it didn’t go anywhere. They kept talking about a 2.0 version, which also really didn’t go anywhere. Now, what you’re going to see from Bally is a pivot in a direction that is the opposite direction of where a lot of US-facing sportsbooks have gone. They have signed a long-term deal with Kambi. Hey, remember Kambi? Kambi, which provided the back end for a number of US sportsbooks, including DraftKings, for quite a long time and had been seeing sportsbooks, including Barstool and DraftKings, move away from a third-party product for the idea of building something in-house. Well, now Bally is going to use Kambi for its trading solution. That is interesting in a number of ways. I think it’s Bally saying, “OK, we can’t reinvent the wheel here. It didn’t work. We tried it. We tried to come up with our own product. It didn’t work out.” They’re accepting the fact that they need to go with something a little more straightforward. The other thing is, this is a huge win for Kambi, right?
Matt Brown (08:58):
Mm-hmm.
Adam Candee (08:58):
This is actually a US-facing sportsbook, albeit one that does not register among a number of people, but it is a US-facing sportsbook, saying, “We want to use third-party technology.” Just that narrative in and of itself is such a shift that it actually goes to the point that Kristian Nylen, the CEO of Kambi, made on their Q4 call when he said, “We believe that there are going to be sportsbooks that decide that doing it themselves is not the best way to go.” Now, we haven’t seen DraftKings walk back from SBTech, and we haven’t seen Barstool and Penn walk back from theScore, so I don’t think that that’s necessarily a long-term trend. But for Kambi, it is a short-term win to be able to say that Bally Bet is going to be using them for their trading.
Matt Brown (09:43):
This was an interesting deal here when it comes down to it, Dustin, because we know there was a big acquisition made. It was going to be in-house tech, in-house trading. There was going to be all of that that was going on with Bally’s. Then it really did, something happened. Failure to launch, basically, essentially everywhere along the way. We were expecting them to get into market X, Y and Z. It never really happened. It was either delays or something wasn’t working along that they thought. Now it just has to basically start completely over at this juncture. Look, they’re smarter than we are, I assume. They’ve run the numbers, they’ve done whatever. It seems like it’s worth, the juice is worth the squeeze. But it is certainly behind the eight ball now and certainly playing catch up.
Dustin Gouker (10:28):
Again, you go, I say this a lot, but I think there was a fair amount of skepticism from all of us when all of these acquisitions were going down that Bally’s was going to really break through. This is the reboot of it. But it’s pretty clear they haven’t really, all these acquisitions they did have not been integrated in any real way, or very well. If you were looking at, I still don’t know what their path forward is other than they’re just not giving up, but there’s still a will to do this here. This will definitely be different. But I still look at the value proposition. I’m not sure what it is for them other than they’ve really not broken through in any way in any market.
(11:10):
Casino is going to be the part, I think, that between, the synergy between that and the rest of the business. There’s a lot of that behind this, too. But to think that Bally’s right now, even with this new move, is going to be a major player in US sports betting, I don’t see that right now. I’m not quite sure what the end game is out of this other than they obviously are admitting they’ve messed up. They’re trying to try a new path forward and still make this work. Obviously, the proof is in the pudding. We’ll see where this goes in the coming months and years.
Matt Brown (11:47):
Adam, when it comes down to it, it’s like we look at some of these guys that are coming in, specifically, having the physical presence with casinos and whatnot. I have no inside knowledge, I don’t think any of us do when it comes to this. But it’s almost like this is just a, let’s stay somewhat relevant somewhere along the way in hopes that there is widespread casino adoption down the line. Then we’re not just basically starting from ground zero. Then it almost seems like that has to be the strategy at this point. Because any real market penetration from a sportsbook side without spending millions upon millions of dollars in marketing things, which doesn’t look like they were willing to do in the first place, seems farfetched.
Adam Candee (12:30):
What’s interesting to me is if I were a business analyst, which I am not, I would say that it’s almost a weird reversal of the DFS playbook come to life here for some of these smaller operators. Where the idea is just to get people in on your technology and build up your database, and hope that there is a product that is legalized down the line, which was sports betting, which is now online gaming and iGaming. That you’re just hoping that in the long game that the DraftKings of the world run out of seed money. And that maybe that market share drops to a point where you can have a robust iGaming offering that is supplemented by having people coming into your physical casinos that you can bring onto that platform.
(13:20):
I’m not saying I think it works. But I’m not saying, I also don’t see how else some of these less-than-1% operators end up making any sort of hay out of the sports betting product, out of the online sports betting. I don’t see how it becomes something for them unless there is a long play into the iGaming space, which, again, is just ironic when you think about who’s leading in sports betting and how they built up their databases and product in the first place.
Matt Brown (13:48):
Guys, because I’m a man of many talents and one of those talents is being able to do two things at once, I was able to go to GoDaddy as we were doing this little bit right here, this segment. Betdkfdmgmcaesars365.com is available, so we can just cover every single one of the players out there or whatever, all in one domain. So betdkfdmgmcaesars365.com, $11.99 for the first year. We can actually add .co, .us and .info for just $3 more, $14.85 for the first year.
Dustin Gouker (14:22):
Really rolls off the tongue, that domain.
Matt Brown (14:25):
Really, you can see the ad right now. Just visit betdkfdmgmcaesers365.com and sign up for your … Come on, Adam. It sounds great, doesn’t it?
Adam Candee (14:35):
Gambling problem? Call 1-800 Matt Brown.
Matt Brown (14:39):
Oh, it’s so good though and who knows? Just for the LOLs, I might actually.
Dustin Gouker (14:43):
Is this what’s going to be on LSR After Dark is just us buying domains?
Matt Brown (14:47):
Yes. Awesome domains that we never do anything with ever. It costs us hundreds of dollars a year that we never make one cent off of, somewhere down the line. All right, Dustin, let’s head up to Colorado.
Dive into Colorado’s anti-harassment program
Dustin Gouker (15:00):
We got news out of Colorado that the Department of Revenue approved grant funding, the Colorado Athlete Wellbeing Program for athletes that are dealing with harassments. Now, this is not just for sports betting but, obviously, intersects with sports betting. Because we’ve seen, quite obviously, that there’s been a lot of harassment of athletes, both pro and college, related to sports betting and people not winning their bets, losing prop bets, things like that. It’s particularly rampant on social media we believe and all of that. We’ve seen some evidence, so it’s good that we’re seeing this. Of course, this is not, athletes might come under harassment for other reasons, just for losing a game that has nothing to do with gambling.
(15:45):
But I think this, short of being able to ban people from social media, or from sportsbooks around this, this is at least doing something around an issue that we’ve seen ESPN and others write about this. It’s something that, whether we believe it’s tied to legal sports betting or not, it’s something that’s getting play and something that deserves to be called out and helping athletes. Because a college athlete who misses a shot has no idea it turned a prop bet, or a spread bet, or a moneyline bet, any of those things. They might be harassed by gamblers privately or publicly on social media, Twitter, Instagram, whatever.
(16:27):
I’d say this is a good thing. We should be probably doing more of this across, this is just Colorado, but should we be doing something like this nationally? Should other states be looking to do this? Because it’s not a problem that’s going to just go away easily. At least supporting athletes that are facing this seems like the bare minimum we can and should be doing.
Matt Brown (16:48):
Adam, I don’t know how easy it would be to do, but certainly something that I think that, as long as there’s something in place, and if anyone gets super egregious with all of this, that there is at least something you can point to. To say, “Hey, look. This was in the terms and conditions when you signed up. You tweeted this guy 57 times in a row, calling him all these nasty names. Your account is suspended for six months.” Or whatever, but whatever it might be somewhere along the line.
(17:16):
I think that having something written that people agree to that, now, there is repercussions if they go overboard with all of this stuff. Because, look, I have been saying this well before sports betting, well before … I think people, if you tweeted athletes negative things or whatever, I think you’re a gigantic loser. I cannot imagine what more you have going wrong for you in life than to go in and do this Twitter storm of a guy that missed a shot late in the game, and tell him how horrible he is, and that you hope horrible things happen to his family. I think you are the biggest loser on the face of the planet.
(17:49):
Now, add in that there’s money involved with that, too, not just fandom but also money involved, I’m all for slapping these guys’ hands. Then repeat offenders, bigger suspensions and who knows what. If it gets crazy, crazy, lifetime bans. All the stuff like that should certainly start to, I hope, make its way into terms and conditions for these books.
