Ep. 123: Prime Suspects - March 2, 2026

Welcome to Prime Suspects. Alongside Adam Bjorn and Prime Sports co-founder Joe Brennan Jr., I'm your host Matt Landis. Adam, let's kick it off as we always do. Where have you seen the most action over the past week at Prime Sports and Betcris?

This week's pretty easy. NBA, NCAA pretty much uh is all the action. Ohio soccer did show up a lot, some big volume there. And then tennis was actually solid across all states. But yeah, this is one of those weeks where you can sort of Go to sleep and just Let the people do what they need to do and start prepping for the rest of the calendar. But easy week to get through. Volume still decent. Results were generally good except for an NBA live in New Jersey. But we'll push on and go to next week.

And building on that, brackets are set for the first conference tournaments, so with March Madness in the sights, how are the Prime Sports and Betchrist trading teams preparing for the big dance? Well, I keep hearing that this season seems like it's pretty wide open, so they're expecting somewhat of a, you know, crazy March madness with some upsets and whatnot. So again, it's just put up a number.

Find where it sits and then uh I haven't checked the numbers. I'll check before next week as to how much of the live now in the N C double A versus pregame. Basketball international basketball has generally been sort of ninety percent live. So

I don't know how that's transitioned to NBA and N C double A. We did see at the course of the football season that there is a little bit more now live than there is pregame. So it's just it's the way the whole market's heading. I mean, I looked at yesterday's numbers. I followed the golf yesterday. I'd backed Nico pre-event. Lowry was sort of the tip coming into it.

plus million dollars traded on CalShi, two million dollars on Betfair. So this live action stuff's really starting to heat up and uh you don't throw in the predictions, but there's some serious money getting thrown around out there. And from what we're seeing live across a lot of the prediction markets and the like, I feel like we're of course going to see plenty of that with regulated books as well. Joe, let's use that as a springboard into

all things flutter, Sanduel's parent company reporting Q four numbers last week, and CEO Peter Jackson referring to subpar NFL results as quote, unfavorable recycling impact, which promptly fanned some flames on gambling Twitter, as you might imagine. What do you make of Flutter's positioning around its Q4 results and what it may say about the foundation of FanDuel's business?

First of all, I I really do love that now we've become such a corporate industry where we get the benefit of like slick American Marcom. slash investor relations language to come up with like a doozy like recycling effect and like they killed their customers and their customers didn't bring any more money back to the table to keep getting killed.

But uh in all seriousness, I mean, when you think about it, like look, is this an anomaly or is this an early sign of potential decline in that product as far as consumers are concerned, right? 78% plus of bets. with the big guys, Fan Kings, are parlays. Anywhere from half to two thirds of their revenue is coming from parlays.

They're already seeing anywhere between fifteen to twenty percent margin on those parlays, and they are telling their investors on the street that they are looking to push that higher. You know, this is

I think really difficult for them because you know, we're a few years into this now. And when SGP first launched, FanDuel brought that to market. Yeah, it was it was quite the revelation. I always thought, like, wow, that's interesting. The biggest innovation in the New American sports betting marketplace was a betting type that's been around since the Roman Empire.

But, you know, that's what they did. But you could always see that look, there's the potential for deceleration in that product. Return to player is really when you think about it for a casino game, is terrible right now. So it's more than likely that they have to better balance this. I mean, the aspiration to try and push their margins higher that they're telling public markets

They're gonna have to manage this. I mean, I obviously they have more data on their audience than we do. We're just on the outside kind of trying to guess, even though they are somewhat educated guesses. But you know, it it's almost like the sale of a barrel of oil, you know, if too low the companies can't make a profit. Too high, it affects consumer behavior, and consumers start to reduce their consumption. You could probably say the same thing here about.

You know, if return to if return to player is too low Players may just say, No, we're not gonna play it. I think one of the other things that was interesting that Peter Jackson was the Flutter CEO said that one of the culprits of this, in addition to blaming like the lack of spar power on the teams that went deep into the playoffs and some other things.

