EPISODE 240 | LSR Podcast

The US Sports Betting Graveyard Is Getting Crowded | Sports Betting News | LSR Podcast 240

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32 min
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The US Sports Betting Graveyard Is Getting Crowded | Sports Betting News

Two more brands decide to call it quits after trying to make a dent in the US sports betting market. What does it mean for the bigger players? Plus, the latest developments in the Jontay Porter NBA scandal, why a new acquisition shows Caesars is better understanding its situation, and a New Jersey legislator starting the long climb toward reversing a betting ban.

Full transcript

Matt Brown (00:15):

Hello, and welcome to episode number 240 of the LSR Podcast. My name is Matt Brown, joined each and every week by the brightest minds in all of the gaming industry.

(00:23):

We are back after the holiday, Matt Brown, Adam Candee with me here, @AdamCandee on the Twitter machine. That’s two E’s, no Y. If you hate yourself, you can follow me, @MattBrownM2. We are on all of your favorite podcasting platforms, so do go in, subscribe, rate, and review. We do appreciate all of the support unless you’re going to leave a three star or lower, and then in that case, just don’t, just move on.

Adam Candee (00:42):

Just email me, email me, adam@legalsportsreport.com. Detail your concerns. Tell me, is it that you’re not getting enough Matt? If you want more Matt, I will get you your four- and five-star review simply by saying, “Hey, we need more, Matt.”

Matt Brown (00:56):

Just whatever it is, four, fives are good, but three and below, just like let’s just pass on those. Appreciate it, just email us directly. My DMs are open so go ahead and go in.

Adam Candee (01:06):

Ooh, slide. You need to slide.

Matt Brown (01:08):

We’ll talk some more Jontay Porter news. We’ll talk about what went on with Caesars, which was fairly interesting. New Jersey trying to get some stuff in line over there was something we had been beating the drum for since the very beginning, but Adam, let’s kick things off here.

(01:22):

What’s something that we knew was going to happen? It’s happened in basically all of the gaming industry that we’ve gone through. Listen, there was the poker boom, there were a million poker sites, and then they all came back together. There was the DFS boom, there were all kinds of DFS sites and then things came back down to normal.

(01:38):

We knew it in the sports betting world as well, who was going to be really here with staying power and then who might be on the fringe. And then there were some that were maybe even outside of the fringe, and I think that’s probably where both of these fall.

Adam Candee (01:53):

What we end up with here, Matt, is one regional operator, and by regional, I pretty much mean one state, and then one of the operators that we expected might at least be able to make a little bit of a name for itself, just because of the backing that it had because some of the partnership deals that it had. But we see both SaharaBets and Betway decide to get out of the US sports betting market. Now, if you’re not familiar with SaharaBets, that means you live outside Arizona.

(02:21):

Arizona, you and I have talked about many times, was one of the more interesting test markets because of the number of available licenses, the low tax structure, and the fact that just about everyone was starting from the same starting line at the beginning of the market, like Colorado. Another one of these interesting markets where we got to see a competitive environment and what that would lead to in the long run.

(02:42):

Now, there have been some interesting success cases in a place like Arizona. If you look at Desert Diamond and what they’ve been able to do, they’ve actually made a real impact in Arizona. SaharaBets was never really able to do the same. Of course, affiliated with the Coyotes, and that has gone its own way as well in Arizona. Not the only hockey connection though, because now we talk about Super Group and Betway.

(03:04):

Betway was a major sponsor in the NHL. In fact, for the last few years, you cannot watch an NHL game without seeing Betway emblazoned down below the goal line in every arena in the NHL. It’s funny because you would see it then right alongside BetMGM ads for one of the official sports betting partners of the NHL, so you’d notice that there was that overlap there. But Betway essentially said, “This is not a path to success for us in the US market.” They’re going to continue to operate internationally.

(03:41):

More consolidation, and really, Matt, not what we’ve talked about before with a PointsBet or someone like that where there are a lot of pieces to pick up. This is one of those where the market share was so ultimately insignificant that it’s not that this would make a big difference for anyone to say, “Let’s try to come in and acquire the bones or acquire the database and turn it into something for ourselves.”

