February 7, 2023 • 47 mins
If it hasn’t already, sports gambling is coming to your town, your living room, and your cell phone. Americans bet about $450 million on sports every day! That’s one of those numbers Tim O’Brien doesn’t even know how to comprehend – it’s so huge! – but, of course, gamblers lose a lot of that money. That’s how the industry pulled in $44 billion last year, and it looks like betting is going to keep on exploding. To better understand that boom, Tim spent time with somebody who’s really good at navigating all of the ups and downs of gambling: Blair Montgomery, one of the industry’s super users. He gambles every day, and he’s making more money betting than he does from his day job.
This is the first of three episodes about the past, present, and future of the multi-billion-dollar sports betting boom, and its impact on games, fans, and society. The series will take you from Chicago to London to the tribal lands of Connecticut to learn more about the rise of mobile betting and match fixing, and the future of tribal casinos.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Are you back there, Blair doing your thing? Can I
sit on your shoulder? Is that going about it? Oh?
Get out, please, get out, get out. Oh that's so brutal.
This is Blair Montgomery. I flew to Chicago to visit
(00:20):
him back in June, and I promise you that he
wanted me to visit. He wasn't yelling at me to
get out. He was yelling at a baseball, a baseball
hit by a player with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Blair
had a two fifty dollar parlay in the game. That's
one large bet made up of a string of smaller bets.
I have a baseball parley where it was like I
(00:42):
picked a guy to hit a home run and the
team to win for three separate games, and uh, I
hit the first two. I need the Dodgers to win,
and I need one of their players to hit a
home run. So this girl, I just wanted to go
to ex trainings. And if this game goes to extra innings,
we may be paying quite a bit of attention to
this one. How much will this pay for you? If
(01:04):
everything works, if if if Freddie Freeman right, so, Freddie
Freeman right here, he's that second for the Dodgers. He's
their first baseman. He hit a ball to the fence
earlier and a guy jumped up and caught it right
at the wall. And if he hits a home run
in the Dodgers win, it pays out like almost sixty grand.
You actually think it's like sixty three grand. So it's
obviously a very, very very profitable and big parlay. Welcome
(01:27):
to Crash Course, the podcast about business, political, and social
disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Brien.
If it hasn't already, sports gambling is coming to your town,
your living room, and your kid's cell phone. Last year,
Americans bet about four hundred and fifty million dollars on
sports every day. That's one of those numbers. I don't
(01:50):
even know how to comprehend. It's so huge. That translates
to a hundred and sixty five billion dollars a year,
but of course gamblers lose a lot of that. That's
how the industry pulled in forty four billion dollars last year,
and it looks like betting is going to keep on exploding.
I've been watching the gambling industry for years, but the
(02:10):
current boom is like no other. It's going to reshape games, fans,
and society, and its impact has only begun to be felt.
And because some gamblers become addicts, it can be a
wildly destructive activity. It can also lead to corruption in sports.
In honor of the Super Bowl this weekend and the
vast number of bets that we placed on the game,
(02:33):
this is the first of three episodes about the past, present,
and future of the multibillion dollars sports betting boom. Over
the next three episodes will travel from Chicago to London
to the tribal lands of Connecticut to explore all of this,
looking at mobile betting, match fixing, and the future of
tribal casinos. But first things first, Today's crash course inside
(02:58):
the digital sports bet Boom to better understand that boom,
I wanted to spend time with somebody who's really good
at navigating all of the ups and downs of gambling.
Blair is one of the industry's super users. He gambles
every day, every weekend, and he's making more money betting
than he does from his day job. He's also a
(03:21):
window under the peculiar set of talents that makes successful
gamblers interesting to me. Unlike most people who bet, he's
actually able to make a handsome living off of it.
He's obsessive, but to my untrained eye, not an addict.
He's emotionally disciplined, he manages money well, he's good at math,
he's intuitive, and he knows how to judge risk. Anyone
(03:44):
can hit those bets one time. It doesn't take someone
who's a sharp sports better or someone who knows sports
extremely well to hit that at one time. But to
be able to do that repetitively over time, or the
even come close to hitting those things over time, I
think you gotta be a little nuts and a little crazy.
(04:06):
And that's kind of how I am like, meaning being
entirely risk forward, being comfortable with massive risks, Yeah, exactly.
And you have to put the work in. And if
you don't and you lose your edge on that and
you're not showing up and being really active with it,
I think it's gonna come bacted by you, and you're
gonna start losing and it's gonna hurt a lot. It
(04:30):
was a great weekend to go to Chicago to watch
Blair gamble the French Open crowd its winners game two
of the NBA Finals tied up the series, and the
baseball season was in full swing. I was excited to
meet Blair and watch him in action. How you do it,
good man? How are you good? It's good to see you.
As I told you, a lot of our a lot
of our interaction is gonna be putting this mic close
(04:51):
to your Yeah, that's fine to worry about it. Don't
confuse Blair with that image you might have in your
mind of a worn out old gambler lurking in a
casino him. He looks like a jock, athletic and trim,
with close cropped auburn hair. He's energetic and friendly, very Midwestern.
I was introduced to Blair by some sports cammeblers I
(05:12):
know who hang out together online. I heard he was
really good at this whole sports betting thing, and he
was even considering turning the side hustle into a full
time job. I found Blair a fascinating person to focus
on because he's an unknown who's already started making a
big splash. And I think he's the embodiment of all
of the highs and lows to be found in the
(05:34):
gambling boom. I've always had like a really good just
general read on sporting events. And I think my mom
always joked and she was like, you're gonna work for
ESPN someday. And when I didn't go that around in college,
she was a little disappointed. But it didn't really change
much in terms of who I was or what people
knew me about. They just didn't know that I could
(05:55):
turn hunter Bucks into you know, sixties seventy dollars and
then you could make tens of thousand some dollars off
of it in a sitting. Like I said, Blair is
very good at this. Here's how he got here. When
he was around ten or eleven, he started playing poker
with his buddies in a small town in Michigan. He
was a good student and a good athlete, competitive and
(06:17):
he routinely demolished his poker partners. His tournaments with friends
grew through high school to thirty forty kids in somebody's basement.
In college, he started going to real casinos. He spent
whole days playing tournaments. I think it's extremely fair to
say that when I was younger, in particularly I was
playing poker that you know, going on tilt is a
(06:37):
very common term in poker, and I had an extremely
hard time balancing that a lot of people do, you know,
and so there were times where I was playing with
money that I shouldn't have, and there are times where
I lost money that I couldn't afford to lose. Around
the time he turned one, a poker front of his
suggested he get into sports betting, so he started to
dabble in that too. Poker would soon take a back
(06:59):
seat because in the Supreme Court ended Nevada's monopoly on
sports betting by striking down a federal law that had
effectively banned it in most other states. Pretty quickly, states
started legalizing something that had once been considered taboo. Indiana
was the closest state to Blair to legalize it in
(07:21):
the fall of but it was still old school. You
had to go to a casino and wager in person,
so Blair had to get up early in the morning
at Chicago to drive an hour or so to Indiana,
pushes money through a window to a bookie, and then
drive home to watch the games. Betting became more popular
and the lines of the casinos grew longer. It was
(07:43):
like going to like an amusement park, you know, were
you wait in line for two hours for a ride.
This all had to be done before the games could start.
If you wanted a bet during the game, you could
try your luck at a digital kiosk, But the problem
was the betting lines or the odds we're changing by
the second, and the machine couldn't keep up. So you
(08:04):
would submit, and then it would think, and then it
would be like do you accept the odds change? And
you're like yes, and you eat it again and they're like,
do you accept the odds change? Like this is just ridiculous,
Like I am never gonna get this in, so then
you just remove it. But nobody would have to wait.
Once gambling went digital apps operated a lot faster than
electronic kiosks. The rise of sports betting apps like FanDuel
(08:25):
and DraftKings man it easier to monitor odds and place
bets from the comfort of your own home. Blair's trips
to Indiana effectively ended when Illinois legalized online betting. In
his living room became his new gambling den. It's a bright,
airy space with a view of the Chicago skyline and
decorated with a comfy L shaped couch in a big
(08:47):
flat panel TV. Decidedly not a casino vibe. It's completely
different than the brick and mortar experience. It's still fun
having like the actual paper slip that you keep and
when you win and you go in and you turn
it in. It's a really cool feeling. But how technology
has changed the way that you can just do this
on your phone is what's made this boom so insane.
(09:08):
Over the last a couple of years, COVID lockdowns caused
a huge spike and online gambling across the country, from
hundreds of millions of dollars in wagers a month to
several billion. But it wasn't until the fall of the
Blair's own sports gambling career really took off, and it
all started at a friend's wedding. Before Blair drove to
(09:30):
that wedding, he had lined up five or six different
parlays for NFL games that day, laying down a total
of about a thousand dollars in bets. Remember, a parlay
is basically one wager made up of a bunch of
smaller different bets. How many field goals are kicked, added
to the number of touchdowns, added to the total score,
(09:50):
and so on and so on. Each one of those
bets needs to win for the entire bet to pay off,
because they're so risky. The odds are astronomically bad. But
if all of the smaller legs of the better winners,
gamblers can get a massive payout. During the wedding, Blair's
most promising parley was shaping up nicely, but by the
(10:13):
time the bride and groom had said I do and
he sat down at the reception, he was a nervous wreck.
Rather than celebrating, his eyes were glued to his phone.
If I have a bet, particularly parleys that have legs,
I have got to be monitoring it and following it,
particularly because you're gonna get live cash out offers, and
(10:33):
if you think something is potentially gonna slip, you need
to jump on it and get out. His friends got
sucked in and started watching the game with him. While
the father of the bride is giving his speech, the
Dolphins converted to fourth downs. Basically, they went ninety yards
in like sixty seconds and they converted a fourth and
(10:57):
to extend the game. All of that helped his bet.