But tried to bring in the fact that he said that they executed poorly on their bonusing program in the face of this to try and retain those players and that now they're gonna have to in essence reacquire them. I mean when you think about this I don't think it's as easy as saying that because now you have a clash between two imperatives for the sports books.

One, yes, they've already promised that they're going to try and push the margins higher, become more profitable. But at the same time, they've been saying for years that they want to wind down. They want to pull back the reliance on bonusing to players, free money to players. as something that drives acquisitions and drives retention. So and we know from from personal experience, an operator can't win, can't profit from a free bet. We only lose.

with the way that the tax laws are written and everything, we just lose on that. So saying that like, oh well, we didn't execute well on our bonus thing or that I I think that's not necessarily the answer either. I do think that this is a real incentive or maybe even an imperative to innovate and to say,

Okay, well what's next after SGPs? It's not super SGPs or odds boosts on SGPs and then what are you gonna do now that there's a possibility that this product may be decelerating in the eyes of consumers?

to replace that. And I don't know. The one thing I will say is this is like this is an environment that the casino companies like Caesars and MGM They should run riot on because if there's one thing that the casino industry, brick and mortar casino industry has long understood, is, you know, that there's a certain acceptable level of return to player that they had to have in place.

If you just come in and you get the shit kicked out of you, you're not going to come back. So they do a really good job in casinos. They made a science of this. of, you know, what just how much can we take from the player? How much do we have to rebate them back in the form of like perks, free drinks, meals, rooms, things like that.

And that's the thing, it's like Caesars and MGM, they have real assets that they can deploy in this regard. So I think it should be a real opportunity for them to lean into it and maybe pick up some market share if this is kind of like the environment, if this is the way things are.

have to happen. You know, FanDuel, DraftKings, they have to go out and they have to pay retail to buy perks for people, whereas, you know, MGM and Caesars, they just have it. You know, they have rooms, they have restaurants, they have booths. It's a great position for them. But I really do think that this is an early notice to everybody in the industry that they should be asking themselves what's next.

With that, we'll move on from FanDuel to the home state of its chief rival, DraftKings. Massachusetts has announced new rules on sportsbooks' practice of limiting betters. In what Jeff Edelstein of Ingame dot com has called one of the most aggressive consumer protection moves in US sports betting, Massachusetts operators will be required to notify betters.

within forty eight hours of limiting their account. This makes the base state the first state to formally regulate limiting, with the ruling slated to take effect June first, pending waiver requests from operators. Adam, how impactful do you think this is gonna be at the end of the day?

As an operator, absolute fucking chaos. Like I mean The ones that get dinged by this the most, but we are mindful that there is some players, whether they're past polsters, whether they're court siding and some of these things, you know, so we do have experience at somewhat

reducing limits on some players depending on, you know, what kind of business they bring. And they're talking about needing to do it retroactively as well. So they have to go through their tens, hundreds of thousands accounts. And then the one thing that clearly showed they don't understand how limits work in this industry is they talked about if something going from seventy five to fifty, you had to let them know. And then if you went from fifty to twenty five

You had to let them know again. I mean, there is, I don't know, fifty sports, couple of thousand league. and they're all not treated equally. So if you're one of these operators that limit people on on a overall aspect and and really targeting this It's an absolute mess. Just it's gonna be a full time job and then they're gonna oversee the correspondences.

Like this is I mean, they have no idea how much paperwork and emails is about to hit their desk as a regulator. Operators may just decide, you know what, how slimm it ten dollars and then just raise players up as they come in and whatnot because this is This is a lot of work. I mean, as an operator, there's no way I would want to be in Massachusetts even with the very, very small narrative items that we come up to because we want to go by sport. We want to go by league.

