Ohtani And Porter, And The Sky Falling | Sports Betting News
The crew brings a busy two weeks of sports betting news into focus with the latest on gambling investigations around Shohei Ohtani and Jontay Porter. Plus, a glimmer of hope for online sports betting in Mississippi and a handful of suggestions for better ways to handle college player props than enacting outright bans.
Full transcript
Matt Brown (00:07):
Hello and welcome to episode number 230 of the LSR Podcast. My name is Matt Brown, joined each and every week by the brightest minds in all of the gaming industry. With me, I have Adam Candee. You can find him over on the Twitter machine @AdamCandee, two E’s, no Y. And if you hate yourself, you can follow me @MattBrownM2.
(00:22):
Quick reminder, everything we do, absolutely free. So go ahead and hit that subscribe button, thumb up. Every little positive thing you can do, we do appreciate here on the LSR podcast.
(00:36):
We’ll talk about maybe hope in Mississippi for some expansion over there. We will talk about college betting props. Is a number attached to that really realistic?
(00:48):
But Adam last week, not around, so I want to circle back to a couple of unfortunately gambling kind of scandal things that are going on and none bigger than perhaps the biggest name in all of Major League Baseball in Shohei Ohtani and his translator, in which, I don’t know man. I’m curious to get your thought on all of this because it started out as a, “Yeah, I gave this guy a loan to help him out,” and now it went to, “Never mind, he stole from me,” and all this. And typically when there’s weird things going on with stories, there’s probably weird things going on with the story itself.
Adam Candee (01:31):
You certainly picked an interesting time to have to miss a week of this podcast because what has happened in the sports betting world in the past two weeks with Ohtani and with Jontay Porter in the NBA, which we will get to talking about a little bit later, it has been a time of upheaval followed by an assault of thinkpieces over what the state of betting on sports in the United States is like.
The crew brings a busy two weeks of sports betting news into focus
(01:57):
Let’s start with Ohtani. Ippei Mizuhara, his interpreter, his close friend, is now accused of stealing millions of dollars from Shohei Ohtani to pay off gambling debt to an illegal — underscore, bold — illegal bookie in California named Matthew Bowyer. What we’ve seen in the time that it took to get that story on paper is that Ippei had already gone out prior and given an interview in which he said that Shohei Ohtani was helping him pay off the debt. He said that Shohei Ohtani had made multiple payments from his bank account, that Ippei had watched as Ohtani made the payments from his bank account, $500,000 at a time to pay off the gambling debt. That was on Tuesday evening, I believe, and by Wednesday morning it had changed to a theft.
(02:52):
And so I find it very interesting in the first place that the guy who had run up millions of dollars in gambling debt and was about to ensnare one of the most famous athletes in the world in a gambling scandal, was trusted and allowed to have a one-on-one interview with ESPN and to represent the story the way that Ohtani’s camp wanted it represented, because he’s the same guy who just stole a bunch of money, theoretically, allegedly, to pay off his gambling debts. And so that to me was wild in the first place.
(03:25):
Everyone has been saying this story doesn’t add up, and I can’t argue with anybody who says that the facts of the story as they have been laid out do not add up at this point. I do not believe that Ohtani was lying in his press conference. I believe that Shohei Ohtani gave a lot of very specific answers in his presser that suggest to me that one of two things, either he’s absolutely telling the truth, and I do believe that to be the case, or if you’re someone who’s skeptical of the things that Ohtani said, that they now have enough iron-clad, either blackmail or payoff going to Ippei that they know that nothing that Shohei Ohtani said in that press conference will be refuted.
(04:06):
But either way, the important things to note here are that Ippei was gambling offshore with an illegal bookie in California, and whether Shohei Ohtani was paying off those debts or whether the money was stolen from him, either way, this is not something that he caused. This is not something that Shohei Ohtani was part and parcel to. And if someone came to me as a friend and said that they were in trouble, and they had debt, and I had the ability to help them pay off that debt, I’m not sure I would be running to my employer to tell them what I was doing. I’m not trying to defend the way that this might or might not have gone down, Matt, but to me there are more sympathetic aspects to Ohtani’s story than I believe a lot of people are giving credit for.
Matt Brown (04:58):
Yeah, again, we may never know the actual true facts of all this. I feel like it’s basically pretty simple, and I think it’s more what you were leaning to towards the end of your talk there, which is I think it’s a guy who has infinite dollars, who has a very long-standing relationship with a guy who probably had a guy come to him and say, “Hey man, I’m in big, big trouble. This has gotten out of hand and could get dangerous for me.”