(04:03):

We’re talking about a fraction of a fraction of market share for both of these operators in the states in which they were active. It continues to lead to us discussing the duopoly at the top, of course, with FanDuel and DraftKings, but then really that third and fourth tier, that Barry Jonas, the Truist Securities detailed a few podcasts ago, where he talked about who else might be able to maybe not make their way to the top of the podium, but at least forge a sustainable path for sports betting in the United States.

Matt Brown (04:33):

It was, you mentioned with Betway, they were one of the ones that came out and had this sponsorship over in New Jersey with the Devils, and I think that dates back all the way to 2021 when they were doing all of that stuff. The Philadelphia Flyers, obviously a big partnership with those guys as well with all of that. And like you said, this is a real betting company.

(04:53):

I mean, this is a group that’s been around for a while and certainly internationally has some play. But it was just one of those things, Adam, where we’ve tried to figure it out with some of these groups that we know what they’re doing. It is not like they’re just like Johnny come lately, but why there has not been able to be any traction whatsoever made with all of this.

(05:16):

I mean, we can go back and obviously, we knew brand recognition was going to do something for DraftKings and FanDuel, but man, I am now looking at all of this and the way that this has gone with … gaming giants, even MGM and Caesars and bet365 and all of these different companies that we thought, look, they have a decent chance of cracking in here and certainly breaking through.

(05:43):

We talked, I mean, ad nauseam about the ads that ran and ran and ran and ran, and now looking back on this, it probably was for the better for them. They caught hell whenever they were running ads every 30 seconds, but it probably worked out for them in the long run, because it’s like we just see it doesn’t really matter. We know these other companies know what they’re doing. We know they’ve got the chops. It just isn’t breaking through.

Adam Candee (06:09):

Well, Matt, let’s go ahead and look at what you would see as you whistle your way through the graveyard of sports betting brands in the United States. As we dig deeper into what you’re talking about here, I’ll read the list from the story that Pat Evans has at LegalSportsReport.com right now, and these are brands where you’re going to hear a lot of different sizes and shapes, but all ended up in the same place.

(06:32):

Barstool, Fox Bet, Fubo Sportsbook, MaximBet, PlayUp, PointsBet, TwinSpires and William Hill. I mean, think about what we talked about with a brand Fox Bet having an NFL broadcast connection and then ultimately getting swallowed up inside the Flutter umbrella, and essentially had the pillow put over its face by FanDuel and Flutter to the point where Fox Bet really wasn’t able to make any sort of impact.

(06:58):

Then you look at some of the smaller entries like a MaximBet where you tilt your head to the side like a dog and say, “What exactly were you thinking as you tried to launch that brand?” So now you see where we have those companies like 365, like the legacy casino companies that you mentioned with MGM and Caesars, and you start to ask the question of like, all right, so how are you going to differentiate yourself?

(07:21):

Because they were part of that advertising blitz, at least MGM and Caesars were part of that real big push early on, but they decided to pull back from it. FanDuel, DraftKings really hasn’t pulled back as much, and they of course were working on products from a long time before we were dealing with ads. You mentioned a long time ago that these ads were not nearly as bad as what we went through in 2015 with DFS.

(07:48):

The messaging was significantly better. It didn’t come off like a get-rich-quick scheme. So I think they managed to ride that line a lot better this time, even though there is federal legislation pending that would regulate sports betting advertising, we never saw the critical mass call for it to stop the way we did in the DFS wars.

Matt Brown (08:09):

Unibet also in there as well is another one that didn’t make it. Another brand that has some bones, has some chops in the gaming space, and you just look at it and shake your head and you just wonder, what’s going on here? And I know that we keep saying, we’ve said it for a few years here on the podcast, Adam. I mean this dates all the way back to when Dustin was on here with us.

(08:30):

We were saying, “You know what? This isn’t over.” I mean, there is still plenty of time for these other brands to come in and other brands to figure things out, and I am becoming less optimistic that it’s going to be a wide open race over the next few years. That’s not to say that MGM and Caesars can’t gain some ground.