Blair was ecstatic, His wife Sarah well less. So, if
we're being fully transparent, I was kind of getting not
upset with him, and I was like, you guys are well.
I was annoyed because I was like, you guys are
being rude, like you need to listen to the speech.
But then as it turns out, like you know, nobody
(11:20):
even noticed. But I was just next to all of them,
and I'm like, we're right back in college. I'm on
team Sarah. Here all of these goofs were staring at
a cell phone during a wedding reception. But then I
found out how much money was involved. By the end
of the speeches, Blair's parlay had one and he had
guaranteed his biggest win yet thousand dollars. It's hard to
(11:45):
describe because it's literally the best. It's the best feeling
in the world. And as you start to realize, like,
oh my god, this has incredible potential, it gives you
goose bumps, you know, and then when you're down to
one game, you're just sitting there sweating out and everyone
one is riding with you and everything, and so it's
just it's the best feeling in the world. Like it's
i mean again, better than everything else, better than sex
(12:09):
um um. I probably can't answer that one. How I
want to because Sarah will probably get a little mad,
but hitting a parlays the best feeling. It's it's incredible.
After that high at the wedding, Blair kept at it.
In the next couple of weeks, Blair hit not one,
but two other massive parlays for a total payoff of
(12:31):
a hundred and thirty three thousand dollars. Other gamblers started
paying attention. My following went from eight hundred people on
Twitter to like ten twelve thousand and in just the
span of a couple of weeks. And then because of
those three successful cart and everyone was like, whoa, Okay,
I didn't know that you actually were good at this.
And you hit one and people are like, oh, that's cool.
(12:54):
You hit two and people are like, oh, okay, and
then you hit three in a row, and everyone is
kind of losing their minds and they're like, this kid
could be from the future. Blair's Twitter account at Monty
Parley now has about thirty five followers, and Blair's built
a real community there. In case you didn't know it,
gambling Twitter as a thing. Lots of people congregate there
(13:15):
looking for hot tips. Blair tweets out his bets and
his analysis so followers can decide whether or not to
piggyback with their own bets. He complains about his losses,
and he celebrates his major wins. He really engages with
his followers. He also has a discord group that's an
online chat room where people pay twenty dollars a month
(13:35):
to talk about their bets and get advice from him.
He takes that responsibility very seriously. If people are going
to have faith in me and follow me, like I
take it to heart and take it serious. Trying to
please a lot of people and I'm trying to help
them make some money, you know. I've had people that
have DM me on Twitter after a parlay hits and
they're like, you just paid for my daughter's dance recitals
(13:58):
for the next year. Like I can't even put into words,
I can't believe. I don't even know how I found
you on Twitter, and I'm like, that's amazing, you know,
Like it's the best feeling in the world. But when
they lose and people are frustrated, you deal with that
side of it too, and it's hard. It's hard because
even thought Blair is really good at this and has
earned his following through some big wins. It's a risky business.
(14:19):
I'm definitely a big parlay guy, and I'm not from
the future, so like I lose all the time, like
anyone who bets parlays loses all the time. But if
your win right on a twelve like parlay is point
to five and you can hit that two or three
percent of the time, you're gonna be math massively profitable.
So it's just a manitor of bankroll management and not
(14:41):
getting too crazy. He's never lost more than on a bet,
but he told me about one time when he missed
a parley by one leg that could have netted him
upwards of two d and twenty dollars. I cried a
little bit that night because that would have been ridiculous, right,
I mean, truly just insane. At another time, when he
(15:02):
missed out on close to eighty grand I was like,
oh my god, I could feel like I wanted to
throw up. But each loss for Blair is a learning opportunity.
I try to always the day after look back at
the ones that lost and take in some whatever information
I can kind of soak in what happened, and that's
(15:22):
how I know that player is really a pro at sports. Gambling.
He's not blindly putting money on games or props. He
does his research and he has a strategy. He listens
to the commentary during the games to learn as much
as he can. He tracks stats and historical data online.
He really thinks this through. He showed me one of
(15:43):
the websites he uses a sort through all of the
data when he's thinking about his bets. The site's called
props dot cash. It was founded only a year ago by,
of all people, an aspiring elementary school math teacher. He
wanted to use sports data to make math more fun
and accessible for students. He quickly learned he can make
(16:04):
more money selling it as a service for gamblers. You
have to remember, deep real time analytics like this weren't
available to most gamblers for the entire history of sports betting. Now,
guys like Blair can operate like hardcore statisticians. The screen
in front of Blair is a sea of fever charts,
bar graphs, league team and player names, all awash and
(16:28):
lots and lots of data. All this data is publicly available,
but to be able to slice and dice it this
way that quickly is what makes this super helpful. You
don't need a super analytical mind to be able to
like look at this and formulate a point of view.
And so I think it's helped a lot of like
(16:48):
your average sports bettors could just sharpen your sort of
statistical sensibility about where the value lies. He's also pretty fearless.
He's not afraid to go with gut instincts, even if
that means backing an underdog. One of his big Parley
wins last year included an NFL bet that the notoriously
bad Jets would beat the pretty good Titans. His followers
(17:11):
really questioned that one realistically, any given night, anyone can win,
and that is true. These guys are professionals and they're
all good, no matter who's on your fantasy team and
who didn't throw for a three yards or get you
a touchdown that week, and you're like, this guy sucks.
I'm never I'm never taking this guy again. That guy
(17:31):
is elite and he is in the pent of the
one percent and what he does in the entire world.
And so if you don't think the Jets can beat
the Titans, I promise you they can and those games
do happen. That strategy is paying off. If I can
come closer to winning more than I throw up air balls,
(17:53):
then I'm going to make money off of this or
at minimum break even. And again, just keep kind of
treading water until I get close to hitting a huge parlay,
because that's kind of my goal with this is just
just do okay, small winds here and there, don't do
anything too crazy, and then put yourself in the spot
where you could win. What did you net in lash? Overall?
(18:17):
It was close close to It was close to two,
and he was like a hundred thousand, So I mean
it was a incredible year. And that was that your
best year ever? Absolutely? Yeah. He says his gambling winnings
last year earned him about as much as his day job.
He's a regional manager at Salesforce. Blair says he loves
his job, but he also logs off right at five
(18:40):
and switches to his side hustle. Beside hustle. This quickly
approaching full time status. Now it feels like a second job,
you know, it really does. I'm definitely doing this and
minimum at minimum thirty hours a week, if not forty,
every single week, and it it never ends. There's sports
on every single day. He also has a life outside
(19:03):
of his two gigs. His wife, Sarah is really supportive
of his side hustle. She talks about his work and
his skill like he's an entrepreneur and he basically is.
She's clearly proud of him that she supports him, and
she trusts that he's not going to make any decisions
that could hurt their family, and yet all of the
gambling takes away from their time together. He's very focused,
(19:25):
I would say that's the best way to describe it.
Very locked in, kind of in his own element. And
then he'll come out, like thirty minutes later, he's like,
all right, sorry, what did you ask me? I was
a little preoccupied. Um, I should know better enough by now.
But yeah, he's he's pretty locked in today. Well the most,
just a few more basketball games and then you're free.
(19:46):
I'm looking forward to having my husband back, but there's
always another sport to distract Blair and he and Sarah
had a major change soon after my trip. Their son
Tommy was born in August. When I visited them in June,
Sarah was trying to figure out how they would juggle work, gambling,
and a new baby. I think it's something that We're
(20:07):
still going to have to navigate just because it is
so new, especially when the baby comes, like right now,
it's just me that he has to worry about, And
especially during peak NBA season when there's like fifteen games on,
it's very time consuming for him to be monitoring all
of those all night, and honestly, we don't spend that
much time together on those nights. Sarah and Blair have
(20:29):
been together for ten years and have been through some
ups and downs. They clearly trust one another, so much
so that Sarah's considering using her marketing chops to help
Blair build a bigger gambling brand for himself. There are
downsides to having a bigger brand, though. Blair says wagering
takes a physical toll, and what began as a hobby
morphs at times into an obsession. It can leave him
(20:51):
little time for anything else. Relationships with his friends and
family are affected research embedding and true on vacation time.
It's even changed how we watch his games. He very
rarely just tunes in for fun anymore because he always
has money on the line, which asserts its own sort
of pull. So here's the thing. Every sporting event that
(21:11):
I can watch is an opportunity to take in information
and learn. I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna bet on this,
but I'll watch. Then all of a sudden, I'm scrolling
on Twitter or Instagram and I'm not paying attention. But
if I bet on it, I'm gonna pay attention to it,
you know. So to be honest, that's why I like
doing it, even if it's something just nothing crazy. If
(21:32):
I just bet on one of the teams to win
or cover the spread or whatever, it just it helps
me treat it like work, where I'm trying to get
better at like a craft than just sitting here and
watching a sporting event. And like you said, nothing beats
the rush of gambling in terms of like my own life,
my own like well being. Doing anything that involves like
(21:55):
risk gets my blood flowing and gets me excited and
I feel fulfilled and a lot. I'van it's a great feeling.
So that explains why Blair signed up for fan Duel
and DraftKings, the two titans in the field of sports
betting apps, as soon as digital gambling became legal in Illinois.
He prefers FanDuel. Their user interface is significantly better, It's cleaner,
(22:16):
it's easier to manage, and it's owned by one of
the world's biggest gambling companies, one that has brought all
of the insights and tools of a consumer products juggernaut
to digital sports wagering. It towers over the industry like
the Wizard of Oz, and most gamblers don't understand who's
spinning all of the wheels behind the curtain. I was
familiar with it, but I didn't know how much of
(22:39):
a role they had played in all this. After the Break,
I'll take a closer look at that company and talk
to some of the people playing a role in making
those gambling apps almost addicting lye fun. Then later I'll
sit with Blair to watch him in action and do
some gambling of my own. So that company we were
(23:03):
talking about before the Break, its name is Flutter Entertainment.
