Front Burner - How gambling became the game

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

How did sports betting go from being illegal to being EVERYWHERE? The answer lies in the convergence of daily fantasy sports apps, a bombshell New York Times op-ed, and the potential of a multi-billion dollar payout. This episode of Understood: The Big Bet tells the story of how a pivotal Supreme Court ruling set the stage for one of the biggest scandals in sports history — one involving a Toronto Raptors bench player named Jontay Porter. Understood takes you deep inside the seismic shifts reshaping our world right now. From online porn and crypto chaos to the rise of tech oligarchs, deepfake AI, and the broken promises of the internet — we explore the stories that define our digital age with hosts and characters embedded in the heart of the action.More episodes of The Big Bet are available wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/TBBxFB

Lately, Canadians are thinking more about the choices we make, aren't we? Where we shop, what we buy, our everyday choices say a lot about what matters to us. And your website domain name can too. Choosing a dotCA connects your brand to Canada while supporting local projects that help build a better, safer, stronger internet for all Canadians. So when you're choosing a domain, see the difference a Canadian choice can make. Visit choose.ca for more details. Hey everybody, Jamie here. Today, billions of dollars are wagered on sports games legally, openly, and often through apps partnered with the leagues themselves.

So how did sports gambling go from a taboo relegated to the shadows to something so pervasive? In the brand new season of Understood, Danny Funt, journalist and author of Everybody Loses, the tumultuous rise of American sports gambling, investigates the sports betting boom since 2021. You'll meet the people who built the industry, the executives who saw an opportunity, the leagues that changed their minds, the bettors who became obsessed, and the athletes who are now players in an all-new game. Now, here is the first episode of the Big Bet. Have a listen. Jonte Porter, also on the court.

Jonte Porter once again at the foul line with a rebound. It's March 20th, 2024 at the Scotia Bank Arena in downtown Toronto. The Raptors are playing the South Carolina. Sacramento Kings. Raptors trail by six. Number 34, Jonte Porter, is out there for the Raptors. He's made some free throws. And had some misses.

He was not a spectacular player. This is Anthony Milton, a journalist based in Toronto, who has written extensively about Jonte Porter. I first got interested in Jonte Porter when well, when everything blew up with him on the Toronto Raptors. The first thing you need to know is that Porter was a bench player. He was a big guy. He performed reasonably well, but he wasn't a star by any means. So when the second quarter begins and Porter stays rooted to the bench, it doesn't raise any eyebrows.

When it comes to Jonte Porter, he is out for tonight and done for night. He's out with an illness. He'd been complaining of food poisoning. And he told everyone that. his friends, his coaches, numbers on the team, his own family, even. He said he was sick. After playing for a few minutes, Porter had approached his coach and taken himself out of the game. We saw the Raptors' training staff chat with him during one of the timeouts, bad. Tell him, that's some discomfort. Athletes get sick, they get hurt, obviously, like anyone.

If you were just watching that game, would anything have looked out of the ordinary? honestly, no. If someone was watching that game, they might have seen Jonte Porter one rather insignificant player on the roster slightly underperforming, perhaps not feeling its best. But they'd have no idea what's actually going on.

What's actually going on is that almost 1,000 kilometers away at a casino diner in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a group of guys, at least one of whom has ties to them, mob have a shot at winning $1,120,000 if Jonte Porter underperforms in this game. They are watching Porter very closely. And soon, the FBI will be watching them. Unbeknownst to everyone else on the court there, Jonte is intentionally underperforming.

He wagered $54,000 on NBA basketball while he was with the Raptors. For decades across most of the United States, sports betting was completely illegal and in Canada severely restricted. So being able to download an app and wager on sports anytime, anywhere, that was unimaginable. But today, billions are wagered legally and openly, often through apps partnered with the leagues themselves, and the number of places where this is legal is growing. So how did sports gambling go from a taboo relegated to the shadows to something so pervasive? Make every moment more with band do. At draft kings, the crown is yours.

BetmGM Sports. Join Bet365. The game starts now. I'm Danny Fund. I'm a journalist and the author of Everybody Loses the tumultuous rise of American sports gambling. I've been investigating the sports betting boom since 2021, and I've seen the legalization of sports gambling. create a seismic shift that's reshaping the business of sports, the fan experience, and even the games themselves.