(08:50):

That’s not to say that who knows what Fanatics may or may not be able to do. I’m not ruling all of that out, but it is starting to seem a little bit more likely that the two at the top might just be the two at the top.

Adam Candee (09:05):

The case is clear if you’re bullish on FanDuel and DraftKings, and I think the biggest part of that case that you have to be willing to buy into is that eventually the expenses will come down. And I think you also have to buy into the fact that there is not a point of diminishing returns on churning through players on parlays and SGPs that these high holds that don’t return a whole lot to the player.

(09:30):

There has to be some thought that you will continue to be able to bring in $5, $10, $20 players along the road to keep going through these long shot parlays that aren’t going to pay off the same way. You have to believe in that and you have to believe in the fact that they won’t have to be on TV as much forever to really buy into that duopoly. I’ll leave that to you out there to figure out how you think that’ll shape up.

(09:52):

And Matt, I think you brought up a great point a few podcasts ago when you said you’d talked to some people in the Las Vegas casino space where you’d said, “Listen, why isn’t there more alignment with rewards and sports betting when it comes to these legacy casino companies?” And I believe you discussed that there wasn’t always the same priority being placed on sports betting inside the legacy casino operators that there is for companies like FanDuel and DraftKings that have to in order to survive.

Matt Brown (10:24):

A 100%, and then at the end of the day, while we’re not as bullish on casino getting legalized as we were a couple of years ago, it is going to get legalized in a few states. I mean, it’s going to happen in some time over the next few years. With that, like I said, that’s just another way to ease the cost of customer acquisition.

(10:42):

There’s some people that are going to be coming in through that funnel. There’s some people that will be going through the sports betting funnel into the casino side of things with DraftKings and FanDuel. We know that DraftKings already made a big acquisition in Golden Nugget Gaming. We know that FanDuel already had it in the Flutter, had already had the online casino stuff in their hold.

(11:00):

So I mean, I don’t know. I thought that there really would be a race. I wasn’t just doing that to throw that out there and have a talking point for us here on the podcast.

(11:10):

But man, it just seems to me now, the more I see this, the more that I think that they understand the customer I think a little bit better than a lot of these people and are just doing it a little bit better. I just don’t know. I don’t know. I really did. I thought that it was going to be open and I think I’m changing my opinion on that.

Adam Candee (11:27):

Well, Matt, I think you’re getting to the point where we discussed for so long, when would product matter? And product matters now in two ways. Obviously, customers are declaring their intent with their feet when the bonuses aren’t the same.

(11:40):

We understand that, but there’s a second part of that discussion as well that I don’t think it’s talked about as much. And it’s that DraftKings, FanDuel, tech-forward companies that have been tech-only companies for quite a while now are companies that have been working on refining product in the last couple of years at the same time that other companies have had to redo their products and relaunch their products.

(12:05):

They haven’t had to go through … You have not heard about the DraftKings 2.0 platform or the FanDuel 2.0 platform. But you’ve heard about it with Caesars and you’ve heard about it with MGM and you’ve heard about it with Bally, and you’ve heard about it with a number of other companies that have had to go through saying, “We’re essentially going to be wasting time by continuing on with a product that we know doesn’t work for some length of time while we’ve redeveloped the new product.” And try to catch up to these companies that not only were able to do better with their tech from the beginning and add to their tech in some cases with some of the acquisitions they made.

(12:40):

But then also they’ve been refining it along the way and now we’re getting to the point where you’re changing your opinion, and I understand why. Because the time to catch those companies was when they were hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars a year, when the losses were absolutely massive for them. And now you’re getting to the point where the losses are narrowing and when the losses start to narrow, and these companies aren’t having to worry about what DraftKings did, which was freezing a bunch of open positions and doing layoffs at one point, then you’re just talking about dealing from a position of strength while others are catching up.

Latest developments in Jontay Porter NBA scandal

Matt Brown (13:12):

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the whole Jontay Porter situation, if you’ve been listening to this podcast and you are someone that subscribes to this podcast. And if for whatever reason you don’t just hit the little Google machine, a story will pop up over at LSR, so you can read all the Jontay Porter stuff.