(05:29):
And Ohtani looks, and being a friend, being of the ability to … I know this sounds crazy because $4.5 million to anyone is a lot of money, but when you are worth a billion dollars, a billion, when you’re approaching a billion with B, it’s more like a couple hundred bucks to me and you Adam, whatever.
(05:51):
And so I think he probably just went and took care of it and then he told his lawyers, or agent, or whoever it was, or someone close to him, and somebody’s like, “Oh bro, you can’t do that.” That’s like, “Oh man, that’s really nice of you, but you can’t do that. This is going to be horrible if people find out about this.” And so that’s what I feel like probably happened and why things had to switch the way that it did, but I think it’s probably nothing more than Ohtani just trying to be a nice guy. And then he got advice from someone who said, “You are a nice guy and that is an awesome thing for you to do, but you just can’t do that.”
Adam Candee (06:29):
And the problem for the media right now goes back to everything that they’ve been mad at Ohtani about, misplaced anger in my opinion, for a long time. Shohei Ohtani is not a transparent athlete. He does not give a lot of interviews. He does not give a lot of insight into his life. He didn’t want people to know what his dog’s name was for months at a time.
Matt Brown (06:50):
He secretly got married. He like secre t… How are you one of the most famous athletes in the world and you secretly get married? It’s like you pop up one day and you’re like, “Oh, by the way, here’s my wife.” He’s just like, yes, he is very private.
Adam Candee (07:03):
He is very private with a secret wife and a secret dog apparently. But Shohei Ohtani has not given the media the access that they like, and they were taking it out on him before this. They were saying, “Well, this free agency stuff, none of this would’ve happened if he would’ve just been a little bit more honest with us.” Well, he’s not under any obligation to do that.
(07:26):
However, there is a flip side and the flip side is that when you are not transparent about things that are not important, when big things happen, when important things happen, and you have not given transparency in the past and you’re not giving a lot of transparency now, you are unfortunately leaving everyone to fill in the details in the situation.
(07:46):
The problem, Matt, that we are beginning to see laid bare in front of us is that those who are left to fill in the details don’t know much about sports betting. And we have seen it come from the mainstream media. We have seen it come from mainstream media outside of sports, talking about how the Ohtani scandal is a sign that the intertwining of sports betting and professional leagues in the United States is going to lead to bad things.
(08:18):
I’m not telling you that it’s impossible for that to happen. What I’m saying is that Shohei Ohtani is not the reason for that. And Shohei Ohtani has nothing to do with DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars, or anybody else being tied up with professional sports leagues in business relationships. I understand that perception becomes reality, but we need to be educated in forming that perception. If media are going to cover this story about Shohei Ohtani, they need to take the time to understand that sports betting in the United States did not start in 2018. It has been proliferating offshore with bookies on shore for a very long time, and the idea that what has happened with Ohtani is the canary in the coal mine is just simply wrong.
Matt Brown (09:06):
Well, we can just take this even a step further, Adam, and it’s like it’s a simple case of KYC for both sides of this. It is know your customer on both sides of this. For one, in any of the legal sportsbooks, a random Joe Schmo is never getting down four and a half million dollars as it is anyway. They’re going to get flagged, their accounts going to get cut off, all the different things that are going on.
(09:30):
On the flip side, it’s a know your customer from the bookie standpoint because they will happily continue to take all of these massive bets from Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter because they understand what their position is. They go to him and say, “Hey, you’re going to pay these debts off. You’re going to go to Shohei and you’re going to get that money, or we’re going to break your legs, or we’re going to,” whatever it is.
(09:53):
So it’s a case of know your customer on both sides of this, which is in the legal market this never gets as bad as it is right now because you and I not having proof of funds, and not having the means of being able to put this type of money, we would get flagged for money laundering instantly. It would never happen in a million years. We would instantly go down because they would see that our net worth is not big enough to be able to make these size bets and to lose as much money.
(10:20):
And then, so on the other side of this, it’s the, oh, this guy has Shohei Ohtani who’s worth a billion dollars really close to him, “Sure, we’ll keep taking these bets because he’s going to go get us some money one way or another.” It might not be all four and a half million, but they know they’re going to get paid a lot of money one way or another because Shohei is probably going to bail him out. So it’s just a dealer… Again, we keep going back to this. The legal market prevents something like this because it gets insta-flagged, it instantly gets flagged, and this never ever even gets close to being as bad as it got.