We wanna go by bet type. Like there's ways to do this correctly, that there is no way operators can do this anymore in Massachusetts. So yeah, if I was, yeah, FanJuel or someone like that, I would just set limits. hard house limits and then just start raising other people as to why you want them going up. And when it comes to limiting players, generally what does happen is there's a percentage module in your back end.

So you got house limits, everyone's getting a hundred percent, and then you may say, Okay, certain players are gonna get ten percent of the hundred percent, which is not a dollar value. So I hope they understand that when players get limited and going into bat for the DraftKings fan jewels and all those guys right now because It's not seventy five to fifty, fifty to twenty five. If you have a ten thousand dollar house limit on an NFL game.

and a hundred dollar house limit on that Indian tag that they play. Usually what they do on the account is change it to a ten percent of the limits or something like that. So you can't use monetary amounts to explained these reductions of this nature. But you know what? Good luck to'em. They've been proactive. They've come up with something. Maybe not the best thing that they could have come up with, but it's something. So good luck to the operators in Massachusetts.

I heard you mention somewhere in there there are ways of doing this correctly, and I think we can all understand and appreciate the intent behind what the Massachusetts Gaming Commission is looking to accomplish here. Adam, any initial thought as to what it would look like to take that intent and implement it correctly in the real world in a way that does work for operators?

The way I may think it's correctly, others may disagree. I don't think they're that far off base with what they're trying to do, but I think it's more of just finding a middle ground that the operators would just happily comply with. you know, minimum bet limits on the NBA, NFL, your top level soccer league, stuff like that. I don't know the back ends of all these other operator systems. I mean these days they get

They're very old technologies. So the ability to be able to do this stuff is very difficult to do it across the board versus you know per league, per sport, per bet type, you know, those kind of things. And then the ability to go in and put whether it's

you know, they get dollar max across the board and things like that. So I would have thought the DraftKings or fan jewel or someone would have come out already and said, you know what, we're gonna be proactive here and put, you know, everybody gets at least a thousand dollars on NFL main game spread total whatnot. And just done some really basic, simple things that aren't gonna hurt them bottom line that they can really go after. But putting it in the regulators' hands and

Do you all have to correct me whether this is regulators or legislators coming up with this rule? But just you don't want to leave it up to them to do this. Someone should have sort of taken a step forward, went to them and said, We'll do this. Everyone else would have fallen in line and it could have been done in a much uh easier nature because as an operator I wouldn't want any part of this.

And Joe, I'll take a stab and say we're talking about regulators at this point. With that, what's your point of view on the ruling and its potential to inspire other state regulators to examine the issue with a more critical eye? I mean Adam said quite a bit of what I might have said. A marks to hi marks to Massachusetts regulators for taking this up in the first place and as seriously as they have.

They've been now working on this for the better of uh, I believe a year and a half now. You know, and they've even though we're not one of their licensees, they sought our input at Prime Sports.

and Planetex. So I really appreciated that. And I think they've done their homework. I think the result though kind of demonstrates that for their intent and for what a lot of us in the industry, especially the players, were probably hoping for with some sort of limits on the operators' abilities to limit. You know, and that doesn't seem to happen. I guess my snide comment the other day on Twitter was after seeing all of this and

the reporting requirements and you know, this seems to be an more about fair notice to players than it is anything else. So I the question I asked is, okay, that's great. All the notice has to go out to players. Is there any type of any bar? Is there any kind of limiting activity? Is there any reason whatsoever that operators are not allowed to limit players for?

And I haven't heard that or I haven't seen that so far. And that's I think absent something like that, Adam's absolutely right. W I know we've been saying it, we're lockstep on this one. It's like instead of looking at this as like, well, we're gonna have these high limits and then we're gonna Squeeze people down if they're winning too much or whatever it may be is. Yeah, start with low limits and then give people multiples on that. We do that.