(13:27):

But Adam, we at least have now a little bit more clarity as to how this all went down. We knew he was guilty anyway, but he has gone ahead and let us know that he is definitely guilty.

Adam Candee (13:37):

Our new CEO for our overall company here at LSR is a regular listener to our podcast, and he likes when we talk about what’s next, when we talk about spinning things forward, and I think that’s where we can get into talking about the Jontay Porter story here right now.

(13:52):

The news of the day is that today pleads guilty in a New York federal court to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He’ll be sentenced later. It appears that the sentencing is anywhere from 41 to 51 months on the prosecutor’s recommendation. Could be likely in the range of four years could be his sentence.

(14:12):

Now, some of the documents from this court proceeding were sealed, which could, let me put on my junior lawyer hat here, indicate that there could be ongoing prosecutions, investigations when it comes to this case. We noticed, of course, that there were multiple arrests along the way, multiple charges along the way for the co-conspirators with Jontay Porter.

(14:33):

Could this potentially be digging into something deeper? Don’t know for sure, but when we see those sealed documents, it certainly tips off our attention to say, “Hey, that’s interesting that some of this is not available to us.”

(14:45):

But as we spin it forward, I still think the most interesting thing that came out of this was an exclusive that we had at LSR from our Mike Mazzeo, in which he found out that the NBA was beginning to open up discussions about banning certain types of prop wagers. And that discussion is of course at its stages of infancy right now, but we know that the league might potentially use this as an opening to discuss whether or not there should be available markets on all players, what those markets should be like.

(15:15):

Of course, from the sportsbooks’ perspective, should they be limited in some way? Who should be able to put wagers on them, on and on and on from that. I think that’s really where this goes is that we’ve talked a number of times about is this the big one? Is this the big news story? Is this the tipping point? And we thought it was going to be Shohei Ohtani before it turned out it really wasn’t. It was Ippei Mizuhara.

(15:37):

The Porter thing is such a clear line drawn from athlete to betting scandal that I think this is the one that could resonate a little bit in terms of the NBA making some progress with that. Is it going to be widespread that the big four or five operators aren’t offering NBA prop bets? Of course not. Might it be a situation where, as you’ve discussed, the 13th guy at the end of the bench doesn’t become the most bet market at a major sportsbook on any single day? Yeah, I think that’s more likely.

Matt Brown (16:08):

I mean, I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but I just don’t think that this is that big of a deal and if it solves any potential problems down the line, I don’t really understand why there would be much resistance. I mean, I understand you want to offer all the markets, you don’t want to funnel any money to offshores or to illegal bookies or whatever it might be. I know what the arguments will be from the other side.

(16:29):

That being said, the money is so small anyway, and honestly, if a street bookie wants to take a ton of money on the 13th guy on the bench, I guess, so more power to him because we see what that is all about. It might mean something is up when it all comes down to it. And the handle is so small on this type of stuff, but the perception of sports and sports betting and the air quote “fixed things” and the people are out there that are still convinced the games are fixed and that all this stuff is happening all the time amongst all of these players.

(17:07):

We’ve tried to explain as rationally as humanly possible, most of these guys are making eight figures, and it’s just never in their best interest to do anything like this to jeopardize their hundred million dollars, $200 million contracts and stuff. But there are guys like Jontay Porter, again, that could be the fly in the ointment, and I just don’t think it’s all that necessary when it all comes down to it.

(17:29):

Adam, whether that means do you have to ban them out right? If you want to make sure that you just offer something on every guy, that you put a $200 limit on … Whatever, something, I’m open for discussion with all of this, but the fact that they were able to get down what they were able to get down on him, I think is an eye-opening deal of is this really something we need to be doing and what is the best way to move forward with all this?

Adam Candee (17:53):

Well, to put some numbers to what you’re talking about, Jontay Porter’s salary on a two-way contract in 23-24 was $410,000. Good money to a lot of people listening to this podcast, not good money for a professional athlete.

(18:07):

Now, you talk about what kind of wagers should be available. I think we would all say if there’s an $80,000 parlay on Jontay Porter on any given day, that’s the type of wager that was unsurprisingly flagged by DraftKings and then ended up in front of the FBI to say, “Hey, we might have some of the world’s dumbest criminals once again trying to rig something in the betting market.”