It's one of the world's biggest gambling operations. While gamblers
like Blair, we're dreaming of sixty pay days, Flutter, which
owns FanDuel and other big brands, hauled in seven point
six billion in revenue. As the old saying goes in
(23:23):
the casino business, the house always wins. Then Flutter cashed
in when the sports betting landscape shifted in the US
back it was the full steenth of May and one
day it will be a company holiday. The day the
Supreme Court opened gamblings floodgates by allowing individual states to
(23:45):
legalize sports betting if they wanted, And that was Peter
Jackson Flutter CEO, the origins of foots slang in the
UK for having a bat having a flutter, says Peter,
as an ancient indulgence. Gambling is something that people have
done for a very very long time, actually not just
around sports. You know, people bet on dice and you
(24:06):
look at the history of gambling and it's a very
very well established thing and there are psychological reasons why
people enjoy taking that risk. Flutter is a collection of
gambling companies in Ireland in the UK that includes old
fashioned bookmakers and newer digital ventures. It has a big
footprint in Europe and around the globe. It's reach expanded
(24:29):
when it bought FanDuel, that app that gamblers like Blair
love to use. It's a U S company that originally
made a big splash and fantasy sports leagues. Flutter's timing
was good. It broke into the US Right before that
Supreme Court ruling was announced, Peter had just become CEO,
armed with an engineering degree from Cambridge and a blue
(24:50):
chip pedigree in banking and consulting. That sort of makes
him the perfect leader for a modern gambling company, less
a bookmaker and more of a consumer products champion. In
adept at reeling in digital customers, what was really clear
to me was that the economics in a digital batting environment,
we're going to be no different to any other digital business.
(25:11):
And we know that if you pick any category, the
economics flow disproportionate to the scale player. A very big
part of what I thought we need to do at
that time was to build scale. More than seven point
five million people visit Flutters various gambling platforms every month.
It's stock priced sword more than between, and it competes
(25:36):
with draft Kings for all of the advertising space you
see chewed up on your TV screens and in bus,
subway and train stations. It's partnered with sports leagues and
traditional media companies. As the boundaries that once separated those
businesses have dissolved. Amy how who runs vanduel for Flutter,
so she's offering her customers more than just gambling. At
(25:57):
the end of the day, we actually view what we
do is we're an entertainment platform, and so there really
are quite a few commonalities as you think about what
we built and what we deliver every day to consumers
and what we're trying to do here at vandel as well.
Like Peter Amy isn't a gambling veteran. She was a
senior executive at Ticketmaster, the entertainment company before coming to FanDuel.
(26:19):
One of the critical things for me is how do
I acquire as many customers as I can as efficiently
as possible. Right so, we have built i would say,
by far, the most efficient marketing acquisition engine in the industry,
and that's really one of the things that's been a
huge driver of our success so far. Another of Flutters
advantages it learned the sports gambling ropes in Ireland and
(26:39):
the UK long before the US betting boom took off,
and how all of that rolled out in the UK
has lessons for the US. I tracked down Rob Davis
to talk a little bit about that. He's a business
reporter for The Guardian and the author of a new book,
Jack Pott, How Gambling Conquered Britain. He's watched the UK
(26:59):
gambling bomb from a front row seat and he was
able to walk through exactly how gambling took over his country.
The boom there started when professional Premier League soccer began
appearing on everybody's TV. I think it last counted something
like a billion people watched the Premier League. So there
is really no advertising platform like it, and so it's
(27:20):
no surprise that over time gambling companies become very interested
in that, and then that essentially gets put on steroids
with the arrival of the Internet and then the second
leg mobile devices. Right, yeah, absolutely, there is a there
are a number of things all going on at once,
kind of confluence of events that creates a sort of
a perfect breeding ground for gambling to thrive and for
(27:43):
football to thrive on. It's as well because a lot
of money that goes into football from gambling. Gambling is
an unusual business. Much of it is just pure entertainment
for most people, but because it taps so directly into
primal urges around greed and risk, it can all will
be a powder keg. Compulsive gambling is one of its
(28:03):
most overt problems. The British government was alarmed by all
of that, so it gathered politicians, gambling operators, even religious
organizations to figure out a response. The two thousand and
five Gambling Act was born. It offered a regulatory structure
in the UK that was meant to last for decades.
They were thinking, well, this is a leisure pursuit, people
(28:26):
want to do it. We shouldn't be a nanny state.
We shouldn't try and intervene and stop them doing it.
And in fact, we can raise huge amounts of tax
revenue and create jobs. And you know, there's some logic
in that. But they dropped the Gambling Act in two
thousand and five. It comes into force in two thousand
and seven. And the thing that happens in the middle
of those two things is the invention of the iPhone.
The Gambling Act was built for a brick and mortar world,
(28:47):
but mobile devices didn't need buildings. Like everyone else, including me,
British politicians didn't fully understand the implications of the technology revolution.
Within a year, everyone was going to have Sisto a
casino in their pockets. And one of the things that
I've found a lot when I've talked to people who
do struggle with their gambling is that it helps them
if there's some degree of friction between the urge to
(29:10):
gamble and the ability to actually do it. Less friction,
more gambling, more gambling, more fun, and more money. But
the Brits had also learned that sports gambling was so
explosive and ubiquitous that their regulations turned out to be
backward looking. So far, the US hasn't appeared to have
learned any of those lessons, and states are legalizing gambling
(29:33):
at a rapid clip. Annual revenues from online sports betting
are currently about a billion dollars. Goldman Sachs estimates that
that figure will soar to about thirty nine billion, by
far more than what people spend on other forms of
entertainment such as movies and booze. All that action could
also lead to more blow ups. You could be in
(29:55):
bed at night at three am with your partners sleep
beside you, and you're losing the mortgage, you're losing the
child's university fund, and you know, I spoken to lots
of people have done that. That's not scam hungering. I mean,
that's what guys on. I've looked at research indicating only
about two percent of the gambling population winds up with
an addiction. Most people do gamble for fun, But all
those studies largely rely on data that predates the more
(30:18):
recent gambling boom. I imagine that number might sore now
that everyone can have a casino in their pocket. That
also got me thinking, could Blair be a self destructive,
compulsive gambler. I'm not an expert, but I don't think so.
He's learned the hard way what he has to watch
out for. Back when he was big into poker, he
(30:38):
found himself betting money he didn't have. Now he makes
it a point to talk openly about his losses. He
says that keeps him from glamorizing gambling. You need to
be humbled and you need to be brought back down
to earth, and you need to know that like, hey,
you can't dodge bullets. But I don't mind going through
those downswings because it just helps me put things in
(31:00):
their perspective. Do you think gamblers have a different relationship
to money than other people? Yeah, I mean I think
with the way that gamblers do this, there's an obsession
to money and too for whatever reason. You know, Well,
but what's the root of it. Do you think. I
don't know if I think it depends on the person.
Like for me, the root of my passion with all this,
(31:24):
it's not greed. Blair was still in high school when
the recession hit in two thousand and eight. Both of
his parents were real estate agents in Detroit and they
lost their house. They moved down to Florida, but Blair
stayed in Michigan to finish out high school. Then he
went to Michigan State. He worked his way through college,
maxed out student loans, and he had to pay for
(31:44):
his senior year using credit cards. I've seen how money can,
unfortunately hurt a family right, and it doesn't solve all problems,
but avoiding financial problems can create an environment to have
(32:06):
a healthy family and a good marriage and everything. It's
not everything, but being able to avoid that stuff is
where it comes from. With me, is like security. I
want to be able to invest and make good money
and do fun things and help my kids get through
college and start their lives because I learned everything that
(32:28):
I learned the hard way. So he's careful. He keeps
his gambling money in a different account and doesn't touch
the savings he shares with Sarah While the Titans of
Mobile Gambling don't offer money management tutorials to gamblers, they
say they're trying to monitor their customers for signs of
problem gambling. Here's fandual CEO Amy how again, I have
(32:48):
a compliance team of well over a hundred people. This
focus on everything from risky play to to anti money laundering.
I've got clear metrics and targets. So my entire organization
is entered based on making sure that we're not just
developing the products to be able to let consumers manage
within appropriate limits, but they were really driving those numbers flutter.
(33:11):
CEO Peter Jackson sums that up simply, we want to
make sure that our customers can have some fun, but
actually when the fund stops, we want them to stop betting.
And Peter says he takes responsibility for the fact that
it's not all on the gambler to stop betting. The
onus isn't on the customer, is a lot of it's
on us. We can see how much time someone's spending
(33:32):
on our site. We can see their patterns of play.
If someone's been depositing a hundred dollars a month and
suddenly they put five hundred dollars in and suddenly they
put two thousand dollars in. We need to be on
red alert. And actually it doesn't matter how much money
people have. If people are spending a huge amount of
time on our site and they hadn't in the past,
(33:54):
that's also something we need to be really thoughtful about
as well. So there's lots of signals and signs that
we look for in terms of our customers on our platform. Well, well,
then reach out and engage in talk talk customers to
check their okay. I want to take Amy and Peter's
responses here at face value, but there's a long history
of companies peddling vice who claim to be concerned about
(34:15):
the impact of what they sell and then can't really
knuckle down and change their behavior. The tobacco industry comes
to mind. I also wonder how much of their valuable
corporate resources they really want to spend looking after wayward gamblers.
FanDuel's website does offer a nifty tools for setting limits
on wagers, but the onus certainly is on the customer
(34:36):
to take advantage of them. Gamblers themselves are required to
set the limits. FanDuel stays out of the way After
I signed up as a FanDuel newbie for this story,
the company flooded my inbox, encouraging me to do anything
but set limits on my gambling. I was offered lots
of exclusives and free bets. I may not be the
sharpest gambler in the world, but I also know there's
(34:59):
no oh such thing as a free bet, and I'm
just a gambling voyeur. For others more attached to their betting,
fan Duel, Draft Kings and other companies, persistent messaging might
encourage something that becomes much more life shattering. Fortunately, my
new friend Blair is not in that category. I sincerely
hope he stays in the safe zone and continues to
(35:21):
have fun and make some good money on the side,
because it really is fun to watch him in action.