And nobody is a clear example of that shift than Jante Porter. Sports betting was everywhere. So to suddenly have a pro player for the Raptors getting booked in a sports betting scandal is huge. This season, Un Understood, we're going to tell the story of how we got here. Over the next four episodes, we'll meet the people who built the industry, the executives who saw an opportunity, the leagues that changed their minds,

and the betters who became obsessed. And throughout it all, we'll keep coming back to Jonte Porter. Because the night he walked off the court in Toronto wasn't the beginning of this story, but it may have been the moment when all of its consequences became impossible to ignore. This is understood, The Big Bet. Episode 1, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? I always wanted to do something in sports.

In high school, I played tennis and a little bit of soccer, a little bit of hockey. And so I dreamed of being an athlete, but I soon realized that wasn't going to be for me. Eventually, it got to a place where I was like, well, maybe if I can't find the perfect job for me, maybe I can create that job for me. Nick Bonadillo loved sports. He also loved numbers. and in the late 2000s, he had an idea for a company that would combine the two. At the time, you'd go to ESPN or go to TSN, like you go to these websites,

and you would read all this analysis, but that analysis was all very qualitative. It was all ex-players, you know, I think this, I think that. And me being a big sports fan, me being a big math and numbers guy, I was like, well, that doesn't really make sense because sports is the most data-driven industry there is. everything that happens gets tracked and gets stored somewhere. And so why can't I kind of use quantitative analysis on this? Nick wanted to take that data, clean it up, and sell it to people who could use it to make calls based on numbers instead of opinions.

Now it seems kind of passe. Everyone knows the Moneyball story. But back in 2009, that was not the case. If you missed Moneyball, the short version is that in 2002, Baseball's underdogs, the Oakland Athletics, used math to construct a stellar roster of overachievers by choosing players based almost solely on their stats. In 103 years of American League Baseball, the athletics have accomplished what no one has before. They have won 20 consecutive game.

Their unlikely success broke minds and spawned two decades of people using the term Moneyball as shorthand for optimizing just about anything with data. Nick's idea was the next logical step. Take those tools out of the back office altogether, aggregate sports data, and sell it to anyone who wants it. It was a great business idea, but Nick had a small problem. Cash flow.

One of my largest goals in life was to start a company and sort of take the entrepreneurial path. I didn't have the family resources to go and do that. So, Nick got creative. Holy cow, what a dance you did. It's 2009. Nick is 27 years old wearing a suit and tie as he dances onto the set of who wants to be a millionaire toward a television icon, Regis Philbin.

But what I love is the fact that you didn't sleep for two nights. What happened to you? I was too nervous. In my head, I was thinking about what dance I was going to do and everything. Oh, really? Millionaire was a game about money, but under that it was a game about risk. Every correct answer moved you closer

to life-changing amounts of cash, while a single wrong answer could wipe out your winnings. So are you ready, Nick? I'm ready. Yes, you are. Let's play Millionaire right now. Nick plays, making it through questions about counting sheep.

Be insomnia. Yeah, you're right. All-American desserts? The answer is A, apple pie. Final answer. Yes, it's Apple pie. Even a sports question. So the final answer is A.

Kim Rekonian is a race car driver. He's got it again. I won $100,000 on a show, and I quit my job at a very max day and started my company. That company was called Numberfire. Numberfire is a sports data analytics company, or as Nick puts it, Data for sports fans built by a sports fan.

Because Nick had a very specific customer in mind. I don't want to just sell this to teams. I want to go and speak to all of the millions of people out there who are playing fantasy sports. Fantasy sports. Fantasy sports. Fantasy team. The fantasy sports hall of fame. Fantasy football. Fantasy baseball.

Taking fantasy golf to the next level. In many ways, the story of modern sports gambling starts right. here with fantasy sports. In fantasy sports, you, the fan, are the general manager of your very own imaginary team, which you assemble using actual professional athletes. You're competing against other fans based on the real world statistical performance of these players, with points awarded for things like goals, yards, or home runs, over the course of a season. We knew that fantasy sports itself was really popular.