You know, we have the max limit, and then we have some people who based on their volume or whatever they may be, we'll give them two times, three times, four times max limits, max staking limits. It really doesn't seem to be that difficult to do. Of course, yeah, that'll raise, you know, other comments and questions like why does that guy get two times, three times limits, and I only get one times limit? But it does seem like it's a much more doable.

situation than what we have here now. Does it lack a kind of understanding of the nuance of like the day to day and the differences between sports and leagues and even day of the week, time of the day, things like that. Yes, of course it does.

But, you know, there's a reason why these things are written in ink and not carved in stone. And so the I guess the hope would be is like, okay, Massachusetts was the first one to throw one out there. It's like hanging the first number. Everybody knows it's gonna get beat up. Everybody knows it's gonna change. And now we'll see once this is active in the marketplace, how is that number going to get shaped by market forces, the operators, and the players?

All right, from big news in Massachusetts to breaking news from DraftKings shortly before we hopped on to record today. Ben Horney of Front Office Sports posted on Twitter that DraftKings plans to launch a so-called super app. including its sportsbook prediction markets and casino and lottery games with phase one expected to roll out by March Madness. Joe, not much time yet to dig in and process this, but what's your initial reaction to the news?

I mean it makes sense, you know, for all the talk of like, oh, what's AI gonna do to our business? Well that the fact that you have one product. And that you're able to determine based on where the player is located, which of the features they're able to access and be presented with. That just seems to make sense, doesn't it? From a product perspective.

And why is it this long in coming? Right? It certainly would clear up a lot of the confusion with, you know, players who play in multiple states. I mean, I have DraftKings apps from New Jersey, Virginia, you know, and other states on my phone. Same thing with the other operators. It's like when you have to have

a different app for different states, it's kind of a pain in the ass and it's a it's a drag on other things that you may want to do, like game innovation, things like that. So I think something like this is long overdue. It's very consistent with what made the Fan Kings guys you know, such juggernauts in the first place, and that was being able to just switch over from DFS to sports betting with the same exact accounts. So

being able to migrate players between game categories that are allowed in different jurisdictions. And then when one comes on, hopefully it's just a flick of a switch on your geolocation settings. And now they can see prediction markets or now they can see casinos, something like that. That's the stuff that makes sense instead of wondering like, how are we going to employ anthropic to do better personalize individuals' games and things like that?

And Adam, what's your instant analysis on the DraftKings super app news of the day? Well, I mean, that's what you're trying to build is a seven eleven, an all in one app where it's just you get everything you need to. I think there's a few that are doing the state by state a lot better than others as well with the single wallet.

with the ability to go, you know, cross borders and move your money across and as long as, you know, the bet's stamped under what jurisdictions it's regulated under, that's sort of the goal. But I mean What's the sort of ultimate idea here? Is it that well if you're in California, only the prediction market comes up and the sports book and those buttons are hidden? Is that pre login, post login? There's a lot of things that sort of

you know, questions that come out of it. But as I said, I was watching it yesterday and is their idea that they're gonna have the ability to put, you know, their sports ball Right next to their prediction market. So now you've got the buy sell and all those other aspects of it. If I was DraftKings fan jewel or any of those, my single entity products would become prediction markets.

Like the live golf yesterday, where you're really only getting singles, have you just turned that into a buy sell yes no, instead of taking it at a sports book where you're paying quarter percent excise tax plus whatever tax you are living in these sinks to win the World Cup, all these kind of things.

I think if you're building all this stuff together, then you just start redirecting people to where you want'em, where you want that bet. Because the regulators don't seem to have done a single thing about all these promises of shutting down anyone, getting into the prediction markets, etc. licensed as a sports book or anything like that. So what the hell? I'd be pushing it to the limit.