After the break, Blair and I will crack open some beers,
dig into some pretzels and cheese dip, and over analyze
some games, all in the hopes of making a little
bit of money. We'll be right back. Let's go back
(35:44):
to that Dodgers Mets game Blair was betting on at
the beginning of this episode. Get through. Oh Let's go,
Oh my god, Oh my God. It's unbelievable, all right. Now,
this baseball game is very important to me. Here's the
bet Blair made for two fifty dollars. He chose the
winner of three baseball games that day and one player
(36:06):
who would hit a home run in each one of them.
By the third game, his bed is still alive. He
just needs one more player to hit a homer, but
it's never that easy. By the end of the ninth inning,
his guy, a Dodger named Freddie Freeman, still hasn't delivered
the goods. Then the game goes into extra innings. Blair's
(36:27):
hopes are kept alive. As a better I could not
be asking for a better situation right now. It's an
extreme long shot that he hits a home run to
win the game, you know, on the bottom of tenth,
But I have a chance, which again, he's all I'm
asking for. So now, Freddie Freeman is a Mets are beating,
leading the Dodgers five to four, and Blair would love
for Freddie Freeman a walk off home run that would
(36:51):
be worth sixty dollars to Blair. Of course, he slings
the first pitch that's disappointing and grounds out. Yeah. Well,
it's not by any means over um, but it would
realistically probably have to go two mornings for him to
get another right bad I'm honestly pretty surprised he swung
at the first pitch. Ever, the optimist Blair saying it's
(37:14):
not over until it's over, and even when it is over,
he's hedged enough that he still has a chance to
make money off the game. Wow, he struck him out
games over employer. So I'm not upset about it. I'm
not upset about it by any means. I'll take that
all day long. But he sounds pretty dejected and he's
(37:37):
thinking aloud about what might have been. I had a
chance for my guy to do what I needed him
to do, to literally end the game and win my
bet in the bottom of the tenth inning. So it's again,
those are good scenarios. That means I had a long odds,
right long odds, but a good scenario, and you have
to find yourself, like I almost picked this guy trade
(38:00):
Turner to home run today, and he did. I ended
upon with Freeman because the starting pitcher for the Mets
was statistically worse against lefties than he is against righties,
so I went with Freeman over Turner, and of course
Turner was the one that you know, you know, we're
on the first inning too, So unfortunately just picked the
wrong guy. Even if he's disappointed, Lair takes comfort in
(38:21):
the fact that he's in it for the long haul.
My theory a lot of the time is just live
to fight another day, because you cannot beat sports betting.
There's always gonna be another game, another match, whatever, it's
always going to be there, and what you're trying to
do ultimately is just it's just just keep making money
(38:42):
and keep profiting off of this stuff. And you've got
to understand that you're gonna get to the last leg
of parlays a decent amount of time and that's gonna
be the one that you were wrong on and it sucks.
So if you take your win, you take your cash
out and hedge, you move on. There's nothing wrong with that.
You just keep building your bank roll, pay off a bill,
go on a vacation, you know, something like that, go
(39:03):
out to dinner with your your spouse, your significant other.
There's nothing wrong with that at all. But that's hard,
especially because so much of gambling is a solitary pursuit.
Sarah says she wishes she could help Lair with some
of his research so they could work on this together,
but Blair really needs to keep it all in his
own head. His friends are supportive and try to bet
(39:23):
with him, but they also don't really get it. I'll
do it with my friends, and my friends will participate,
but they'll mostly just take whatever it is that I
did and then put significantly less money on it, and
then when the game's going on, they might not even
be paying attention in the sense that I am. And
if you watching a guy miss a three pointer in
(39:44):
the first quarter and be like furious, and they're like,
what's the big deal, it's the first quarter. I'm like,
because he's only gonna shoot two more. I needed to
make two and now he's got to go and they're
like what. That's what prop betting specifically will do to you.
You will pay attention to the dumbest and the tiniest
little details that will impact your bet at some point
(40:04):
throughout the game, and it will change the way that
you feel about certain players because they'll miss a layup,
or they'll drop a pass in the end zone or something,
and you're just like like, like, what's wrong with you?
You know? But in reality, like they're humans, they're gonna
make mistakes. But it's hard not to get frustrated when
stuff like that happens. I laughed to myself as player
(40:25):
told me this, but I wouldn't truly understand until later
when I had my own bet on the line. You see,
I had the Fan Duel app open for most of
the weekend watching the lines along with Blair, and Fan
Duel kept nudging me. I just got a reality check
from my Fan Duel app saying, we're glad you're enjoying
FanDuel Sports Book. Just so you know, you've been playing
(40:47):
for thirty three minutes. You have wagered zero dollars since
you logged in. Okay, So I do get the feeling
that the app is getting mad at me. Isn't this
the company that was telling me they wanted to make
sure I went about this nice and easy. Well, they
sure made it easy for me since it was my
first prop bet. They gave me twenty five dollars to wager.
(41:08):
So during the Warriors Celtics playoff game, I put it
on one of their promotions, what they call a boost bet.
I bet that Steph Curry and Jayson Tatum would each
score over thirty points during the game. At first, I
was really proud of myself. I thought I would nail it.
You're a pretty good shape on that boost. Bet, you're
really good shape. Yeah. I think he's a twenty now
(41:31):
and uh Tatum's got twenty one. I mean, in a
close game, Steph Curry needs ten points and Jayson Tatum
needs nine. You're in a You're in a good spot.
Step Crey to sport game. Good job, Steph. See I've
now got a different relationship to this game. Yeah. Now
(41:52):
you paying attention to it differently. You can feel it right, Yeah,
totally where he's like in a normal game, you'd like,
oh wheriors are up twelve. You know this is great?
Missed the lay up. Then all of a sudden, the
game turned into a blowout. The Warriors began pounding the Celtics.
Blair spotted that development right away before I even knew
(42:13):
what it meant. Blows is where all the parleys where
they all go to die? All parley's even my parley. Yep.
Although Steph Curry needed just one more point and Jayson
Tatum needed just two from I bet to pay off
the blowout met their coaches might take them off the court.
What I wouldn't be surprised if Tatum, if this gets
(42:36):
to like points that he won't come back in and
then you're like, wow, he needed three points for a
quarter and a half and he couldn't get it, and
he just missed a free throw, which is unusual, which
is making me mad and it should right like it's
it's it's very frustrated. At this point, it wasn't hard
(42:59):
for our minds to go cynical, and we started questioning
FanDuel's motives and offering this particular boost. Did they know
it was going to be a blowout, because this sort
of thing with the boost happens all the time. All
the time. We're like, you're right there, and all of
a sudden, something weird happens and then it just doesn't finish. Wow. Really,
(43:21):
So it's common for boosts not to pay, like right
at the edge, it's common for them not to hit.
Oh yeah, I mean I get it is common for
them not to hit, except presumably they wouldn't be offered
that much. But the thing is that they come right
up to the edge of it, and then they don't hit.
We weren't the only ones moaning about how close we got.
The next day, Pat McAfee brought up that exact same
(43:41):
parlay on his popular gambling show. McAfee has developed such
a close following that Banduel reportedly pays him thirty million
dollars a year just to gab about gambling and fan
duel representatives go on a show the morning after I
lost my parlay, he had fan duels. Top odds maker
John Shearon onto chat, let's just get right into it.
(44:03):
Last night's boost yea Tatum and Steph to both score thirty?
How many did Steff have after three quarters? How many
did Tatum have after three quarters? How many minutes did
they play in the fourth quarter combined? Zero? How did
you know? How? How did you know? John? We just
have a direct line step side. It will be over
(44:24):
after three quarters and you wouldn't see him again. People. Well,
I'm not seeing fan duel fix that, bet. I really
don't think there's any chance that they bribed Katum, Curry
or their coaches. That's why McAfee and Sharon could joke
about it now. But whenever you see something like that happened,
I assume you guys are ecstatic. You would have to
(44:44):
be whenever the fourth quarter starting, and it's like, neither
the guys are playing. Oh, isn't that we perfectly put
this is the perfect boost right there. Third Like that's
dream for the book, right for that to happen. Honestly
it is. But like that's not the way that we
try and think about. We're not sitting there looking to
(45:08):
try and you know win. All of these boots boosts
are offered honestly, you know, with genuine good faith. We
want people have a good experience. I want to give
them a bit of value. So Fan Duel wasn't manipulating anything.
All of us gamblers just had bad luck on that one.
But it did get me thinking about the perils of
match fixing and about a series of interviews I had
done earlier in the spring. Next episode, we'll bring you
(45:30):
that story, the rise of gambling and match fixing. For now,
I'm still stewing about the hundred and fifty bucks I
missed out on. Blair, of course, was much more successful.
Sure he missed out on the sixty three dollar Baseball
Parley pay out, but in our two days together he
netted close to two thousand dollars. That's not bad for
(45:51):
a weekend of watching sports. Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow's
another day, and there's hockey, and there's probably some random
bottom to your tennis matches, and I bet you there's
twelve baseball games or something. So there's plenty of stuff
that there's going to be action on, that's for sure.
(46:23):
Here at Crash Course, we believe the collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising,
and always instructive. In today's Crash Course, I learned that
we are in the very early stages of a huge
boom that's transforming sports media and the way that people gamble,
and that the only people who should be gambling lots
(46:43):
of money a lot of the time are the ones
who are actually good at it. What did you learn?
We'd love to hear from you. You can tweet at
the Bloomberg Opinion handle at Opinion or me at Tim
O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also
subscribed to our show wherever you're listening right now and
leave us a review. It helps more people find the show.