Adam Candee (18:12):
I have to think that the Venn diagram of people who tweet nasty things at athletes, especially college athletes, and people who post eggplant emojis and raindrop emojis at thirst traps has to be just one circle, right?
Matt Brown (18:29):
Yes.
Adam Candee (18:29):
There’s not even a little bit of overlap, right?
Matt Brown (18:30):
Yeah.
Adam Candee (18:31):
It’s just the exact same person who’s doing all of these things. It’s amazing to me that this is something that has to be dealt with. But I put this on the agenda here for us to talk about for two reasons. First of all, I think it’s interesting that they’re developing the program. It’s a $250,000 grant. I thought the most interesting part is that, while it’s also going to allow mental health services to be more accessible to athletes, this was the line that caught my attention. “The app will combine a mental health assessment with an avenue for reporting and investigating harassment. Kindbridge will use its network of investigators and resources to attempt to find the person responsible and share the intel with law enforcement.”
(19:10):
I think just the idea of deterrent in the first place could be something that is both useful and, hopefully, repeatable throughout the US if this works out. Now, I think about this much like a pilot program. There’s no proof it’s going to work. But the fact that Colorado is going to dedicate some resources to at least trying something to see if it can be accomplished, I think, is a great move.
(19:33):
The second reason I included this is because I disagree fundamentally with the idea that sports betting being legalized and regulated in the US has led to this massive increase. I think that our old friend-
Matt Brown (19:47):
Oh, yes. Certainly is not. Correct, it’s-
Adam Candee (19:47):
Chris Grove has been the one leading this charge with the fight against some of the idea online to say, “We also need to look at the fact that, A, harassment, in general, in the last few years has grown for a number of segments of society.” And the online channel being made available and the ease of access that people have to be able to do this with college athletes, in particular, pro athletes, as well. But when we talk about under 21 and how vulnerable they are to this, then I think we have to make a serious, well-rounded consideration of what’s really leading to this. Instead of just the binary look of legal sports betting equals more harassment.
(20:31):
I’m pointing specifically to the ESPN story that link the two together. David Purdum, who does a lot of great work in the sports betting space, was going back and forth with Chris Grove saying that he thought that his conclusion was it had led to more harassment. I’m not saying that’s not possible, but I’m saying making the link without a much more serious consideration of how easily available it is now and just how much hate speech has grown in general is incomplete.
Matt Brown (21:02):
I like David for sure. David can take the L on this one. That is not, I have … As someone who’s been on the Twitter machine since, basically, the beginning of all of this and has followed all of this stuff, I worked in sports my entire life. I’ve worked in some sort of tangentially, whether it be in the sports gaming space, or just sports in general, and this is not because of the adoption of gaming. Listen, it extends beyond that even further.
(21:30):
Dustin, you and I just giving opinions on things or whatever, the safety of anonymity for these people online allows them to be way more nasty than they would be in person, or in any other circumstance, in any other situation in life. You and I have dealt with a lot of these various different things. I laughed off some of the different things. But, guys, just to let you know, I’m a nobody, and I certainly have cost nobody any money by missing a shot in a game or whatever and all this stuff.
(21:58):
I had a guy send me a link, an eBay link, to a rickety chair and then an Amazon link to a rope and basically saying, “Here’s the chair and the rope that you can use to hang yourself,” and things like that. Again, I’m a nobody, and I’ve certainly cost nobody money by missing a shot or all this. This has been going on for a long, long time. It’s just we’re hypersensitive to it now because of the whole gaming thing or whatever. But this is not like, oh, all of a sudden we’re getting way more of this because people are betting. That’s just not the truth.
(22:30):
Fans sometimes are idiots. People sometimes are idiots. The condition of anonymity also helps them be a bigger idiot. When we have this thing, and I always go back to this and not to get on a soapbox and get off on a tangent here or something like that, but it’s like, OK. You’re driving. It’s like a road rage thing, and then elevate it by 100 times when you can go online, and you don’t even have to look at the person. When you’re in a car, and the only thing separating you and the person right next to you is this tiny little piece of glass between both of your cars, you have no problem turning and MFing that person over and over again and flipping them the bird and all that.