And I think there's opportunities for these, you know, big box stores to really play that tax game and that narrative to really build out a really strong product that really targets everyone across the fifty states. You know, heard Utah recently barking that they'll never let the gambling into their state, but

Here it is. I mean, there's just there's nothing stopping this right now. So lean into it. Start building your technology to make the most out of building your databases in in states that just Currently don't have sports betting or iCasino. But that's the name of the game here. It's eyeballs and databases. That's why the sweeps existed. That's why all these fantasy things existed. Building up databases that are worth something at the end of the day.

From DraftKings headquarters in Boston, a couple hundred miles down I-95, next.io Summit is coming to New York City next week. And so are both of you guys for one of the industry's bigger annual conferences. Adam, what's circled on your calendar for next week and who are you most looking forward to meeting? There's a schedule out. I don't know what it is. I haven't looked. I know this thing is on Tuesday, Wednesday. My schedule right now is

A day at Gulf Stream Saturday. If anyone's in the area or wants to hang out with the races, I'll be there Saturday. Sunday flight of New York. with my farce kids. I do have a child in New York, so I'll be going to pick her up and spend the night with her Sunday. So this is a double whammy for me. And then as far as the schedule goes I plan to be sitting on a stool in a bar somewhere around two PM Monday. I know we've got the Stardys Monday night.

And that's as far as I've got right now. And I have a flight Thursday to Vegas. So whatever happens in between Monday and Thursday, six AM, I have no idea. But I just like running in I just I really like finding a spot almost. standing there and just people watching and they'll find you if they need you or any of those things. So I'm not going there necessarily to listen to panels or anything of that nature.

It's really just across paths, but is always good to catch up with. And I doubt I'll be going to SBC this year. They couldn't have put it at a worse time possible, literally, you know, day before and the day of the first day games of the World Cup. So this looks like my opportunity to sort of run into people before G Tui.

And Joe, when Adam mentions having a spot that he likes to post up, I know it betbash, Saginaws inside of Zurica, is that spot for you? Anything similar on the docket when it comes to your game plan for next week in New York City? First of all, I'm not insulted at all that Adam didn't talk about the incredibly riveting 11 30 a.m. Tuesday morning panel discussion between myself and friend of the pod Alex Kane of Sport Trade regarding prediction markets.

Why would you want to go to that panel? But that's actually that the venue that they have this at convene in New York and Liberty Place. It's actually not really a great venue for that like sit down like we do at Saginaw's and and other places and you know watch the world go by and invite everybody for coffee and drinks. 'cause it's very self contained,'cause it's a very, you know, exclusive, I guess, right now conference. So it's it's different from like S B C and G to E in that regard.

As far as what I'm looking for, I'm always interested at at the start of every conference to look at everyone who's now an expert. Like who are the experts this year on prediction markets? You know, because last year for instance they were probably experts on sweeps. And then before that there were experts on everything from like crypto to online sports bar to D F S and D F S Plus. Etc.

So there's a lot of people who they just they're rather chameleon like when it comes to their expertise. Although I guess I'm the one who just said I'm on a prediction markets panel. So maybe I could I'm guilty of that as well. I guess when I look at all this stuff, it's so far, yeah, you know, when you look at the industry right now, so far everything to me is just very one dimensional, you know.

You have online sportsbook, then to DFS Plus and then the sweeps and sweeps crypto and now prediction markets and and frankly everything is the same. There's no innovation. There's no innovation. There's just the innovation is just pushing regulatory risk. You know, for instance, when online sportsbook was being legalized, you already had DFS Plus, which I'll admit I was one of the ones who

Who started that? I was there at the inception, was guilty of it. But when it really started to take off is when it when you really removed the F part of it. It was no longer really fantasy based and they really just became, you know, a compendium of prop bet. So Which clearly violated the federal definitions, but it grew and grew and grew by copying basically prop parlay products from online sportsbooks.

And then sweeps came along and you know, here you have this again, pushing the limits of the laws and the regulations. But was the product any different? No, it was a carbon copy. And now when you look at prediction markets, again The innovation is is the regulatory risk, pushing the definitions of what is permitted in the marketplace, under the laws and the regulations. What is prediction markets doing with it? They are a carbon copy of online sports books.