(47:06):
This episode was produced by the Indispensable Anamazarakis and me
are supervising producers Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing help
from Katie Boyce, Jed Sandberg, Jeff Grocott, Mikeniezza, Samantha Story
and Christine Van den Bilart. Blake Maples does our sound
engineering and our original theme song was composed by Luis Kara.
(47:28):
I'm Tim O'Brien and this has been crash course. Check
your feed for the next episode in our gambling series
about match fixing.
Are you back there, Blair doing your thing? Can I
sit on your shoulder? Is that going about it? Oh?
Get out, please, get out, get out. Oh that's so brutal.
This is Blair Montgomery. I flew to Chicago to visit
(00:20):
him back in June, and I promise you that he
wanted me to visit. He wasn't yelling at me to
get out. He was yelling at a baseball, a baseball
hit by a player with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Blair
had a two fifty dollar parlay in the game. That's
one large bet made up of a string of smaller bets.
I have a baseball parley where it was like I
(00:42):
picked a guy to hit a home run and the
team to win for three separate games, and uh, I
hit the first two. I need the Dodgers to win,
and I need one of their players to hit a
home run. So this girl, I just wanted to go
to ex trainings. And if this game goes to extra innings,
we may be paying quite a bit of attention to
this one. How much will this pay for you? If
(01:04):
everything works, if if if Freddie Freeman right, so, Freddie
Freeman right here, he's that second for the Dodgers. He's
their first baseman. He hit a ball to the fence
earlier and a guy jumped up and caught it right
at the wall. And if he hits a home run
in the Dodgers win, it pays out like almost sixty grand.
You actually think it's like sixty three grand. So it's
obviously a very, very very profitable and big parlay. Welcome
(01:27):
to Crash Course, the podcast about business, political, and social
disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Brien.
If it hasn't already, sports gambling is coming to your town,
your living room, and your kid's cell phone. Last year,
Americans bet about four hundred and fifty million dollars on
sports every day. That's one of those numbers. I don't
(01:50):
even know how to comprehend. It's so huge. That translates
to a hundred and sixty five billion dollars a year,
but of course gamblers lose a lot of that. That's
how the industry pulled in forty four billion dollars last year,
and it looks like betting is going to keep on exploding.
I've been watching the gambling industry for years, but the
(02:10):
current boom is like no other. It's going to reshape games, fans,
and society, and its impact has only begun to be felt.
And because some gamblers become addicts, it can be a
wildly destructive activity. It can also lead to corruption in sports.
In honor of the Super Bowl this weekend and the
vast number of bets that we placed on the game,
(02:33):
this is the first of three episodes about the past, present,
and future of the multibillion dollars sports betting boom. Over
the next three episodes will travel from Chicago to London
to the tribal lands of Connecticut to explore all of this,
looking at mobile betting, match fixing, and the future of
tribal casinos. But first things first, Today's crash course inside
(02:58):
the digital sports bet Boom to better understand that boom,
I wanted to spend time with somebody who's really good
at navigating all of the ups and downs of gambling.
Blair is one of the industry's super users. He gambles
every day, every weekend, and he's making more money betting
than he does from his day job. He's also a
(03:21):
window under the peculiar set of talents that makes successful
gamblers interesting to me. Unlike most people who bet, he's
actually able to make a handsome living off of it.
He's obsessive, but to my untrained eye, not an addict.
He's emotionally disciplined, he manages money well, he's good at math,
he's intuitive, and he knows how to judge risk. Anyone
(03:44):
can hit those bets one time. It doesn't take someone
who's a sharp sports better or someone who knows sports
extremely well to hit that at one time. But to
be able to do that repetitively over time, or the
even come close to hitting those things over time, I
think you gotta be a little nuts and a little crazy.
(04:06):
And that's kind of how I am like, meaning being
entirely risk forward, being comfortable with massive risks, Yeah, exactly.
And you have to put the work in. And if
you don't and you lose your edge on that and
you're not showing up and being really active with it,
I think it's gonna come bacted by you, and you're
gonna start losing and it's gonna hurt a lot. It
(04:30):
was a great weekend to go to Chicago to watch
Blair gamble the French Open crowd its winners game two
of the NBA Finals tied up the series, and the
baseball season was in full swing. I was excited to
meet Blair and watch him in action. How you do it,
good man? How are you good? It's good to see you.
As I told you, a lot of our a lot
of our interaction is gonna be putting this mic close
(04:51):
to your Yeah, that's fine to worry about it. Don't
confuse Blair with that image you might have in your
mind of a worn out old gambler lurking in a
casino him. He looks like a jock, athletic and trim,
with close cropped auburn hair. He's energetic and friendly, very Midwestern.
I was introduced to Blair by some sports cammeblers I
(05:12):
know who hang out together online. I heard he was
really good at this whole sports betting thing, and he
was even considering turning the side hustle into a full
time job. I found Blair a fascinating person to focus
on because he's an unknown who's already started making a
big splash. And I think he's the embodiment of all
of the highs and lows to be found in the
(05:34):
gambling boom. I've always had like a really good just
general read on sporting events. And I think my mom
always joked and she was like, you're gonna work for
ESPN someday. And when I didn't go that around in college,
she was a little disappointed. But it didn't really change
much in terms of who I was or what people
knew me about. They just didn't know that I could
(05:55):
turn hunter Bucks into you know, sixties seventy dollars and
then you could make tens of thousand some dollars off
of it in a sitting. Like I said, Blair is
very good at this. Here's how he got here. When
he was around ten or eleven, he started playing poker
with his buddies in a small town in Michigan. He
was a good student and a good athlete, competitive and
(06:17):
he routinely demolished his poker partners. His tournaments with friends
grew through high school to thirty forty kids in somebody's basement.
In college, he started going to real casinos. He spent
whole days playing tournaments. I think it's extremely fair to
say that when I was younger, in particularly I was
playing poker that you know, going on tilt is a
(06:37):
very common term in poker, and I had an extremely
hard time balancing that a lot of people do, you know,
and so there were times where I was playing with
money that I shouldn't have, and there are times where
I lost money that I couldn't afford to lose. Around
the time he turned one, a poker front of his
suggested he get into sports betting, so he started to
dabble in that too. Poker would soon take a back
(06:59):
seat because in the Supreme Court ended Nevada's monopoly on
sports betting by striking down a federal law that had
effectively banned it in most other states. Pretty quickly, states
started legalizing something that had once been considered taboo. Indiana
was the closest state to Blair to legalize it in
(07:21):
the fall of but it was still old school. You
had to go to a casino and wager in person,
so Blair had to get up early in the morning
at Chicago to drive an hour or so to Indiana,
pushes money through a window to a bookie, and then
drive home to watch the games. Betting became more popular
and the lines of the casinos grew longer. It was
(07:43):
like going to like an amusement park, you know, were
you wait in line for two hours for a ride.
This all had to be done before the games could start.
If you wanted a bet during the game, you could
try your luck at a digital kiosk, But the problem
was the betting lines or the odds we're changing by
the second, and the machine couldn't keep up. So you
(08:04):
would submit, and then it would think, and then it
would be like do you accept the odds change? And
you're like yes, and you eat it again and they're like,
do you accept the odds change? Like this is just ridiculous,
Like I am never gonna get this in, so then
you just remove it. But nobody would have to wait.
Once gambling went digital apps operated a lot faster than
electronic kiosks. The rise of sports betting apps like FanDuel
(08:25):
and DraftKings man it easier to monitor odds and place
bets from the comfort of your own home. Blair's trips
to Indiana effectively ended when Illinois legalized online betting. In
his living room became his new gambling den. It's a bright,
airy space with a view of the Chicago skyline and
decorated with a comfy L shaped couch in a big
(08:47):
flat panel TV. Decidedly not a casino vibe. It's completely
different than the brick and mortar experience. It's still fun
having like the actual paper slip that you keep and
when you win and you go in and you turn
it in. It's a really cool feeling. But how technology
has changed the way that you can just do this
on your phone is what's made this boom so insane.
(09:08):
Over the last a couple of years, COVID lockdowns caused
a huge spike and online gambling across the country, from
hundreds of millions of dollars in wagers a month to
several billion. But it wasn't until the fall of the
Blair's own sports gambling career really took off, and it
all started at a friend's wedding. Before Blair drove to
(09:30):
that wedding, he had lined up five or six different
parlays for NFL games that day, laying down a total
of about a thousand dollars in bets. Remember, a parlay
is basically one wager made up of a bunch of
smaller different bets. How many field goals are kicked, added
to the number of touchdowns, added to the total score,
(09:50):
and so on and so on. Each one of those
bets needs to win for the entire bet to pay off,
because they're so risky. The odds are astronomically bad. But
if all of the smaller legs of the better winners,
gamblers can get a massive payout. During the wedding, Blair's
most promising parley was shaping up nicely, but by the
(10:13):
time the bride and groom had said I do and
he sat down at the reception, he was a nervous wreck.
Rather than celebrating, his eyes were glued to his phone.
If I have a bet, particularly parleys that have legs,
I have got to be monitoring it and following it,
particularly because you're gonna get live cash out offers, and
(10:33):
if you think something is potentially gonna slip, you need
to jump on it and get out. His friends got
sucked in and started watching the game with him. While
the father of the bride is giving his speech, the
Dolphins converted to fourth downs. Basically, they went ninety yards
in like sixty seconds and they converted a fourth and
(10:57):
to extend the game. All of that helped his bet.
Blair was ecstatic, His wife Sarah well less. So, if
we're being fully transparent, I was kind of getting not
upset with him, and I was like, you guys are well.
I was annoyed because I was like, you guys are
being rude, like you need to listen to the speech.