(23:05):
However, if you stepped 6 inches outside of the car and you were both standing face to face, you would never do it. It’s just that little bit of glass between you turns you into this super human or whatever. It’s the same deal that goes on online. It’s just you have that barrier between you and the human being and that’s been going on. Dustin, you’ve experienced it. I’ve experienced it. These athletes, I’ve worked extensively with athletes physically when I was in the UFC, when I was working MMA, almost primarily with dudes getting some of the worst things said to them on the face of the planet. This was a decade ago. This was well before any of this was going on, so I have to push back on the whole deal that it’s getting worse because of the sports betting.
Dustin Gouker (23:46):
I think it’s just one piece of the puzzle is where I come at it from. It’s like, yes, there’s probably more people, there’s definitely more people betting. Because I think we know at this point, it’s not just, clearly there’s new people betting who don’t bet very much. But some of these people are also … It’s not a problem.
(24:00):
Like you said, it’s not a problem that just started. This goes back even before DFS and people accosting people for ruining their regular fantasy teams, which don’t have all, sometimes don’t even have that much money or any money, and they’ll still yell at athletes online. Like Adam said, it’s a confluence of social media, access to people, hate speech and just what’s happened in US society over arguably just in the last five years or so.
Matt Brown (24:25):
The normalization of being an asshole, yeah.
Dustin Gouker (24:28):
Like being mean and an asshole, right?
Matt Brown (24:28):
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Dustin Gouker (24:29):
These are all of these things combined. Yes, it’s not just, I also reject that as just more legal sports betting. Because, yeah, people are now emboldened to do this. Because we see this, again, outside of the sports betting. We’re not going to get too political here, but we see this everywhere in society now. It’s not that people are just more bold about expressing their opinions, hate speech, just saying things that you wouldn’t say to a person in person, although even we saw that example with Bradley Beal recently in the NBA.
(24:59):
But it’s not just legal sports betting. This is going to dovetail into our next item, as well, that this is part, this is not just a legal sports betting problem. I think it’s the fact that we see this is a holistic, larger problem. Like Adam said, it’s really interesting that we’re seeing somebody try to do something about it rather than just wishing the problem away.
Catching a potential college baseball betting issue
Matt Brown (25:21):
Adam, yes, this does go into this. This came across my radar, obviously, because of the teams involved. When it first came out, very, very little details. I still don’t know for sure if we have everything that we’re looking for in this story. But it was interesting that Ohio decided to flag a collegiate baseball game.
Adam Candee (25:42):
Yes. For those who don’t know, Matt might have a very special interest in one of the teams involved in this, talking about an LSU-Alabama baseball game. The short version of this, if you haven’t heard, is that Ohio’s executive director issued a notice to all sportsbooks in the state that they needed to halt any wagering involving the Alabama baseball team. Now, that is very specific. College baseball, if you don’t know, is not exactly a high-volume trading experience for any sportsbook.
Matt Brown (26:16):
You got to do several scrolls to find the menu. If you’re looking at that.
Adam Candee (26:20):
You really have to be digging to find this. The fact that a college baseball game in another state is what ultimately had a flag raised by U.S. Integrity to Ohio regulators is certainly worth our attention. Now, we don’t know much more than that. I can’t give you much more than that other than first reported by ESPN that this was an issue. We don’t know if wagering will again become available on Alabama baseball moving forward.
(26:50):
The statement that just came out from the university, I’ll read this directly because we just saw this recently. “Alabama Athletics became aware of this situation Monday evening and is actively seeking information about the report.” It doesn’t really tell us anything, but we’ve seen essentially these no comments from everyone. We tried to talk to U.S. Integrity. They said they couldn’t comment on the ongoing investigation. Obviously, the Ohio regulators are just standing by the statement that they put out halting betting on this.
(27:21):
Again, the things to understand. Not a high-trading volume experience when it comes to college baseball, and we are probably talking about extremely low limits when it comes to betting on a college baseball side. The bet happened somewhere in Ohio. We’ve heard rumors as to which sportsbook it involved. We’ll wait till we have a little bit more confirmation before we put that out there. But it is an ongoing situation. It is, I think you guys would agree, an example, once again, of the regulated market doing what it’s supposed to do and finding these things before they become bigger problems.
