SportsHandle and friends deliver another round-up of the week’s big developments in US sports betting.
Taylor Mathis Got Sacrificed At The Altar Of Responsible Gambling
Taylor Mathis got fired from her job as a host and analyst at SuperBook because she went into her sister’s second-grade classroom in Illinois and talked to them about March Madness as a math exercise.
To be clear, Mathis — a University of Iowa journalism graduate who has worked her way up the ranks after getting her start at a southwestern Nebraska ABC affiliate — did not teach these second-graders how to place a parlay, how to open a sportsbook account, or how to game the bonus system.
Nope. She went into her sister’s second-grade classroom and talked about the numbers next to the team’s names.
Taylor Mathis’ Tattler Says She Shouldn’t Have Been Fired From SuperBook
It appears that Taylor Mathis has a new supporter: the man who dimed her out, leading to her getting fired from her job at SuperBook.
“I absolutely think in any situation, education is better than retribution. There was an opportunity for everybody to grow here. I never asked for her to be fired, I asked for it to be stopped and addressed,” Harry Levant, a former gambling addict turned gambling reformer, told Sports Handle.
America’s Online Sportsbook Business Is Consolidating At The Top, And Fast
In the third quarter of 2022, and for the fifth straight quarter, the online sportsbook market share for the combined forces of the Big Two — FanDuel and DraftKings — and the Next-Biggest Three — BetMGM, Caesars, and Barstool — grew.
It was 92.4% in Q3 2022, according to research compiled by Vixio. To compare, the number was a still-huge 87.9% in the third quarter of 2021, and that was up from an all-time low of 75.2% in Q3 of 2020.
New Jersey Lawmakers Latest To Condemn Amount Of Wagering Advertising
In an ongoing effort to limit the amount of wagering advertising that residents are subjected to, a New Jersey General Assembly committee Monday morning moved forward a resolution that “condemns the overproliferation of pro-gambling advertising” in the state.
Assembly Resolution 168 doesn’t have any real teeth, but it nonetheless moved forward. It follows a trend across the country to clamp down on sports betting marketing and advertising and will be shared with gambling-related agencies in the state.
Miami’s Vice: The Riskiest Kentucky Derby Bet Of All Time
The year was 1988. The month was January. The city was Los Angeles. The car was a Nissan 300ZX, the music inside the car came courtesy of Phil Collins, and the gamblers in the front seat went by the names Dino and Miami.
Their destination was Agua Caliente, a struggling horse track in Tijuana that was run by a powerful businessman, Jorge Hank Rhon, who came from a family described as “Mexico’s Rockefellers” and was rumored to be friendly with violent drug cartels. Only Dino and Miami didn’t know that at the time. They just knew that Agua Caliente was offering 50/1 Kentucky Derby futures odds on a filly named Winning Colors to win, whereas those odds were halved, if not quartered, at race books around the United States.
Michigan-New Jersey Interstate Play Elevating PokerStars’ Fortunes
The Michigan Gaming Control Board does not distinguish online poker figures from online casino numbers, making it impossible for the public to know how much revenue each of the three regulated online poker operators in the state is generating.
But the same three operators (more or less) are dealing virtual cards in New Jersey, a state whose regulator does separate iPoker from iCasino in its revenue reports. And while those numbers don’t necessarily reflect the popularity of each site in Michigan, they do make one thing very clear: Since PokerStars on Jan. 1 began offering player pooling between the two states — allowing Michigan and New Jersey players to compete in the same games — the site’s fortunes have risen considerably.
