Dustin Gouker is the former Vice President of Content for North America at Catena Media. He now serves as a responsible gambling consultant for the company.
Along with a talented team of writers and editors, Gouker helped to turn Legal Sports Report from a small blog to the go-to source for news about the sports betting industry.
Gouker started writing and editing at LSR in 2015, reporting on the meteoric rise of DraftKings and FanDuel in daily fantasy sports. He also led coverage of the push for legalization of sports gambling in the US, including being on hand to cover oral arguments in the US Supreme Court as the federal ban was lifted. He’s considered one of the leading experts about the US sports betting space and has spoken at a variety of conferences and with various media outlets about the industry’s development.
Before LSR, Gouker was a journalist and editor for more than 15 years, working at a variety of newspapers, including the Washington Post, while also writing about the poker industry during its prime in the early 2000s.
Gouker was born in Pennsylvania and now lives in Oregon with his wife and daughter.
Media Appearances and Citations
- Las Vegas Review-Journal | Sports betting expands in US faster than some expected
- “The day the federal ban came down, I thought we’d get sports betting in a lot of places, but I definitely did not see the rate of expansion as fast as it is. I’d argue we’re in the midst of one of the largest gambling expansions in a compressed amount of time in really the history of the U.S.”
- Marketwatch | When will New York sports betting go live? First mobile bets to be taken this week
- “New York will be a fascinating test case for just how much states can tax sports betting without damaging the future of the industry. Launching with four of the best-known sportsbook brands in the U.S. shows that operators have not been dissuaded so far. And there is no doubt New Yorkers will respond in huge numbers, so long as operators can offer competitive products that sufficiently desensitize crossing state lines to place a bet.”
- Axios | Sports betting, two years later
- “The states with more open markets (N.J., Pennsylvania, Indiana) have outperformed those without them (Oregon, Rhode Island). It’s too early to make calls beyond a shadow of a doubt, but both Oregon and Rhode Island would clearly be doing better if they took less money with an open system.”
- Reuters | New Jersey’s first legal Super Bowl wagers underwhelm
- “The New Jersey market is not as event-driven as Nevada, and it’s not as much of a destination, at least not yet, for the Super Bowl. It remains to be seen if Super Bowl is just a much smaller part of the picture in New Jersey or if the numbers will be way down for February.”
- Suffolk News Herald | Let Virginians bet on their teams
- “There’s so many ways to wager right now on colleges that carving them out from Virginia sportsbooks doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense.
Video Appearances
Articles by Dustin Gouker:
