Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1992 legislation that prohibited sports gambling in most states (Nevada enjoyed an exclusion ). When that occurred, the floodgates for legalized sports betting across the country opened up–Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island became the first to allow betting on the outcome of a match, but they are not going to be the final.
Texas-based documentary filmmaker and UT grad Bradley Jackson, who produced the surprise hit Dealt, about a blind San Antonio card shark, spent much of the past six months immersed in the world of sports betting due to their follow-up to that undertaking. Reteaming with Dealt director Luke Korem and fellow producer Russell Wayne Groves (as well as showrunner David Check), Jackson produced the four-part Showtime documentary series Action, that monitored the winners and winners of the 2018-19 NFL season–maybe not the ones on the field, but the ones at the casino, wagering a small fortune on the results of the games being played. Texas Monthly caught up with Jackson in advance of the series’ final episode to chat about sports gambling, daily dream, and what the chances are that Texas allows fans to put a bet on game day within the next few decades.
Texas Monthly: What did you learn from this job?
Bradley Jackson: How large a company this is. I mean, you find the numbers and they are simply astronomical. In the opening sentence of this show, when we’re showing all these people gambling on the Super Bowl, which only on the Super Bowl alone, I think it’s like six billion dollars. But then the caveat to that stat is that only 3% of that is legal wagering. Meaning 97 percent of action wagered on the Super Bowl is prohibited. That amount from Super Bowl weekend was among the very first stats that I saw when we were getting into this project, and it blew my mind. Then you examine the real numbers of just how much is really bet in the usa, and it’s billions and billions of dollars–and so much of that is prohibited wagering. Therefore it feels like it’s one of these things everyone is doing, but nobody really talks about.
Texas Monthly: Did working on this job inspire you to place any bets?
Bradley Jackson: Yeah. I had never done it, and now that I’ve spent six months embedded in this world, I have made a few –low-stakes stuff, just to get that sense of what it’s like. And it’s fun, particularly when you’re wagering a sensible level –but the emotions are still there. I am a very mental person, so when I dropped my fifty-dollar UT vs. OU wager, I felt awful for about one hour. Because naturally I wager on UT, so when OU won, it hurt not just because my team lost–it hurt even more that I dropped fifty dollars.
Texas Monthly: Can you have a feeling of when putting a bet like that in Texas could be lawful?
Bradley JacksonWe are living in a country that’s obsessed with sportsfootball especially. And nothing brings people’s attention over gambling on soccer, especially the NFL. I believe finally Texas will do some kind of sports gambling. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I believe that they’ll do it in mobile, since I don’t think we’ll see casinos in Texas, actually. I have been hearing that maybe Buffalo Wild Wings is going to do some type of pseudo sports gambling stuff, which means you could go to Buffalo Wild Wings and get in your phone and place a fifty-dollar wager on the Astros, and I think that will be lawful one day. Probably sometime in the next five decades.
Texas Monthly: With this business being huge, illegal, and thus largely untaxed, to what extent do you believe gambling as a source of untapped revenue for the state plays into things?
Bradley Jackson: This will play hugely right into it. From a financial point of view, it is enormous. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, was kind of on the forefront of the. He wrote an editorial to the New York Times about four years ago where he stated we will need to take sports gambling out of the shadows and then bring it into the light. That way you may tax it, which is obviously good for the states, but you may also make sure it’s done over board. When the Texas legislature sniff how much money may be taxed, it’s a no-brainer.
Texas Monthly: The prohibited bookie that you speak to in the documentary states that legalization does not affect his business. What was that like for you to learn?
Bradley Jackson: It blew me away. When we had been sketching out the figures we wanted to try and identify to put in the series, an illegal bookie was unquestionably at the top of our listing. Our assumption was that this will hurt them. We believed we were going to obtain some New Jersey illegal bookie whose bottom line was likely to be very hurt by all of this. After we met this guy, it was the specific opposite. He was like,”I’m not sweating in any way.” I was really shocked by it. He did say he believes that if every state goes, if this becomes 100% legal in every nation, he then think he could be affected. But he operates out of the Tri-State area, and now it’s only legal in New Jersey, and just in four or five places. He breaks it down really well at the end of the first episode, where he simply says,”It’s convenient and it is credit–both C’s will never go off.” Having a illegal bookie, you are able to lose fifty thousand dollars on credit, and that can really negatively impact your life. Whereas you can still hurt yourself gambling legitimately, but you can not bet on credit via lawful channels. If casinos begin letting you wager on credit, I believe his bottom line could get hurt. The longer it is a part of this national dialog, the more money he makes, as people are like,”Oh, it is legal, right?”
Texas Monthly: Is daily fantasy among those gateways to sports gambling? It seems like it is just a small variation on traditional gaming.
Bradley Jackson: In Episode 3, we follow one of the top five daily fantasy players in the us. He is a 26-year-old child. He makes millions of dollars doing that. He told me that the most he has ever produced was $1.5 million in one week. Among our hypotheses for the series was that the pervasiveness of daily dream was a gateway to the leagues allowing legalized gaming to actually happen. For years, you noticed the NFL state that sports gambling is the worst thing and they’d never let it. And then about four years ago daily fantasy like DraftKings and FanDuel started, and they bought, I think, 30,000 advertisement spots across the NFL Sunday platform. When you’re watching the NFL, any commercial was DraftKings or even FanDuel. And a great deal of folks were like,”Wait a minute, you guys say that you think sports gambling is the worst thing ever. How is this not gambling?” It is gambling. We actually interview the CEO of DraftKings, and two of the high-up people at FanDuel, and I believe it’s B.S., but they say daily fantasy isn’t gambling, it’s a game of skill. But I really don’t think that is true.
Texas Monthly: The way individuals who make money do it will involve running substantial quantities of teams to beat the odds, instead of picking the guys they think have the best matchups this week.
Bradley Jackson: Right. We filmed our daily dream player above a weekend of making his stakes, and he does not do well that weekend. And he talked about how what he is doing is a lot of ability, but every week there are two or three plays that are completely arbitrary, and they make his week ruin his week, which is 100 percent luck. This really is an element of gambling, as you’re putting something of financial worth up with an unknown outcome, and you don’t have any control over how that’s awarded. We watch him literally lose sixty million dollars on a three-yard run by Ezekiel Elliott. It is the Cowboys-Eagles, and he says,”All I want is to get the Cowboys to perform well, but without Ezekiel Elliott producing any profits, after which you visit Zeke get, for example, a four-yard pass and he is like,”If one more of these happens, then I am screwed.” And then there is this tiny two-yard pass from Prescott to Elliott and he goes,”Well, I simply dropped forty thousand dollars right there.” And you watch $60,000 jump from an account. There is no way that is not gambling.
Texas Monthly: Ken Paxton has contended that daily fantasy is illegal in Texas. Are there any cultural factors in the state which may make this more difficult to pass, or is some thing like that just a way of staking a claim to the money involved?
Bradley Jackson: It could just be the pessimist in me, but think at the end of the day, a lot of it just boils down to cash. A fascinating case study is exactly what happened in Nevada. In Nevada they left daily dream illegal, which is crazy, because gaming is legal in Nevada. But they made it illegal since the daily fantasy leagues would not cover the gambling tax. So it was like a reverse place, in which Nevada said,”Hey, this is gambling, so cover the gambling taxes,” and DraftKings and FanDuel were like,”It is not gambling.” And so they did not come to Nevada. I don’t think Texas will necessarily take action right off the bat, but I think it in a few years, when they determine how much cash there will be made, and there are smart ways to go about it, it’ll happen.

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