(18:32):

So, there is a reasonable discussion to be had. And the whole thing about people who go back to the axiom of, “Well, it’s going to drive people offshore,” take the idea that we talk about in healthcare all the time of an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and apply that here. An ounce of self-regulation, an ounce of self-restraint will be a lot smarter than the pound of regulation or cure that would be coming down from regulators, that would be coming down more importantly from legislators, from Congress, from any of the actors who do not always have the nuanced understanding of the industry that those who work on a day-to-day do.

Matt Brown (19:10):

And that’s basically what it comes down to, because while you and I, we know sports enough, so not only do we know this industry and know sports betting and whatever, we know sports enough, so we understand that these guys, these stars, are not going to jeopardize their a hundred million dollar contracts, on top of their endorsement deals, on top of their, all of the things like that that they would have to lose in all of this.

(19:33):

We get that and we understand that we are rational enough to get it, but all you have to do is put this in front of a person who doesn’t follow sports, who doesn’t care to follow sports or doesn’t care to hear the rational side of it. Because that’s the other thing that we’ve seen in some of these discussions whenever we’re listening to legislators debate things back and forth, Adam, is where we have to roll our eyes and …

(19:52):

Because some people don’t want to hear the truth, some people don’t want to hear the rational explanation of anything. They just want, they just want the blood. Then they want the blood and they want it and they don’t care how it got there. And so can we just avoid that? Maybe we just avoid that.

Adam Candee (20:06):

I wouldn’t mind that. I like avoiding, I like avoiding in general. You might hear that from ex-girlfriends or something like that on my side, like, “He doesn’t mind avoiding things.”

New acquisition shows Caesars is better understanding its situation

Matt Brown (20:15):

So, I’m going to make you pronounce this very slowly and I’m going to make you pronounce this…

Adam Candee (20:20):

Oh, God.

Matt Brown (20:21):

We’re going to be.

Adam Candee (20:21):

I’m going to become Steve Levy if I don’t do this right.

Matt Brown (20:24):

Yeah, so just say it in your head three times real quick. But Caesars made an acquisition, and I’m glad I don’t have to tell you who it was.

Adam Candee (20:31):

So Caesars has made an acquisition of a company based in Australia named Zero, and I’m going to spell it first, F-L-U-C-S. Fluctuations is the idea you should have in your head. ZeroFlucs is the name of the company that was acquired last week by Caesars. We’re past the dangerous parts.

Matt Brown (20:54):

We’re done. We don’t have to say it.

We’ll just call it ZF from here on out. You know what I’m talking about.

Adam Candee (21:02):

Yeah, ZF, I love it. I love it, ZF. Eric Hession, president of Caesars Digital, talked about the expertise in data science and trade technology, coupled with their passion for sports makes them a great fit that complements the rewards program. And really what this company is going to do is help their capabilities when it comes to not only same-game parlays but expanded SGP markets.

(21:21):

I’ll read directly from the story we have by Sam McQuillan over at LSR, “The company now has full access to the Australia-based startups cutting edge software, which sportsbooks have used to augment their pricing capability with their own data. The company also hopes the new edition will ‘unlock exciting new product features and benefits for Caesars Sportsbook bettors.’”

(21:43):

That was not released in terms of the financials on this one, financials were not released. “The company will stay under the leadership of founder Steve Gray and former CTO Carly Christensen.” Again, this goes back to the discussion we had earlier when we talked about sports betting brands and whether they’re playing catch up and what they’re focusing on now.

(22:06):

Well, now we see Caesars after it made a big move to essentially end the bulk of its outbound marketing. A lot of its TV, a lot of its big bonus offers went away, and Caesars said, “You know what? We got to fix this platform,” after they had the disaster with Will Hill in Nevada, “We got to do right by our tech.” And now you see them making a move towards same-game parlay and towards improving that technology and just going along with the rest of the market and saying, “Traditional sports betting hold at 5.5% isn’t what is winning this market right now; 13, 14, 15% hold on same-game parlays is absolutely what’s going to be driving margins at least in the near term until we find out if that point of diminishing returns that we talked about exists within the US sports betting markets.”

(22:51):

So, seems like a fairly smart move for Caesars to try to augment that technology and build onto what it has now, which is of course a lot better than what they were dealing with when they were still trying to integrate with the Will Hill technology after that merger went down a couple of years ago.

Matt Brown (23:09):

I mean, at the end of the day, at least these guys aren’t sitting on their hands. I mean, that’s one of the things I do, because one of the things we’ve talked about, Adam, just mainly from these states in general where we’re saying, listen, more competition’s good. It’s going to make people try to be better.

(23:27):

You look at Caesars and MGM and I think at the very beginning, and this is just my opinion, I don’t know if it is your opinion, and so people don’t angry tweet, but just my opinion, was I think that the thought probably was, “What do you mean? We’re MGM. We’re Caesars. Whatever, of course, people are just going to come and give us their business. We’re MGM. We’re Caesars.”

(23:48):

And then now they had to play catch up from an app standpoint and had to really put in some serious work to get to even close to where DraftKings and FanDuel are, and at least they understood. It took them a little bit too long in my personal opinion, but at least they understood, “Hey, we got to make some moves. We got to do this. Us just sitting back going like, ‘Hey, look, we have a bunch of casinos,’ beating our chests across the country that didn’t work, and it’s not going to work.”

(24:12):

And so like you said, Caesars’ app is much, much better now. I mean, we have it here, which is great. It functions a whole … I can’t even put into words how much better it functions than the previous version of it. Same could be said for MGM. So both of them, at least working on the tech side of things as we move into, as you mentioned, maybe the next phase of all this, which is a customer choosing who they want to spend their money with based off of, I don’t know whether the app works properly or not.

Adam Candee (24:36):

Well, to your point, Matt, it seems to me, I don’t know whether or not they were saying, “Well, we can just rely on the brand. We can stand on name,” with MGM and Caesars and bigger, Bally, whoever it might be. I don’t know if it was all that, but I do think there was a part of it in which they didn’t understand the sophistication of the competition.

(24:58):

And the fact that DraftKings and FanDuel, yes, of course there are web-based versions of that that people were using for DFS for the longest of times, but these are companies that were preparing for post-PASPA for quite a while. They knew that getting from DFS to PASPA or post-PASPA was the way that they were going to be able to blow up, and they were ready. The tech was ready.

(25:21):

There were moments where they had significant downtime. Hell, FanDuel had significant downtime just a couple of weekends ago. It happens, but it wasn’t the way it is with the legacy casino companies. We didn’t ever see with DraftKings and FanDuel what we saw with BetMGM where we were getting decimal odds inside the app when it first launched. That’s just a fundamental misunderstanding of the customer and a fundamental mental misunderstanding of the sophistication that the two big ones were going to bring in terms of their tech.

Matt Brown (25:49):

Absolutely. I mean, you and I would just sit there and giggle because you would open up the app, and the thing that they would be feeding you cricket lines and they’d be feeding you soccer lines. That was literally the home screen of some of these apps, and we’re just going, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”

Adam Candee (26:04):

Matt, with one app that shall remain nameless, you had to on its top menu in the Nevada version of the app, you had to scroll through cricket, through tennis, through basketball, and then you could get to NFL in the middle of NFL season. Not great.

New Jersey legislator starts long climb toward reversing betting ban

Matt Brown (26:25):

Not great. All right, let’s close things out here with New Jersey, and this is, again, we’re taking no credit for any of this stuff. We’re just saying we’ve been beating the drum for since the beginning of time whenever we talked about this, because again, if you do want to talk about stuff that really and truly could push a potential bettor to a nefarious market or an offshore market or some guy named Bobby Knuckles down on the corner, whatever it might-

Adam Candee (26:49):

Bobby Knuckles, I grew up with Bobby Knuckles. I didn’t know you knew him.

Matt Brown (26:53):

Whatever. Not being able to bet on their home team is certainly one of those things. I mean, listen, you’re going to the games anyway, Adam. You want to be able to sit in the stands and you want to be able to root on the team. And if you want to have 10 bucks or 20 bucks on the game, which is by the way, that’s the majority of bettors out there. Everyone, listen, it’s $20 bettors. You should be able to do that. And at least they’re trying to get that done for college sports over there in New Jersey.