Adam Candee (10:54):
Does anybody out there know who the biggest players are at DraftKings, at FanDuel, or say in Las Vegas at Caesars Palace, or at the Venetian, or at the MGM Grand? Does anybody know who the biggest VIP sportsbook accounts belong to, who’s playing the most on baccarat, who’s playing the most in pai gow? No, you don’t. And there’s a reason, because they keep those things quiet. In Vegas no one is out there advertising who their high-end clients are. In fact, it is a feature of them being able to gamble at those places that your identity will be protected, “We are not going to let everybody know who’s out there.”
(11:35):
Now, you want to talk about the other side of this with Ippei Mizuhara, the Matthew Bowyer situation, the bookie was thrilled to have someone related to Shohei Ohtani according to the reports that have been out there, he wanted to use that as a recruiting tool for other people. He wants to broadcast it to everybody that he’s got someone from Ohtani’s world because, “Hey, obviously if someone with Ohtani’s kind of money is betting with me, I’m a legit guy. Right?” air quotes.
(12:03):
So those are the differences when it comes to Ohtani betting in the legal market and in the offshore market, I should say, someone from Ohtani’s sphere not Ohtani.
Matt Brown (12:13):
Yes, yes. No, absolutely. So just to me, that was the first thing some people were saying to me, and I’m like, “This thing never even gets off the ground in the legal market, never even happens.” They’re going to look and say like, “Yeah, I mean Shohei Ohtani has money, but the translator certainly doesn’t have this type of money.” And then it goes into all kinds of investigations because then they’re wondering if he’s being a mule for Ohtani. Again, so it’s just all kinds of things that are going on there so this never ever gets off the ground. So yeah, I’m with you. But as you said, it wasn’t just this story that we were dealing with last week either.
Adam Candee (12:45):
No. And now we get to the story involving Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors, that I think if you are contributing to that mountain of thinkpieces that’s out there, you’re a little closer to reality when it comes to this. But I’m going to bring up a number of points to highlight why the legal market is the reason that this didn’t get any worse than it has been thus far.
(13:06):
So Jontay Porter, a reserve forward, the brother of Michael Porter Jr. from the Nuggets, plays for the Toronto Raptors. On two different occasions in the last few months Jontay Porter came out of games early with supposedly aggravations of lingering injuries or acute situations that he had to come out of the game after just a few minutes. At the same time, there was a significant amount of betting action on Jontay Porter unders. And these are the sorts of things that become very obvious very quickly when a sportsbook like DraftKings in this case puts out its information to media and says, “Here are the most bet props of the day.” And everyone tilts their head to the side like a dog, and says, “On both of those days, why would Jontay Porter be the most bet prop at the entire DraftKings Sportsbook?”
(14:01):
Now, what happened was the first time this happened in January, it was flagged. It said, hey, we probably should keep an eye on this moving forward to make sure that nothing like this happens again. And then in late March, guess what? It happened again. And when it happened the second time, it immediately became a major story. It was something in which Jontay Porter was identified as someone we need to be keeping an eye on, these bets need to come off the board. That is an integrity problem. That is a massive integrity problem for the NBA and for legal sports betting.
(14:37):
I know that we often will be accused of taking a rosy view of the regulated market here, but I will take a rosy view and say the reason this did not become worse was because it happened in the regulated market, because it was immediately on the first time that someone saw it happen, and on the second time someone saw it happen, they said that’s about it.
(14:57):
Also, because there were bets of a thousand dollars, $2,000 at a time, but people were trying to get down much larger action on this. They were trying to get down five-figure bets. And if someone’s trying to put down a five-figure bet on an NBA prop for a reserve forward, your eyes are going to pop if you are behind the counter.
Matt Brown (15:18):
Yeah, we’re talking about… And Adam, we always wonder about just the individual player prop stuff and individual player prop market, and where we’re going with all of this. And I think people look and see the type of money that NBA players make and realize this is just not going to happen at all. Well, the thing is Porter’s a two-way guy. He’s a two-way player. If you don’t know, I don’t have time to explain all this [inaudible 00:15:42]. Two-way contract guy, it comes out to about 400 grand. So if you’re making about 400 grand because you’re a guy that isn’t really on the roster and stuff, then you could be susceptible to someone coming to you and maybe offering something in order for you, for your services. The 99% of NBA players are making five-plus million a year. It is like the last guy on the bench is still making 4 and 5 million a year, and so it is very, very, very unlikely for any of that to happen.
(16:14):
So is there a future down the line here, Adam, where you know what, we’re only going to get prop bets, we’re only going to get prop lines on regular starters, or regular guys in the rotation, maybe. And if that’s the case, is that really going to be that big of a deal? I don’t think so. If we have to do things like that in order to just make sure that these markets are a little bit more safe and a little bit more secure, I’m all right with that. Sure, are they more exploitable with these guys that there’s less information about? Do the algorithms know less about some of these guys? Do you feel like as a prop bettor maybe you have some edges? Sure, but me looking at the industry as a whole, I would much rather give away a little bit of my edge on this side in order for the health of the industry as a whole. So if I’m only going to get the top seven, eight guys in the rotation on a prop bet side of things every game, so be it.
Adam Candee (17:05):
Or how about this? This is a classic limits situation. If the limits are low enough, offer it for everything if you want to have it on the board. Because how many people out there are trying to get a dime on Jontay Porter’s props? That’s not something that happens. That is not the common thing, which is why the Jontay Porter situation jumped out the way that it did. You can control this by having $100, $200 limits on markets for players where there is less information and where you might believe that in some way they are more volatile for you to be able to try to handle as a bookmaking operation.
(17:43):
Now, you talk about the $400,000, and I know if you’re listening to this, you’re probably saying that seems like a lot of money, like if I had a $400,000 job, I wouldn’t risk it as an NBA player. Well, who’s to say it’s for him? This is a young kid who maybe didn’t think about his $400,000, who maybe is thinking about his friends who are saying to him, “Hey, man, you know how easy it would be for you to just say that you tweaked your injury and you come out of the game and we could all get a bunch of money down? This is such a quick score. Who would ever notice?” Well, the answer is everyone, when this is happening in the legal market, we will all see it happen. And again, innocent until proven guilty. However, man, this couldn’t look any guiltier on the surface.
(18:32):
And Matt, I’ll go back to the situation with the Alabama baseball coach and the guy who tried to bet at the sportsbook in Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati who told the people behind the counter, “If only you knew what I knew.” In some ways the legal market has been helped by the fact that it has been some of the dumbest criminal enterprises possible that have happened, like the biggest flashing neon signs for, hey integrity monitors better catch the fact that a guy’s trying to get a hundred grand down on a college baseball game and that an NBA player is mysteriously coming out of games early at the same time that everyone is trying to get massive action down on his unders.
Matt Brown (19:15):
Yeah, we say it all the time. This doesn’t get caught if it’s not for the legal market. It’s what it is. It’s like you said. There are stats. They’re able to put out this information. People can take that information and do with it what they will and stuff like you said, innocent until proven guilty, doesn’t look great. So that’s all we’ll say here on the pod.
Glimmer of hope for online sports betting in Mississippi
(19:38):
Adam, we’ve talked a long time about Mississippi and some possible expansion going on in that state, we know one of the first states to legalize sports betting, but it was in a restricted manner. You needed to be inside one of the sportsbooks in order to get some stuff down, and despite the fact that their neighboring state in Louisiana legalized and did go with the online model, they were slow to come around, but maybe some light at the end of the tunnel here?
Adam Candee (20:04):
We’ll see. They’re at least going to have an opportunity to vote on an online Mississippi sports betting bill. Let’s see here as I checked the calendar. They’ve got about a week to do so. So what happened yesterday, we saw the online Mississippi sports betting bill clear its last committee in the Senate. That means that it’s eligible for a floor vote. Will it get a floor vote? We don’t know yet. It already passed the house a long time ago. There were some adjustments made to the bill, mostly minor things having to do with fantasy sports that were changed to the bill. So even if it passes the Senate, that means that either the House is going to have to concur with the changes or we’re going to have to have a quick conference committee to get this done. There are many days left, but as I tell everyone when it comes to legislation at the end of a session, you are deep, deep, deep down the pile of bills that really truly matter to people at the end of a legislative session when it comes to trying to get sports betting across the line.
(20:59):
That said, if you’re playing the long game on this, multiple years, like almost every year since Mississippi began in-person sports betting, someone has proposed a bill for online, and it went nowhere at all. So for this thing to get all the way to the altar in 2024 means that even if it doesn’t pass, I have a pretty good feeling for 2025 for it to come back and have a better chance to pass. But it’ll be interesting to see how that goes.