Matt Brown (27:58):
Dustin, so this goes back to where we say that this stuff really does work. Low-level tennis, all these things are that where it’s low volume, it’s low limits, it’s whatever. If you see a game just all of a sudden start getting popped, or a low-level tennis match or anything start getting popped, it raises red flags. That’s why U.S. Integrity was able to flag something like this.
(28:21):
Guys, I did a little bit of my own research to try and figure out if I could figure out anything that was going on here. I do know the game in question. The starting pitcher for Alabama got scratched. He had back tightness and ended up getting scratched in the game. My guess is that maybe it got out that they were going to be starting a lesser pitcher, or something like that. Maybe bets started rolling in on LSU. Again, just speculating, just guessing. But that’s all I could figure out that I saw from this.
Adam Candee (28:57):
To add to that, Matt, if you’re not familiar with college baseball, your Friday night starter is your number one starter.
Matt Brown (29:02):
Right, right.
Adam Candee (29:02):
That can make a major difference.
Matt Brown (29:05):
Again, just speculation. I don’t know. There was no details given on all of this, Dustin. But, regardless, again, it’s like, “Hey, let’s chalk one up for the good guys here.” Let’s chalk one up for what we keep and continue saying, which is, “Hey, this is a good thing, guys. We’re able to catch all these things.” All these concerns that regulators want to bring up as to why sports betting could be bad is actually proof in the pudding right here as to why this is actually good. Because you monitor these things, they’re going to happen regardless. It’s going to happen anyway. So to be able to catch it and do something about it is a step in the right direction.
Dustin Gouker (29:40):
Yeah, we’re a broken record about this stuff.
Matt Brown (29:41):
Yes.
Dustin Gouker (29:41):
But we have to keep playing the broken record so that people listen. Because this is exactly … But people are going to also hold this up and say, “Oh, we need to ban betting on college baseball, or betting on state college teams.” They’re going to use this as that. But it is exactly what you have said, Matt. This is an example of it working. You would not catch this otherwise if the regulated market didn’t happen in the US. Because you can bet on these games anywhere offshore right now and have been for years and who knows what we’ve missed.
(30:11):
Maybe this was a real integrity problem, maybe it wasn’t. But it’s clear that this is the example of it working. It’s not like, I cringe because I fear if whatever comes out of this, people are going to hold this as, “Oh, we need to stop college betting.” That is not the lesson of this. The lesson is we are, again, and to emphasize what Adam said, that this is low limits. There’s not a ton of money being traded on college baseball results. It’s not going to happen. Nobody wants to expose themselves to that for some of the reasons we’ve just talked about. But we have, yes, this is an example of the system working. Please don’t use it the other way and say, decry betting on college sports and things like that.
Matt Brown (30:52):
Right. Yeah, Adam, you bring it up. We’re looking, I don’t know, because I don’t bet college baseball. But $500, maybe $1,000 limits. I can’t imagine that it’s much higher than that when it comes down to it. LSU was a -245 favorite anyway, so nobody was getting rich on this. But it’s still just, it’s good to notice if a flurry of bets come out of nowhere for a team. Then it comes out that the starting pitcher for the other team gets scratched, hey, let’s put two and two together. Realize that maybe something went on here, somebody made a few hundred bucks. I hope it was worth it, whatever. I hope it was worth it for your account to get banned and all the things that go along with it.
Adam Candee (31:30):
If the sportsbook in question is the one that we believe that it is, that took these wagers, I guarantee you those limits were not extremely high. We are not talking about one of the “sharp sportsbooks,” giant air quotes on that, that likes to take big money.
Matt Brown (31:46):
Guys, everything we do, absolutely free here, so please head over to legalsportsreport.com. Take in all of the great words that Adam and team over there are putting on the website. Of course, this podcast, absolutely free, as well. All we ask of you, costs you zero dollars and zero cents and just two seconds of your time, hit that pause button, go down and give us a five-star review. Maybe even if you want to drop a few words in there, as well, certainly do appreciate that. For Adam, for Dustin, I’m Matt. Talk to you guys next week.