Freakonomics Radio
The Economics of Sports Gambling
What happens when tens of millions of fantasy-sports players are suddenly able to bet real money on real games? We’re about to find out. A recent Supreme Court decision has cleared the way to bring an estimated $300 billion in black-market sports betting into the light. We sort out the winners and losers.
In 2012, three friends and co-workers named Jason Robins, Paul Liberman, and Matt Kalish decided to launch a startup. The idea was simple: millions of people already loved playing online fantasy sports (themselves included). But most competitions had a really long timetable — an entire baseball season or football season, for instance. What if you could draft a new fantasy team every day? How much fun would that be — and how lucrative?
At the time, other people were already working on daily fantasy sports, most significantly, a company called FanDuel. But the three friends thought they could do it better.
“We had really been trained at companies and in areas — tech analytics and marketing — that we thought were core to really building the best mousetrap in daily fantasy sports,”…