Like, if you know anybody who plays fantasy, they will bore you to tears, which is a great sign. They love it. And to me, that's like, I always want to build a business where people are passionate and excited. And so I was like, this is a great category. This is Nigel Eccles. And in 2009, while Nick was winning 100 grand on millionaire and starting number fire, Nigel, along with his wife and a small group of friends, founded another company, one that was going to be a hundred grand. going to, in startup parlance, disrupt fantasy sports. That company, it was called Fandul. Fandul Sportsbook. Fandul. Vandul.com. Unlike Nick Bonadillo, Nigel didn't come to fantasy sports

out of a love of sports. Nigel came from a love of gambling. I do remember my first bet, And I think it was in 1987 Grand National, and I had a one pound on a horse called West Tip at 16 to 1, and it came in. It was a beautiful gray. And I remember thinking, wow, it was amazing. Why doesn't everybody do this? Sports betting wasn't legal in the U.S., but fantasy sports were. And Nigel's team identified a major shortcoming,

or perhaps opportunity, with how fantasy sports were being played. We sort of thought, well, waiting three or four months to wins a very long time. What have we made it much faster? They capitalized on a new idea floating around at the time. What if, instead of competing over a full season, contest took place over a single day? Let's take a product people love, make it faster, make it mobile, and put real prizes around it. That should work. That was as simple as that.

Turns out, it was. Welcome to DFS or Daily Fantasy Sports. Daily fantasy sports. Daily fantasy sports. Daily fantasy sports. Daily fantasy sports. Daily fantasy sports. Daily fantasy sports.

And there was another major selling point of Daily Fantasy Sports. You could win a shipload of money. Be crowned a fantasy football millionaire. The money is real. And with no season-long commitment, you only play when you want. Instead of playing for a whole season and cashing out if you won out, after all those months, you could win or lose real cash every day. And if you're thinking, this sure sounds like gambling.

In 2015, the comedians of late-night television were right there with you. Daily Fantasy is the best. I get to play every day. You mean you get to gamble? It's not gambling. Oh, it's definitely gambling. You have a massive gambling problem. Play Daily Fantasy Now. Just use promo code gambling. or promo code, obviously gambling, or promo code, exploiting a legal loophole, but by any common sense definition, this is gambling. But the companies, Fandul and eventually their competitor,

Draft Kings, argued it wasn't gambling. You weren't betting on one player or one final score. You were assembling a roster and making strategic decisions based on research. This was a game of skill, in other words, not a game of chance. Crucially, the laws of many states agreed with them, and so does Nick Bonadillo. DFS really is a skill game. And the fact that it existed in a real money space, that meant that, well, geez, I can leverage this skill, and now I've got this second income stream,

whereas I didn't have one before. And that skill created a problem for Fandul. The best players kept winning. And the lower 90% just churn off. And no matter what you do to try to guide them into beginners-only contest or lower state contest, it's really difficult to actually get them to do that because they're attracted by the potential of winning a million dollars. To keep more customers happy, Fandall needed to level the playing field.

They couldn't make everyone equally skilled, but they could give everyone better information about the athletes in their fantasy lineups. So Nigel's team called up Nick, the sports data guy, acquired number fire, and made Nick Fandall's VP of product. And the industry was growing, doubling, tripling year over year. And so it was really enjoyable. In the 2010s, Daily Fantasy Sports were booming. Money was pouring in from investors, and the leagues were happy.

This wasn't gambling. It was skill-based engagement. So teams were striking partnerships with the apps. The NBA is an equity stake in Fandul. MLB has won in Draft Kings. And many NFL teams have advertising deals with the fantasy sites. We were doing a million-dollar deals with multiple teams. In fact, nearly every team in the league had a deal.

But beneath all of it, there was this question hanging over the industry. Could the Daily Fantasy Sports Apps, Fandle, Draft Kings, ever become something bigger? I asked Nigel about it. Was it in the back of your heads that ultimately this would be a great sports betting business and maybe DFS could be a stepping stone? Yeah, like, in a way, yes. Like, so coming from the UK, which is where I was at the time, the US was always this great anomaly. Like here we had a country, economically, you know, the most successful country in the world,

where the population loved sports, loved gambling, right? But it was completely illegal. And we just sort of thought, this is crazy. Like, it seems weird that sports betting would be illegal. Other countries at the time were moving towards more regular. liberalization, so why wouldn't the U.S. do the Siam? But as an American, Nick knew exactly why not? For so long, there was this air of degeneracy to it, in this air of, you know, oh, this is,

this is taboo and this is verbatine. And then Adam Silver comes out and says, hey, this is something that we're looking into. In November of 2014, the newly installed commissioner of the NBA, Adam Silver, writes an op-ed in the New York Times. The headline is a five-year-old. word bombshell. Legalize and regulate sports betting. It was huge. Lately, Canadians are thinking more about the choices we make, aren't we?