But then as it turns out, like you know, nobody
(11:20):
even noticed. But I was just next to all of them,
and I'm like, we're right back in college. I'm on
team Sarah. Here all of these goofs were staring at
a cell phone during a wedding reception. But then I
found out how much money was involved. By the end
of the speeches, Blair's parlay had one and he had
guaranteed his biggest win yet thousand dollars. It's hard to
(11:45):
describe because it's literally the best. It's the best feeling
in the world. And as you start to realize, like,
oh my god, this has incredible potential, it gives you
goose bumps, you know, and then when you're down to
one game, you're just sitting there sweating out and everyone
one is riding with you and everything, and so it's
just it's the best feeling in the world. Like it's
i mean again, better than everything else, better than sex
(12:09):
um um. I probably can't answer that one. How I
want to because Sarah will probably get a little mad,
but hitting a parlays the best feeling. It's it's incredible.
After that high at the wedding, Blair kept at it.
In the next couple of weeks, Blair hit not one,
but two other massive parlays for a total payoff of
(12:31):
a hundred and thirty three thousand dollars. Other gamblers started
paying attention. My following went from eight hundred people on
Twitter to like ten twelve thousand and in just the
span of a couple of weeks. And then because of
those three successful cart and everyone was like, whoa, Okay,
I didn't know that you actually were good at this.
And you hit one and people are like, oh, that's cool.
(12:54):
You hit two and people are like, oh, okay, and
then you hit three in a row, and everyone is
kind of losing their minds and they're like, this kid
could be from the future. Blair's Twitter account at Monty
Parley now has about thirty five followers, and Blair's built
a real community there. In case you didn't know it,
gambling Twitter as a thing. Lots of people congregate there
(13:15):
looking for hot tips. Blair tweets out his bets and
his analysis so followers can decide whether or not to
piggyback with their own bets. He complains about his losses,
and he celebrates his major wins. He really engages with
his followers. He also has a discord group that's an
online chat room where people pay twenty dollars a month
(13:35):
to talk about their bets and get advice from him.
He takes that responsibility very seriously. If people are going
to have faith in me and follow me, like I
take it to heart and take it serious. Trying to
please a lot of people and I'm trying to help
them make some money, you know. I've had people that
have DM me on Twitter after a parlay hits and
they're like, you just paid for my daughter's dance recitals
(13:58):
for the next year. Like I can't even put into words,
I can't believe. I don't even know how I found
you on Twitter, and I'm like, that's amazing, you know,
Like it's the best feeling in the world. But when
they lose and people are frustrated, you deal with that
side of it too, and it's hard. It's hard because
even thought Blair is really good at this and has
earned his following through some big wins. It's a risky business.
(14:19):
I'm definitely a big parlay guy, and I'm not from
the future, so like I lose all the time, like
anyone who bets parlays loses all the time. But if
your win right on a twelve like parlay is point
to five and you can hit that two or three
percent of the time, you're gonna be math massively profitable.
So it's just a manitor of bankroll management and not
(14:41):
getting too crazy. He's never lost more than on a bet,
but he told me about one time when he missed
a parley by one leg that could have netted him
upwards of two d and twenty dollars. I cried a
little bit that night because that would have been ridiculous, right,
I mean, truly just insane. At another time, when he
(15:02):
missed out on close to eighty grand I was like,
oh my god, I could feel like I wanted to
throw up. But each loss for Blair is a learning opportunity.
I try to always the day after look back at
the ones that lost and take in some whatever information
I can kind of soak in what happened, and that's
(15:22):
how I know that player is really a pro at sports. Gambling.
He's not blindly putting money on games or props. He
does his research and he has a strategy. He listens
to the commentary during the games to learn as much
as he can. He tracks stats and historical data online.
He really thinks this through. He showed me one of
(15:43):
the websites he uses a sort through all of the
data when he's thinking about his bets. The site's called
props dot cash. It was founded only a year ago by,
of all people, an aspiring elementary school math teacher. He
wanted to use sports data to make math more fun
and accessible for students. He quickly learned he can make
(16:04):
more money selling it as a service for gamblers. You
have to remember, deep real time analytics like this weren't
available to most gamblers for the entire history of sports betting. Now,
guys like Blair can operate like hardcore statisticians. The screen
in front of Blair is a sea of fever charts,
bar graphs, league team and player names, all awash and
(16:28):
lots and lots of data. All this data is publicly available,
but to be able to slice and dice it this
way that quickly is what makes this super helpful. You
don't need a super analytical mind to be able to
like look at this and formulate a point of view.
And so I think it's helped a lot of like
(16:48):
your average sports bettors could just sharpen your sort of
statistical sensibility about where the value lies. He's also pretty fearless.
He's not afraid to go with gut instincts, even if
that means backing an underdog. One of his big Parley
wins last year included an NFL bet that the notoriously
bad Jets would beat the pretty good Titans. His followers
(17:11):
really questioned that one realistically, any given night, anyone can win,
and that is true. These guys are professionals and they're
all good, no matter who's on your fantasy team and
who didn't throw for a three yards or get you
a touchdown that week, and you're like, this guy sucks.
I'm never I'm never taking this guy again. That guy
(17:31):
is elite and he is in the pent of the
one percent and what he does in the entire world.
And so if you don't think the Jets can beat
the Titans, I promise you they can and those games
do happen. That strategy is paying off. If I can
come closer to winning more than I throw up air balls,
(17:53):
then I'm going to make money off of this or
at minimum break even. And again, just keep kind of
treading water until I get close to hitting a huge parlay,
because that's kind of my goal with this is just
just do okay, small winds here and there, don't do
anything too crazy, and then put yourself in the spot
where you could win. What did you net in lash? Overall?
(18:17):
It was close close to It was close to two,
and he was like a hundred thousand, So I mean
it was a incredible year. And that was that your
best year ever? Absolutely? Yeah. He says his gambling winnings
last year earned him about as much as his day job.
He's a regional manager at Salesforce. Blair says he loves
his job, but he also logs off right at five
(18:40):
and switches to his side hustle. Beside hustle. This quickly
approaching full time status. Now it feels like a second job,
you know, it really does. I'm definitely doing this and
minimum at minimum thirty hours a week, if not forty,
every single week, and it it never ends. There's sports
on every single day. He also has a life outside
(19:03):
of his two gigs. His wife, Sarah is really supportive
of his side hustle. She talks about his work and
his skill like he's an entrepreneur and he basically is.
She's clearly proud of him that she supports him, and
she trusts that he's not going to make any decisions
that could hurt their family, and yet all of the
gambling takes away from their time together. He's very focused,
(19:25):
I would say that's the best way to describe it.
Very locked in, kind of in his own element. And
then he'll come out, like thirty minutes later, he's like,
all right, sorry, what did you ask me? I was
a little preoccupied. Um, I should know better enough by now.
But yeah, he's he's pretty locked in today. Well the most,
just a few more basketball games and then you're free.
(19:46):
I'm looking forward to having my husband back, but there's
always another sport to distract Blair and he and Sarah
had a major change soon after my trip. Their son
Tommy was born in August. When I visited them in June,
Sarah was trying to figure out how they would juggle work, gambling,
and a new baby. I think it's something that We're
(20:07):
still going to have to navigate just because it is
so new, especially when the baby comes, like right now,
it's just me that he has to worry about, And
especially during peak NBA season when there's like fifteen games on,
it's very time consuming for him to be monitoring all
of those all night, and honestly, we don't spend that
much time together on those nights. Sarah and Blair have
(20:29):
been together for ten years and have been through some
ups and downs. They clearly trust one another, so much
so that Sarah's considering using her marketing chops to help
Blair build a bigger gambling brand for himself. There are
downsides to having a bigger brand, though. Blair says wagering
takes a physical toll, and what began as a hobby
morphs at times into an obsession. It can leave him
(20:51):
little time for anything else. Relationships with his friends and
family are affected research embedding and true on vacation time.
It's even changed how we watch his games. He very
rarely just tunes in for fun anymore because he always
has money on the line, which asserts its own sort
of pull. So here's the thing. Every sporting event that
(21:11):
I can watch is an opportunity to take in information
and learn. I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna bet on this,
but I'll watch. Then all of a sudden, I'm scrolling
on Twitter or Instagram and I'm not paying attention. But
if I bet on it, I'm gonna pay attention to it,
you know. So to be honest, that's why I like
doing it, even if it's something just nothing crazy. If
(21:32):
I just bet on one of the teams to win
or cover the spread or whatever, it just it helps
me treat it like work, where I'm trying to get
better at like a craft than just sitting here and
watching a sporting event. And like you said, nothing beats
the rush of gambling in terms of like my own life,
my own like well being. Doing anything that involves like
(21:55):
risk gets my blood flowing and gets me excited and
I feel fulfilled and a lot. I'van it's a great feeling.
So that explains why Blair signed up for fan Duel
and DraftKings, the two titans in the field of sports
betting apps, as soon as digital gambling became legal in Illinois.
He prefers FanDuel. Their user interface is significantly better, It's cleaner,
(22:16):
it's easier to manage, and it's owned by one of
the world's biggest gambling companies, one that has brought all
of the insights and tools of a consumer products juggernaut
to digital sports wagering. It towers over the industry like
the Wizard of Oz, and most gamblers don't understand who's
spinning all of the wheels behind the curtain. I was
familiar with it, but I didn't know how much of
(22:39):
a role they had played in all this. After the Break,
I'll take a closer look at that company and talk
to some of the people playing a role in making
those gambling apps almost addicting lye fun. Then later I'll
sit with Blair to watch him in action and do
some gambling of my own. So that company we were
(23:03):
talking about before the Break, its name is Flutter Entertainment.