Adam Candee (27:17):

So, just, I want to underscore your point there for a second, Matt. I know we say it all the time, “Oh, $10 bettor, $20 bettor.” This is a tweet from ESPN Bet earlier today, and they were touting that a bet boost that Molly Qerim, who’s the host of the morning show, had.

(27:32):

It was boosted up to basically 10 to 1, and they said, “Bet boost hits! 1,200+ ESPN Bet patrons bet an average of $7.37 on this Molly Qerim special and won an average return of $89.” And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that.

Matt Brown (27:52):

No, nothing wrong with it at all.

Adam Candee (27:53):

People are excited about that. That’s super cool. They bet seven bucks, they won 90, and they got to bet on Caitlin Clark. That was the special, Caitlin Clark over four and a half 3-pointers and over nine and a half assists against Washington. So, cool. It worked out for them. That’s the kind of action they want.

(28:11):

Well, then think back a couple of years ago in the NCAA tournament when St. Peter’s made its big run, when Fairleigh Dickinson made its big run, and in both of those runs, in-state bettors in New Jersey, were not allowed to wager on those games because they involved in-state teams. Well, Assemblyman Michael Venezia has introduced the constitutional amendment in which he’s going to try to reverse that ban on in-state college betting.

(28:37):

Now, this is going to face quite the lift, because notice I said constitutional amendment and not bill. Keep in mind that this was on the ballot three years ago, and it lost by a 57% to 43% margin. Voters voted to keep the in-state ban. The article in which the assemblyman spoke to Mike said, “I think a lot has changed since it was voted down in 2021.”

(29:00):

Venezia said, “especially now with the NIL deals the college athletes are able to get. I think that’s changed the landscape of things. If you go on the app right now, you can bet on a soccer game in Finland, but you’re not able to bet on a Rutgers-Ohio State football game.”

(29:12):

So, the man makes some sense when he talks about that. It’s a long road ahead. This would have to not only get through the legislature, but because it was a constitutional amendment, it would have to go back onto the ballot to be voted on. But it is interesting to see that lawmakers in one of the OG states of sports betting in the US in New Jersey are trying to make a correction to the law that I think ultimately most of the market would tell you makes sense.

Matt Brown (29:42):

Absolutely. And you mentioned a couple of the instances in which like, “Hey, man, that’d been cool to be able to put a little,” but you got to remember, Rutgers is in New Jersey, Seton Hall is in New Jersey. Princeton is in New Jersey. Whenever they do, they feature all the Ivy League stuff all the time.

(29:59):

There are other institutions in the state in which there are people who would love to just be able to go and back those schools. I mean, I know people will go, “Oh, it’s Jersey, who cares about it?” But look, man, there’s a lot of Seton Hall fans, there’s a lot of Rutgers fans, don’t you know?

Adam Candee (30:12):

Hey, hey, let me make one thing clear. If people are saying, “Hey, Jersey, who cares about it?” You let me say that. I’m the only one who gets to talk like that. New Yorkers get to disrespect New Jersey. You don’t get to disrespect New Jersey based on its college betting rules.

(30:27):

I’m the one who gets to tell you that when the revolution comes, when the revolution comes from overseas, I might offer up a piece of New Jersey as part of the compromise. I’m just saying.

Matt Brown (30:38):

Love it.

Adam Candee (30:38):

Just saying.

Matt Brown (30:39):

Absolutely love it. Guys, everything we do, absolutely free, so do appreciate your support if you want to. If you’re watching us on video, you can go ahead and hit that subscribe button. If you’re also just listening to the podcast version of this, we’ll take a subscription over there, too, and if you want to leave a rating and a review, we do appreciate that.

(30:55):

Every single story that we talk about here on the podcast, you can find over at LegalSportsReport.com. So please go in and take in all the words that Adam and team are putting in over there. More stories than we even have time to talk about here on the podcast, so be sure and check all of that stuff out over there at LSR. For Adam, I’m Matt. Talk to you guys next week.

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