Where we shop, what we buy, our everyday choices say a lot about what matters to us. And your website domain name can too. Choosing a dotCA connects your brand to Canada while supporting local projects that help build a better, safer, stronger internet for all Canadians. So when you're choosing a domain, see the difference a Canadian choice can make. Visit choose.ca for more details. The following is paid content for Desjardin. Lately, it feels like everyone has a take on Gen Z.

There's a misconception that everybody in our generation wants things handed to them. Which is so unfair. A lot of the circumstances that other generations got to have, we simply do not have. So when Dejordan asked me to go out and hear directly from young people, I was all in. Because between sky high rent, $10 lottes, and the AI Revolution, got a lot to unpack. We went out to see what Gen Z's reality actually looks like, and we made a web series out of it. It'll be on CBC Gem. It's called Countess In, and honestly, I think you guys are going to love it.

To understand why the professional leagues had, for so long, been so resistant to sports betting, you have to go back. There's no one specific moment, but there is one that crystallizes their aversion. In 1919, eight members of baseball's Chicago White Sox were accused of conspiring with gamblers to throw the World Series. As the impact of the confession sank in, the American people were at first shocked and then sickened. That's author Elliot Asinoff on the Studs Terkel Show in 1963, reading an excerpt from his book about the scandal, Eight Men Out. What came to be known as the Black Sox scandal was so significant that we still know some of the players' names. Lefty Williams, Shulis Joe Jackson. Say it ain't so, Joe.

Public trust in the United States. the game nearly collapsed. Baseball was in dire trouble, trouble that the American people would think of it as a dishonest thing. And in response, baseball said, never again. The office of the commissioner was established to protect the integrity of the game, and the lesson sports took from that moment was straightforward. Keep gambling as far away from the game as possible.

People started thinking that if you could fix the world's sense, series, then by gosh, you could fix anything. And it could conceivably happen again. Sports gambling was already illegal. In fact, it wasn't until 1992 that Congress, under pressure from the leagues, felt obligated to make that explicit to individual states. That year, Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, or PASPA, effectively banning sports betting across the entire U.S., with one notable acceptance. Nevada. And that was that. So when Adam Silver, Commissioner of the NBA, came out as the first league executive to endorse legalizing sports gambling, Nigel Eccles, the CEO of the Daily Fantasy

Sports Company Fandul, was floored. We had spent the last several years saying, we're not sports betting. We're a game of skill. And so at the very same moment that we do a deal with, the NBA, He also writes a thing that sports betting should be legal. So that was like a little bit of a shock. Adam Silver has never taken me up on interview requests. But here's part of what he wrote in that bombshell op-ed in 2014, read here by one of my colleagues. For more than two decades,

the National Basketball Association has opposed the expansion of legal sports betting, as have the other major professional sports leagues in the United States. But despite legal restrictions, sports betting is widespread. It is a thriving underground business that operates free from regulation or oversight. He had a point. Bookies had been taking bets illegally since the earliest days of American sports, and Adam Silver used this black market to make his case. Because there are so few legal options available, those who wish to bet resort to illegal bookmaking operations and shady offshore websites. There's no solid data on the volume of illegal sports betting activity in the

the United States, but some estimate that nearly $400 billion is illegally wagered on sports each year. Adam Silver wanted that money to stay in the country, and he called out PASPA, the law that blocked states from legalizing sports betting for being out of touch. Times have changed since PASPA was enacted. Gambling has increasingly become a popular and accepted form of entertainment in the United States. Most states offer lotteries.