It's one of the world's biggest gambling operations. While gamblers
like Blair, we're dreaming of sixty pay days, Flutter, which
owns FanDuel and other big brands, hauled in seven point
six billion in revenue. As the old saying goes in
(23:23):
the casino business, the house always wins. Then Flutter cashed
in when the sports betting landscape shifted in the US
back it was the full steenth of May and one
day it will be a company holiday. The day the
Supreme Court opened gamblings floodgates by allowing individual states to
(23:45):
legalize sports betting if they wanted, And that was Peter
Jackson Flutter CEO, the origins of foots slang in the
UK for having a bat having a flutter, says Peter,
as an ancient indulgence. Gambling is something that people have
done for a very very long time, actually not just
around sports. You know, people bet on dice and you
(24:06):
look at the history of gambling and it's a very
very well established thing and there are psychological reasons why
people enjoy taking that risk. Flutter is a collection of
gambling companies in Ireland in the UK that includes old
fashioned bookmakers and newer digital ventures. It has a big
footprint in Europe and around the globe. It's reach expanded
(24:29):
when it bought FanDuel, that app that gamblers like Blair
love to use. It's a U S company that originally
made a big splash and fantasy sports leagues. Flutter's timing
was good. It broke into the US Right before that
Supreme Court ruling was announced, Peter had just become CEO,
armed with an engineering degree from Cambridge and a blue
(24:50):
chip pedigree in banking and consulting. That sort of makes
him the perfect leader for a modern gambling company, less
a bookmaker and more of a consumer products champion. In
adept at reeling in digital customers, what was really clear
to me was that the economics in a digital batting environment,
we're going to be no different to any other digital business.
(25:11):
And we know that if you pick any category, the
economics flow disproportionate to the scale player. A very big
part of what I thought we need to do at
that time was to build scale. More than seven point
five million people visit Flutters various gambling platforms every month.
It's stock priced sword more than between, and it competes
(25:36):
with draft Kings for all of the advertising space you
see chewed up on your TV screens and in bus,
subway and train stations. It's partnered with sports leagues and
traditional media companies. As the boundaries that once separated those
businesses have dissolved. Amy how who runs vanduel for Flutter,
so she's offering her customers more than just gambling. At
(25:57):
the end of the day, we actually view what we
do is we're an entertainment platform, and so there really
are quite a few commonalities as you think about what
we built and what we deliver every day to consumers
and what we're trying to do here at vandel as well.
Like Peter Amy isn't a gambling veteran. She was a
senior executive at Ticketmaster, the entertainment company before coming to FanDuel.
(26:19):
One of the critical things for me is how do
I acquire as many customers as I can as efficiently
as possible. Right so, we have built i would say,
by far, the most efficient marketing acquisition engine in the industry,
and that's really one of the things that's been a
huge driver of our success so far. Another of Flutters
advantages it learned the sports gambling ropes in Ireland and
(26:39):
the UK long before the US betting boom took off,
and how all of that rolled out in the UK
has lessons for the US. I tracked down Rob Davis
to talk a little bit about that. He's a business
reporter for The Guardian and the author of a new book,
Jack Pott, How Gambling Conquered Britain. He's watched the UK
(26:59):
gambling bomb from a front row seat and he was
able to walk through exactly how gambling took over his country.
The boom there started when professional Premier League soccer began
appearing on everybody's TV. I think it last counted something
like a billion people watched the Premier League. So there
is really no advertising platform like it, and so it's
(27:20):
no surprise that over time gambling companies become very interested
in that, and then that essentially gets put on steroids
with the arrival of the Internet and then the second
leg mobile devices. Right, yeah, absolutely, there is a there
are a number of things all going on at once,
kind of confluence of events that creates a sort of
a perfect breeding ground for gambling to thrive and for
(27:43):
football to thrive on. It's as well because a lot
of money that goes into football from gambling. Gambling is
an unusual business. Much of it is just pure entertainment
for most people, but because it taps so directly into
primal urges around greed and risk, it can all will
be a powder keg. Compulsive gambling is one of its
(28:03):
most overt problems. The British government was alarmed by all
of that, so it gathered politicians, gambling operators, even religious
organizations to figure out a response. The two thousand and
five Gambling Act was born. It offered a regulatory structure
in the UK that was meant to last for decades.
They were thinking, well, this is a leisure pursuit, people
(28:26):
want to do it. We shouldn't be a nanny state.
We shouldn't try and intervene and stop them doing it.
And in fact, we can raise huge amounts of tax
revenue and create jobs. And you know, there's some logic
in that. But they dropped the Gambling Act in two
thousand and five. It comes into force in two thousand
and seven. And the thing that happens in the middle
of those two things is the invention of the iPhone.
The Gambling Act was built for a brick and mortar world,
(28:47):
but mobile devices didn't need buildings. Like everyone else, including me,
British politicians didn't fully understand the implications of the technology revolution.
Within a year, everyone was going to have Sisto a
casino in their pockets. And one of the things that
I've found a lot when I've talked to people who
do struggle with their gambling is that it helps them
if there's some degree of friction between the urge to
(29:10):
gamble and the ability to actually do it. Less friction,
more gambling, more gambling, more fun, and more money. But
the Brits had also learned that sports gambling was so
explosive and ubiquitous that their regulations turned out to be
backward looking. So far, the US hasn't appeared to have
learned any of those lessons, and states are legalizing gambling
(29:33):
at a rapid clip. Annual revenues from online sports betting
are currently about a billion dollars. Goldman Sachs estimates that
that figure will soar to about thirty nine billion, by
far more than what people spend on other forms of
entertainment such as movies and booze. All that action could
also lead to more blow ups. You could be in
(29:55):
bed at night at three am with your partners sleep
beside you, and you're losing the mortgage, you're losing the
child's university fund, and you know, I spoken to lots
of people have done that. That's not scam hungering. I mean,
that's what guys on. I've looked at research indicating only
about two percent of the gambling population winds up with
an addiction. Most people do gamble for fun, But all
those studies largely rely on data that predates the more
(30:18):
recent gambling boom. I imagine that number might sore now
that everyone can have a casino in their pocket. That
also got me thinking, could Blair be a self destructive,
compulsive gambler. I'm not an expert, but I don't think so.
He's learned the hard way what he has to watch
out for. Back when he was big into poker, he
(30:38):
found himself betting money he didn't have. Now he makes
it a point to talk openly about his losses. He
says that keeps him from glamorizing gambling. You need to
be humbled and you need to be brought back down
to earth, and you need to know that like, hey,
you can't dodge bullets. But I don't mind going through
those downswings because it just helps me put things in
(31:00):
their perspective. Do you think gamblers have a different relationship
to money than other people? Yeah, I mean I think
with the way that gamblers do this, there's an obsession
to money and too for whatever reason. You know, Well,
but what's the root of it. Do you think. I
don't know if I think it depends on the person.
Like for me, the root of my passion with all this,
(31:24):
it's not greed. Blair was still in high school when
the recession hit in two thousand and eight. Both of
his parents were real estate agents in Detroit and they
lost their house. They moved down to Florida, but Blair
stayed in Michigan to finish out high school. Then he
went to Michigan State. He worked his way through college,
maxed out student loans, and he had to pay for
(31:44):
his senior year using credit cards. I've seen how money can,
unfortunately hurt a family right, and it doesn't solve all problems,
but avoiding financial problems can create an environment to have
(32:06):
a healthy family and a good marriage and everything. It's
not everything, but being able to avoid that stuff is
where it comes from. With me, is like security. I
want to be able to invest and make good money
and do fun things and help my kids get through
college and start their lives because I learned everything that
(32:28):
I learned the hard way. So he's careful. He keeps
his gambling money in a different account and doesn't touch
the savings he shares with Sarah While the Titans of
Mobile Gambling don't offer money management tutorials to gamblers, they
say they're trying to monitor their customers for signs of
problem gambling. Here's fandual CEO Amy how again, I have
(32:48):
a compliance team of well over a hundred people. This
focus on everything from risky play to to anti money laundering.
I've got clear metrics and targets. So my entire organization
is entered based on making sure that we're not just
developing the products to be able to let consumers manage
within appropriate limits, but they were really driving those numbers flutter.
(33:11):
CEO Peter Jackson sums that up simply, we want to
make sure that our customers can have some fun, but
actually when the fund stops, we want them to stop betting.
And Peter says he takes responsibility for the fact that
it's not all on the gambler to stop betting. The
onus isn't on the customer, is a lot of it's
on us. We can see how much time someone's spending
(33:32):
on our site. We can see their patterns of play.
If someone's been depositing a hundred dollars a month and
suddenly they put five hundred dollars in and suddenly they
put two thousand dollars in. We need to be on
red alert. And actually it doesn't matter how much money
people have. If people are spending a huge amount of
time on our site and they hadn't in the past,
(33:54):
that's also something we need to be really thoughtful about
as well. So there's lots of signals and signs that
we look for in terms of our customers on our platform. Well, well,
then reach out and engage in talk talk customers to
check their okay. I want to take Amy and Peter's
responses here at face value, but there's a long history
of companies peddling vice who claim to be concerned about
(34:15):
the impact of what they sell and then can't really
knuckle down and change their behavior. The tobacco industry comes
to mind. I also wonder how much of their valuable
corporate resources they really want to spend looking after wayward gamblers.
FanDuel's website does offer a nifty tools for setting limits
on wagers, but the onus certainly is on the customer
(34:36):
to take advantage of them. Gamblers themselves are required to
set the limits. FanDuel stays out of the way After
I signed up as a FanDuel newbie for this story,
the company flooded my inbox, encouraging me to do anything
but set limits on my gambling. I was offered lots
of exclusives and free bets. I may not be the
sharpest gambler in the world, but I also know there's
(34:59):
no oh such thing as a free bet, and I'm
just a gambling voyeur. For others more attached to their betting,
fan Duel, Draft Kings and other companies, persistent messaging might
encourage something that becomes much more life shattering. Fortunately, my
new friend Blair is not in that category. I sincerely
hope he stays in the safe zone and continues to
(35:21):
have fun and make some good money on the side,
because it really is fun to watch him in action.