So there's just no innovation here right now. Why people are just taking these huge risks, and I think they are huge risks from a regulatory perspective, from a legal perspective. To then just serve copycat product, it mystifies me. When I'm there, when I go to all these conferences, I want to look at some I want to see something. I want to look at it and I want to say, wow, that may change things.

That may open something up that we haven't seen so far in this industry, you know, as far as like user experience, product, something like that, some new, interesting, engaging way of being able to, you know, offer markets on sports. You know, it harkens back to what we were saying earlier regarding SGPs. What's next? Like what are the big guys going to do to kind of stay at the head of the curb? Because it's about engagement. How do you keep those players

playing, right? And so I always go to conferences looking for that kind of thing. More often than not, I come away and I'm just shaking my head and saying like, everything's the same. Everything's Everybody right now will be talking about how they're going to open up a predictions marketplace. And all I wanna know is, okay, and then what? And you know, somebody who has a good creative answer for that, I'm all ears and I'd love to meet ya and see what you got going on.

And we'll go ahead and wrap up this week with a jump ball looking ahead at the sporting calendar. What, if anything, is grabbing your guys' attention this coming week on either side of the counter? F one baby. F one. Big East Tournament, Pennsylvania High School basketball playoffs. Just no betting on that. At least not legally. Yeah.

So but hoops. Like this is the time of year to totally get excited. I since high school have loved watching the conference tournaments, especially Big East Tournament. So yeah, I mean this is it'll be interesting to see like going back to Peter Jackson's comments.

about, you know, like last year's men's tournament was a very chalky tournament, right? All the favorites were winning. It was kind of a tough tournament to be on the other side of the counter. It'll be interesting to see since this is supposedly such a wide open year. how that's going to affect things. But it's one of those things where I always I make my brackets or probably at least ten of'em. And then I sit there and I'm rooting against them'cause I wanna see like the the Saint Peter's

Or someplace or Concordia or somebody like that just come in from a low seed and just roach some higher seated team in it. Who cares if I lose money? It is absolutely for my money the most exciting thing on the American sports calendar. And Adam, we heard Joe elaborate on why he's looking forward to college basketball in the week to come. You jumped in quickly with F one, so go ahead and tell us about that as both a better and or a bookmaker.

Yeah, I mean it's back this week. Australia usually starting the season. I enjoy watching this race in particular because I remember as a seventeen, eighteen year old when the F one come to town and we had our motorbike. And the track was somewhat put together at night times at two AM in the morning, getting out there on the road.

It was a lot of fun. So no, I mean I've been an F one fan since Ayrton Santa, Michael Schumacher, Elaine Prost, et cetera. And this year actually looks interesting. New chassis, new regs, everything. I mean, it sort of twos the field for the championship. So it seems like it's a wide open year. I think that's the biggest thing that's sort of failed F one for a very long time is the races just got monotonous and whatnot. Last year was it it was

A lot of back and forth on that. But it seems like no one's really sure who has what this year. Ferrari seemed to be sort of at the front of it as well. So I think it's a good year to get back involved and and hopefully some exciting Sunday morning races. Make sure you have your subscription to Apple TV, right? Since they're the ones carrying the races.

All right, and with that, we'll go ahead and wrap up this episode to the audience. Whether or not you'll be in New York for next.io summit next week, we appreciate you joining us this week. Thanks as always for tuning in. And during a break in the action for Adam and Joe at some point from the Big Apple, we'll catch you next week.

Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Prime Suspects. Register for Prime Sports at Primesports.com and download the Prime Sports app. You can follow us on Twitter at Prime Suspects underscore at Joe Brew. and junior and at Adam Bjorn too. You must be twenty-one or over to play on Always bet responsibly and within your limits. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call 1 800 GAMBLE.