Over half of them have legal casinos. In light of these domestic and global trends, the laws on sports betting should be changed. Nick Bonadillo, Fandall's VP of Product. Adam Silver is a strong voice. Like, it's one thing if, you know, a columnist says something about it or, like, maybe, like, a representative from some state. It's another thing when the commissioner or the NBA says it. It lands this level legitimacy to it. It lends this authority to it that was really, really big.

For the gambling lobby, that op-ed was the opening they'd been waiting for. That was really enough for the American Gaming Association and their constituents, the casinos, to say, hey, maybe we should kind of start digging into if there's a way that we could get legalized sports betting in the United States. This is Stephen Master. He used to work for the NFL, but by the time Adam Silver's op-ed came out, he'd moved on to a position at Nielsen, the company famous for calculating TV ratings. They were the de facto currency for measuring TV viewership. Stephen's business was attention. Who watches, what, how much, for how long, specifically when it came to sports broadcasts.

My group really worked with every single league, the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, and then all of the TV networks, whether that be ESPN or Turner. or anyone that showed sports, really, to help them understand TV viewership around sports specifically. Which meant if you wanted to get sports betting legalized, then Stephen Master was the guy to call, which came as news to Stephen. In 2015, I got a call from the American Gaming Association, which is the trade group based in Washington, D.C., who is working to protect the interest in D.C. for casinos. And at first I was kind of pushing back. I said, who are you? Who's the American Gaming Association? It just wasn't something I was familiar with

because gaming and casinos wasn't my world. The American Gaming Association, the AGA, had a theory, and they wanted Stevens help to back it up. They said, we know intuitively that if you have a little bit of skin in the game, even if it's just a fantasy player, you might have a higher tendency to watch more games, but we just don't have any real hard evidence to prove it. and we think that designing a study could help.

And the AGA knew exactly where they wanted Stephen to start. They said, well, the NFL is really the league that benefits most if we had legalized sports betting. The study was straightforward. All they needed were a thousand avid football fans. 500 of those fans were folks who said, you know what, I don't bet, I don't play fantasy, I don't do anything where I put any money or any stakes.

I just love to watch football for the sake of watching. The other 500, they said, hey, yeah, I do play fantasy football. I do play daily fantasy, which is exploding at the time. Or I bet with a bookie, really, or in Nevada. So we kind of had those two buckets. Over the course of an entire football season, he tracked what happened. And the results were unbelievable. The gambling and fantasy group didn't watch a little.

more football, they watched a lot more football. The average of the 500 who were avid fans but don't necessarily have anything riding on the game watched about 15.8, 15.9 games a year, which is won a weekend. The other group had around 36 games that they watched. That's more than twice as many games. Fantasy players and betters also watched more of each game. 50, 60% more minutes per game were watched amongst that crowd, which all again, makes sense because if you've got a player who's in the fantasy team, you'll watch to the end. And with that, the casinos had their golden carrot to tempt the leagues toward embracing sports gambling. More viewers means more advertisers, means more money and media rights, means more sponsorship, means more data rights, means more jersey sold.

Means more money. So Stephen and the American Gaming Association took their findings on the road, executives, networks, owners, and to the league offices. The NFL was a big client of mine, right? So, you know, I called some of the senior executives. Hey, I've got some really interesting stuff. I wanted to show you on a study that we did around fantasy and betting and TV viewership. And, of course, they were intrigued and they said, sure, come on in.

And I said, if you're, I would like to take, you know, some folks from the American Gaming Association. with me, and they push back into this. You know what? We're fine to have you come in, but we really don't want anyone from the Gaming Association to come to the office. That's how radioactive gambling was to the sports leagues. They wouldn't even let the casino lobbyists

into the building. So they met at a cafe instead, where Stephen walked them through the presentation. It was probably about a 15-page PowerPoint. And the response? It surprised him. No outrage or anger or even fear. There was curiosity.

And Stephen had a sense that what he was saying actually confirmed something for the leagues. They've never admitted it to me, but they kind of knew that it was always driving. Gambling was, you know, always driving viewership, but they just couldn't believe to what extent how many more minutes and how many more games were tuned in by gamblers.