After the break, Blair and I will crack open some beers,
dig into some pretzels and cheese dip, and over analyze
some games, all in the hopes of making a little
bit of money. We'll be right back. Let's go back
(35:44):
to that Dodgers Mets game Blair was betting on at
the beginning of this episode. Get through. Oh Let's go,
Oh my god, Oh my God. It's unbelievable, all right. Now,
this baseball game is very important to me. Here's the
bet Blair made for two fifty dollars. He chose the
winner of three baseball games that day and one player
(36:06):
who would hit a home run in each one of them.
By the third game, his bed is still alive. He
just needs one more player to hit a homer, but
it's never that easy. By the end of the ninth inning,
his guy, a Dodger named Freddie Freeman, still hasn't delivered
the goods. Then the game goes into extra innings. Blair's
(36:27):
hopes are kept alive. As a better I could not
be asking for a better situation right now. It's an
extreme long shot that he hits a home run to
win the game, you know, on the bottom of tenth,
But I have a chance, which again, he's all I'm
asking for. So now, Freddie Freeman is a Mets are beating,
leading the Dodgers five to four, and Blair would love
for Freddie Freeman a walk off home run that would
(36:51):
be worth sixty dollars to Blair. Of course, he slings
the first pitch that's disappointing and grounds out. Yeah. Well,
it's not by any means over um, but it would
realistically probably have to go two mornings for him to
get another right bad I'm honestly pretty surprised he swung
at the first pitch. Ever, the optimist Blair saying it's
(37:14):
not over until it's over, and even when it is over,
he's hedged enough that he still has a chance to
make money off the game. Wow, he struck him out
games over employer. So I'm not upset about it. I'm
not upset about it by any means. I'll take that
all day long. But he sounds pretty dejected and he's
(37:37):
thinking aloud about what might have been. I had a
chance for my guy to do what I needed him
to do, to literally end the game and win my
bet in the bottom of the tenth inning. So it's again,
those are good scenarios. That means I had a long odds,
right long odds, but a good scenario, and you have
to find yourself, like I almost picked this guy trade
(38:00):
Turner to home run today, and he did. I ended
upon with Freeman because the starting pitcher for the Mets
was statistically worse against lefties than he is against righties,
so I went with Freeman over Turner, and of course
Turner was the one that you know, you know, we're
on the first inning too, So unfortunately just picked the
wrong guy. Even if he's disappointed, Lair takes comfort in
(38:21):
the fact that he's in it for the long haul.
My theory a lot of the time is just live
to fight another day, because you cannot beat sports betting.
There's always gonna be another game, another match, whatever, it's
always going to be there, and what you're trying to
do ultimately is just it's just just keep making money
(38:42):
and keep profiting off of this stuff. And you've got
to understand that you're gonna get to the last leg
of parlays a decent amount of time and that's gonna
be the one that you were wrong on and it sucks.
So if you take your win, you take your cash
out and hedge, you move on. There's nothing wrong with that.
You just keep building your bank roll, pay off a bill,
go on a vacation, you know, something like that, go
(39:03):
out to dinner with your your spouse, your significant other.
There's nothing wrong with that at all. But that's hard,
especially because so much of gambling is a solitary pursuit.
Sarah says she wishes she could help Lair with some
of his research so they could work on this together,
but Blair really needs to keep it all in his
own head. His friends are supportive and try to bet
(39:23):
with him, but they also don't really get it. I'll
do it with my friends, and my friends will participate,
but they'll mostly just take whatever it is that I
did and then put significantly less money on it, and
then when the game's going on, they might not even
be paying attention in the sense that I am. And
if you watching a guy miss a three pointer in
(39:44):
the first quarter and be like furious, and they're like,
what's the big deal, it's the first quarter. I'm like,
because he's only gonna shoot two more. I needed to
make two and now he's got to go and they're
like what. That's what prop betting specifically will do to you.
You will pay attention to the dumbest and the tiniest
little details that will impact your bet at some point
(40:04):
throughout the game, and it will change the way that
you feel about certain players because they'll miss a layup,
or they'll drop a pass in the end zone or something,
and you're just like like, like, what's wrong with you?
You know? But in reality, like they're humans, they're gonna
make mistakes. But it's hard not to get frustrated when
stuff like that happens. I laughed to myself as player
(40:25):
told me this, but I wouldn't truly understand until later
when I had my own bet on the line. You see,
I had the Fan Duel app open for most of
the weekend watching the lines along with Blair, and Fan
Duel kept nudging me. I just got a reality check
from my Fan Duel app saying, we're glad you're enjoying
FanDuel Sports Book. Just so you know, you've been playing
(40:47):
for thirty three minutes. You have wagered zero dollars since
you logged in. Okay, So I do get the feeling
that the app is getting mad at me. Isn't this
the company that was telling me they wanted to make
sure I went about this nice and easy. Well, they
sure made it easy for me since it was my
first prop bet. They gave me twenty five dollars to wager.
(41:08):
So during the Warriors Celtics playoff game, I put it
on one of their promotions, what they call a boost bet.
I bet that Steph Curry and Jayson Tatum would each
score over thirty points during the game. At first, I
was really proud of myself. I thought I would nail it.
You're a pretty good shape on that boost. Bet, you're
really good shape. Yeah. I think he's a twenty now
(41:31):
and uh Tatum's got twenty one. I mean, in a
close game, Steph Curry needs ten points and Jayson Tatum
needs nine. You're in a You're in a good spot.
Step Crey to sport game. Good job, Steph. See I've
now got a different relationship to this game. Yeah. Now
(41:52):
you paying attention to it differently. You can feel it right, Yeah,
totally where he's like in a normal game, you'd like,
oh wheriors are up twelve. You know this is great?
Missed the lay up. Then all of a sudden, the
game turned into a blowout. The Warriors began pounding the Celtics.
Blair spotted that development right away before I even knew
(42:13):
what it meant. Blows is where all the parleys where
they all go to die? All parley's even my parley. Yep.
Although Steph Curry needed just one more point and Jayson
Tatum needed just two from I bet to pay off
the blowout met their coaches might take them off the court.
What I wouldn't be surprised if Tatum, if this gets
(42:36):
to like points that he won't come back in and
then you're like, wow, he needed three points for a
quarter and a half and he couldn't get it, and
he just missed a free throw, which is unusual, which
is making me mad and it should right like it's
it's it's very frustrated. At this point, it wasn't hard
(42:59):
for our minds to go cynical, and we started questioning
FanDuel's motives and offering this particular boost. Did they know
it was going to be a blowout, because this sort
of thing with the boost happens all the time. All
the time. We're like, you're right there, and all of
a sudden, something weird happens and then it just doesn't finish. Wow. Really,
(43:21):
So it's common for boosts not to pay, like right
at the edge, it's common for them not to hit.
Oh yeah, I mean I get it is common for
them not to hit, except presumably they wouldn't be offered
that much. But the thing is that they come right
up to the edge of it, and then they don't hit.
We weren't the only ones moaning about how close we got.
The next day, Pat McAfee brought up that exact same
(43:41):
parlay on his popular gambling show. McAfee has developed such
a close following that Banduel reportedly pays him thirty million
dollars a year just to gab about gambling and fan
duel representatives go on a show the morning after I
lost my parlay, he had fan duels. Top odds maker
John Shearon onto chat, let's just get right into it.
(44:03):
Last night's boost yea Tatum and Steph to both score thirty?
How many did Steff have after three quarters? How many
did Tatum have after three quarters? How many minutes did
they play in the fourth quarter combined? Zero? How did
you know? How? How did you know? John? We just
have a direct line step side. It will be over
(44:24):
after three quarters and you wouldn't see him again. People. Well,
I'm not seeing fan duel fix that, bet. I really
don't think there's any chance that they bribed Katum, Curry
or their coaches. That's why McAfee and Sharon could joke
about it now. But whenever you see something like that happened,
I assume you guys are ecstatic. You would have to
(44:44):
be whenever the fourth quarter starting, and it's like, neither
the guys are playing. Oh, isn't that we perfectly put
this is the perfect boost right there. Third Like that's
dream for the book, right for that to happen. Honestly
it is. But like that's not the way that we
try and think about. We're not sitting there looking to
(45:08):
try and you know win. All of these boots boosts
are offered honestly, you know, with genuine good faith. We
want people have a good experience. I want to give
them a bit of value. So Fan Duel wasn't manipulating anything.
All of us gamblers just had bad luck on that one.
But it did get me thinking about the perils of
match fixing and about a series of interviews I had
done earlier in the spring. Next episode, we'll bring you
(45:30):
that story, the rise of gambling and match fixing. For now,
I'm still stewing about the hundred and fifty bucks I
missed out on. Blair, of course, was much more successful.
Sure he missed out on the sixty three dollar Baseball
Parley pay out, but in our two days together he
netted close to two thousand dollars. That's not bad for
(45:51):
a weekend of watching sports. Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow's
another day, and there's hockey, and there's probably some random
bottom to your tennis matches, and I bet you there's
twelve baseball games or something. So there's plenty of stuff
that there's going to be action on, that's for sure.
(46:23):
Here at Crash Course, we believe the collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising,
and always instructive. In today's Crash Course, I learned that
we are in the very early stages of a huge
boom that's transforming sports media and the way that people gamble,
and that the only people who should be gambling lots
(46:43):
of money a lot of the time are the ones
who are actually good at it. What did you learn?
We'd love to hear from you. You can tweet at
the Bloomberg Opinion handle at Opinion or me at Tim
O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also
subscribed to our show wherever you're listening right now and
leave us a review. It helps more people find the show.
(47:06):
This episode was produced by the Indispensable Anamazarakis and me
are supervising producers Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing help
from Katie Boyce, Jed Sandberg, Jeff Grocott, Mikeniezza, Samantha Story
and Christine Van den Bilart. Blake Maples does our sound
engineering and our original theme song was composed by Luis Kara.
(47:28):
I'm Tim O'Brien and this has been crash course. Check
your feed for the next episode in our gambling series
about match fixing.
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