(21:28):
As you mentioned, Mississippi was one of the first three states to go live with sports betting because they had a loophole in a fantasy sports law that passed previously that allowed them to go live. But despite the fact that they have what we termed Mississippi mobile with being able to bet by your phone geofenced onto the casino property, no casino is really doing that in any sort of meaningful way. You can’t really say that they have any form of meaningful online in Mississippi. So we’re keeping an eye on what’s happening there in one of the college football crazed states because that Matt has also been a big topic of discussion lately.
Suggestions for better ways to handle college player props
Matt Brown (22:04):
Absolutely. Let’s go ahead and wrap things up here with some talk about what’s going on in the prop betting market, and this is now we’re into the college ranks here and not necessarily in the pro ranks we were talking about a little bit earlier.
(22:17):
But Adam, this is something you and I we’ve talked about a couple of different times on the podcast given our opinions on all of this. And now we get a study come out that I’m not going to say is incorrect. I will just say I have the little curious face emoji going on as I was reading this on LSR.
Adam Candee (22:36):
I’ll give you a little bit of behind the scenes on the reporting and publishing of this story. Our Sam McQuillan came to me with this note from Jordan Bender at JMP Securities, and to be clear, who has been a very reliable person to discuss matters related to sports betting for a couple of years, and said that they had this note that they were putting out that said that if a national ban on college props, as we heard requested by NCAA President Charlie Baker, were to go into effect, that it would slash roughly $200 million from the annual revenue of legal sportsbooks in the United States. We’re talking about $11 billion of revenue and roughly $200 million. You’re talking about a little less than 2% of all revenue made on sports betting in the United States coming from college player props. Just think about that for a second. It’s a tough one for me to get my head around.
(23:39):
Now, we mathed it out and I felt comfortable reporting what this note said. However, it would be surprising to me if the sportsbooks all threw open their ledgers and showed us what the wagering looked like and it came out to this. I think the important part of this story though is to report on yes, the NCAA after successfully lobbying the state of Ohio to change its rules to no longer allow player props on college athletes has now tried to take this national. And we knew they would. There’s no surprise at all that the NCAA had one round of success and then said, you know what? We’re going for everyone. We’re going to try to see if we can get these banned in as many places as possible.
(24:21):
And Matt, you and I have said on the podcast, we’re not entirely opposed to it. We’re not entirely opposed to the idea of banning player props on college athletes. I know there have been those in the legal sports betting market who’ve said, “If you do this, it’s just going to drive people offshore. They’re just going to go find a way to bet on it, et cetera, et cetera.” OK-
Matt Brown (24:43):
Fair.
Adam Candee (24:43):
Maybe.
Matt Brown (24:44):
Fair. Yeah. Right. Fair.
Adam Candee (24:45):
It’s a fair argument. I agree with the argument, but I also feel like as we get into the idea of juice being worth the squeeze, you already mentioned, you as a regular bettor would be willing to give up some end of the bench players in professional sports leagues having props in order to facilitate the overall health of the market. I think you’ll find an even broader swath of the population who’s willing to give up player props on college athletes, which is maybe one of the most on the surface susceptible areas for someone with bad intent to be able to manipulate the legal market. That is a place where I believe that if we were to find some sort of a compromise that was closer to what the NCAA was looking for, I think you would find more consensus out there than you would expect.
Matt Brown (25:34):
Yeah. I think that there are solutions to not having to do an outright ban, but Adam, it would take what we commonly know as prop betting, and it would kind of have to twist it a little bit. Of course, the obvious one that you and I have said multiple different times where you could leave it the same that it is right now, is just make the limits just basically micro limits, like you’re never getting down more than $500 on a certain bet.
(26:00):
But the thing is that the algorithms can also go in and put a limit on different players too. This is not crazy. The technology companies are fantastic at this stuff. If I go in and try to bet a golfer, I can’t put as much down on a guy that’s 150 to 1 as a guy that is 20 to 1, because they don’t want me to be able to put that. I can’t win a quarter of a million dollars on one golf outright, so the limit is lower on that specific player than it is on a guy who’s a little bit lower odds. And you could go about it from that standpoint. If you want to do that, you could even tier the bets and the max bets on certain players and certain things like that.
(26:41):
Or Adam, we don’t like this as bettors, we don’t like this as bettors, but if we wanted to keep some form of collegiate prop betting, you can make them one-way markets and you have to bet the over. Because the only way that bad stuff happens is when you can go the under because a person could then air quote “tank” or whatever it is, or do something like that. If it is for achievement, well, there’s no guarantee in achievement. And so you could make them one-way markets and they would be all over bets. You wouldn’t be able to make under bets if you wanted to.