And after a stop at the NFL, Stephen repeated the process for Major League Baseball, the NHL, league after league, and network after network. And Nielsen projected how much money each league stood to make if sports gambling were legalized across the country. We did a whole bunch of meetings, and they were very hesitant. But when they started looking at the numbers and diving in, and they just kind of nodded their heads quite a bit and said,

wow, this could really fundamentally change our business. So with the NFL, which, as you said, is the, the league that stood to make the most from the spread of legalization. Do you remember what that final figure was when you added up the direct and indirect projections? Yeah, they were close to about $5 billion. $5 billion a year? Yeah, annually. Wow, wow.

That's real money. Yeah, right? And I would think they're probably even making more than that now. But it was about $5 billion. I later went back and checked, and the original projection was closer to $2.3 billion. But still, that's quite a windfall about the value of the average NFL franchise at the time, certainly enough to get their attention. But while Stephen was carrying those numbers from meeting to meeting,

and while league executives were nodding along that sports betting could drive billions in new revenue, the leagues were officially still very opposed to some. sports betting. In fact, in 2015, while they were taking meetings with Stephen, the NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, and NCAA were all fighting to stop New Jersey from legalizing it. In 2012, led by Governor Chris Christie, New Jersey passed a law allowing sports betting in their state. The leagues sued and years of litigation followed. By 2017, New Jersey's fight made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. You'll hear argument first this morning in case 16-476, Christy versus NCAA.

By this point, the case wasn't really about sports betting anymore. It had become a fight over who gets to decide. Could Congress effectively freeze sports betting policy in place, or did individual states have the right to chart their own course? So the citizens of the state of New Jersey are bound to, obey a law, that the state doesn't want, but that the federal government compels the state to have. That seems commandeering. Justice Kennedy, we don't think PASPA operates in that way.

The leagues had repeatedly prevailed before the lower courts to keep sports betting outlawed. This was New Jersey's last chance. Thank you, counsel. The case is submitted. For months, the industry waited. Everyone understood that if New Jersey prevailed, sports betting in America would be unleashed. And at least one group had a lot riding on the outcome. Because while all of this was happening in court in front of the world,

and while the casinos were lobbying the leagues behind the scenes, daily fantasy sports, which had been shot out of a cannon just a few years earlier, were plummeting back to Earth. Here's Nick Bonadillo, then Fandall's VP of product. The rosy projections that everyone had for DFS weren't really coming true. And so DFS had plateaued. Fandul wasn't failing, but it was battling lawsuits that claimed daily fantasy was a form of illegal gambling, and losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year while spending a fortune on ads.

And there was another problem. They'd run out of new users. We had saturated the market for people who wanted that product. So I don't know if it was like our tombstones already written, but it certainly wasn't growing in the way that it was before. Fandual had already tried to save money by merging with its main rival, Draft Kings. But U.S. regulators blocked the deal, saying it would have created an illegal monopoly.

So instead, Fandua accepted a deal to be bought by a U.K. company. When Flutter bought us, it was not a guarantee that Passman was going to get repealed. Like, you know, they sort of took it, you know, no pun intended here. Like, they took a bet on us that like, okay, you know, there's a chance this might happen. And here's this company Fandol that is kind of plateaued from a growth perspective. Like, if Passma does get repealed, then here is a massive asset that is undervalued. I think that's sort of what Flutter was thinking. In case number 16.4.

And then. On May 14, 2018, the Supreme Court delivered its answer. Justice Alito has the opinion of the court. The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected New Jersey's argument, and we now reverse. Translation? In a 6-3 decision, after years of litigation, New Jersey had won. So if a state wanted sports betting, it could now authorize it. Scores on the field could soon be leading to bigger paydays off the field. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law on Monday that effectively banned sports gambling in most of the U.S.

The Supreme Court said that states can allow gambling on sports if they would like to. The court could not have made its admonishment more clear. PASPA was in fact not constitutional under their analysis. We were actually, all of us were in Dublin, Ireland, and then word gets out that PASPA gets repealed. and I think everyone in the room sort of looked around, you'd be like, well, holy crap, you know, here we go. A lot of people assumed when sports gambling got legalized, the biggest winners would be the casino giants.

You know, Caesars or MGM of these legacy companies. The companies that have been taking bets for decades, the ones that have been repped by the American Gaming Association. Whereas I thought 100%, no doubt in my mind, Fandel and Draft Kings were going to win. For years, Fandall had been building technology for daily fantasy sports, and that tech turned out to have a lot in common with sports betting. Regardless of whether you're building a DFS product or a sports betting product,

you need an onboarding flow, you need geolocation, you need responsible gaming, you need, you know, there's all of these things that are already built. And so we are already coming to it on second base. Fandall and Draft Kings had millions of sports fans already using their apps, the kinds of fans primed to go from risking money on daily fantasy sports to placing old-fashioned wagers right from the palms of their hands. Throughout 2018, states began legalizing sports betting one after another. Delaware becomes the second state behind Nevada to allow full-scale sports betting as of today. California lawmaker is introducing a constitutional amendment to

make sports gambling legal in our state. Mobile sports betting line. launched over the weekend in New York, and it already looks like a big win for the state and the casinos. Soon Canada would get in on the action too, massively relaxing the country's rules. And Fandall was ready. We would have been ready way before we actually got the thumbs up to launch. From front to back, we probably were online in New Jersey,

six months, nine months, maybe. Nick estimates that in places where sports betting was legalized, Fandul managed to convert about 90% of its daily fantasy customers into sports bettors. Watching that migration from the inside, for Nick, it came with mixed feelings. DFS is a peer-to-peer game. It's me versus you. Sports betting is not like that. Sports betting is versus the house. And so now we are shifting to a company that is adversarial to its own users. Like we win when they lose.

And any product person, any designer, they have done. deep empathy for their users. We want them to be happy. We want them to love our product. And it's hard to do that when they are losing and you're taking their money. The league's embraced it. MGM will have access to MLB logos and official data for its sports betting operation. Broadcasters embraced it. Another initiative, Todd's odd with our friend Todd Furman, our sports betting expert. Teams embraced it.

So Draft Kings is now the official sports betting partner of the Cubs. Fans embraced it. Do you bet on sports? Well, if my fiance is watching, I don't bet at all. But if she's not watching, we might bet it a little too much. Some of them, anyway. Every other ad is sports betting. It's brutal.

And eventually, athletes would have to figure out how to live inside this new world, too, including one NBA player named Jante Porter. I've never really liked to use my basketball platform to gain anything, and I felt like that could be cheating. Coming up next time on Understatement. stood the big bet. So the bells go off. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, woo, woo.

That's loss us disguised as a win. Once it gets legalized, I kind of start saying, okay, well, if they're thinking we should gamble and they think it's okay, well, then why don't we all gamble? Like, we should all be gambling. It was funny because we didn't care if we won or not. It was more soaring it in that group chat and being able to come back and replying to the message being like cash or dropping a money sign emoji or something. I kind of just started looking at money differently.

I almost treated it like a video game, almost looking at it just like numbers on a screen. But no, jaunty. It's not just numbers on a screen. Like, that is your money. You've been listening to Understood the Big Bet. Our lead producer is A.C. Row. The producers are Arman Agbali and Hadeel Abdel Nabi. The sound designer is Julian Uzieli, who also voiced the Adam Silver op-ed. Our story editor and senior producer is Veronica Simmons. I'm Danny Fund. This episode featured archival tape from CBC and NBA TV, MLB TV, Fanduel, Draft Kings, Bed MGM, Betano, ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, PGA, Odds Shopper Sports Betting, Linemaker Sports, Jedi Modi Sports Network,

ESPN, Yahoo Sports, Business Insider, HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumble, The Wall Street Journal, PBS, KPIX, Scripps News, the Associated Press, Bayou Barristers, Fox Business, the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, the Supreme Court of the United States, legal sports report, TSN, Toronto Maple Leafs, and CNBC. The executive producers of CBC podcasts are Chris Oak and Cecil Fernandez. The senior manager is Tanya Springer and the director of CBC podcast is RF Narani. For more from Understood, check out Season 5, Who Broke the Internet?

Corey Doctor-O traces how the Internet went from a place of endless possibility to what he now calls the Insitternet and investigates whose fault it is. You can find that right here in the Understood feed. Just scroll back and hit play. That was the first episode of The Big Bet. If you like what you heard, episode two is waiting for you right now. Just search for Understood, wherever you've. get your podcasts and be sure to follow the feed so that you don't miss an episode.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.