(27:19):
So again, just there are solutions to this without an outright ban, but again, if an outright ban is what it is to make sure that we don’t have to deal with this all the time, then I guess so be it.
Adam Candee (27:32):
Let me add a thought to this, Matt, because you can go beyond the individual player props. What if they are team-based props? What if instead of Blake Corum’s rushing yards for Michigan, we talk about Michigan rushing yards total in the game. Because the theory being it is a lot harder to get a whole group of people to agree to manipulate a market than it is to get one player to turn an ankle early in a game and have to come out like the Jontay Porter situation. There are ways to offer some markets here that I think would still meet the appetite of bettors who want to be able to get really into a college game without us having to offer a market that would not make a lot of regulators and legislators happy, as we have the perception of these things become more and more… I’m not going to say tainted. Tainted’s not the right word, but misunderstood in some ways, sullied in some ways with the stories of the last couple of weeks.
(28:33):
Because I am not unsympathetic to those who say that the proliferation of sports betting is going to raise the risk of integrity problems within sports, raise the risk of problem gamblers, etc. I’ve always said that I believe that the right way to deal with it is for legislators and regulators to be enacting the right rules, to be putting money behind responsible gambling efforts, to be strongly holding operators accountable when they fail at KYC, when they fail at anti-money laundering, etc., etc. Those are the things that can be done to enhance what’s happening in the legal market so that there can be a way for the legal market to exist that does not draw the ire of regulators and legislators who, as we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks, many have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the legal market is.
Matt Brown (29:28):
Yeah. And this also goes into the whole deal of you ban this, but if you don’t ban the pick’em games. Again, it is a far-reaching deal because the pick’ems will still offer the stuff.. So I don’t know. We said an outright band doesn’t have to happen. You gave an example of something that could happen. I gave a couple of examples of something that happened. Even another example would be, and this would be the one I would hate the most, but if it would at least keep it live, is that you just couldn’t make single bet prop bets. Everything would have to be a parlay.
(30:01):
And like you were talking about, Adam, it’s harder to get multiple people to do things than it would be to get a single person to do things. And so we don’t want to go to that extreme or that measure, but again, we don’t have to just because something might happen, some bad things might be able to happen, then it’s just like, “OK, got to be cut off. Let’s ban it all together.” There are ways we could go about this without doing that. Again, whether it’s limits, whether it’s making all the markets one way markets, whether it’s you have to at least have two legs to make a profit. Like you said, maybe it’s team based as opposed to… There are solutions to this that aren’t always just like, “OK, let’s cut it off completely.”
Adam Candee (30:40):
Totally agreed. And where I think that you have to really put the onus for this is on the sportsbooks. They have to be the ones to recognize what could happen, which could be a far more reaching ban on NCAA props, maybe on certain professional player props, things that in the long run might actually have some effect on their bottom line, but not a really huge effect on their bottom line.
(31:04):
And what they need to do is some of the ideas that we’re throwing against the wall, and I think what you and I are doing, Matt, is throwing things against the wall just to show how many ways there are to deal with this without an outright ban. But the sportsbooks need to be the ones to say, “We’re going to innovate with some products that still meet the needs of our customers that also meet the needs of regulators and legislators.” But again, the idea of self-regulation is not a new discussion for us. We’ve been having the idea of will sportsbooks self-regulate for a long time. And I think quite honestly, it’s a mixed record of success in their doing that.
(31:41):
Now, I’ll throw another little piece of news in there that happened in the last couple of weeks. We did see a number of large US sportsbooks form a responsible gambling coalition, and I think that that is a step in the right direction without question, and this is the sort of thing that a coalition of sportsbooks working on responsible gambling could decide to take up as an issue.
Matt Brown (32:05):
Yeah. Again, we will continue to follow these stories, and you can read them all in depth over at legalsportsreport.com.
(32:12):
OK guys, everything we do, absolutely free, so I do appreciate your support. If you want to hit that subscribe button, or thumbs up button, or like button, or any kind of anything like that, any sort of buttons, press any button, any of the buttons you want to press, we’re OK with you pressing.
Adam Candee (32:24):
Just not the panic button. All right. We’ve seen enough of that the last couple of weeks.
Matt Brown (32:25):
Yeah, any of those, we don’t want that, but any of the other buttons, go ahead and push them. We do appreciate it.
(32:29):
If you want to follow Adam @AdamCandee, two E’s, no Y. If you hate yourself you can follow me @MattBrownM2.
(32:33):
For Adam, I’m Matt. Talk to you guys next week.