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SportsTranscript
00:00A lot to discuss here with Washington, D.C. and sports betting going offline, going online,
00:08new companies joining as well.
00:10Everyone wants a piece of the pie in our nation's capital.
00:14Let's get an update on the very latest there.
00:16Thanks for coming on.
00:17Yeah, Craig, great to be back.
00:19And Washington, D.C., when you talk about it as a city or a state, it's really unique
00:23that way.
00:24And it's been no different with their sports betting experience, unparalleled to pretty
00:28much any other market in the country where they had this one app for a while that was
00:32really bad, but they allowed different apps around stadiums, got rid of the app, allowed
00:37a new app.
00:38The app went offline during the Super Bowl.
00:40It's been just quite a fiasco with D.C. sports betting thus far.
00:44But this week, it seems like the dust is finally settling, about four years after they legalized
00:49it.
00:50But it didn't take, it wasn't without some drama first, of course.
00:54So what happened basically was you had FanDuel had taken over this contract for the lottery,
01:00was running the only game in town.
01:02And then all of a sudden it went offline this week because of changes in the upcoming fiscal
01:07budget for the year 2025, made some pretty significant sports betting alterations to
01:12the entire market.
01:14But when the mayor, Muriel Bowser, was holding on to this budget essentially and had not
01:19made a decision on whether she would sign it or send it back, that caused all of a sudden
01:24all the changes to take a pause.
01:26FanDuel automatically had to go offline.
01:28It was sort of this unforeseen error, which is pretty symptomatic of the entire process
01:33in D.C. in general.
01:35It's always some little thing gets in the way that nobody saw.
01:38But she returned the budget yesterday, which allowed FanDuel to go back online.
01:42The Office of Lottery and Gaming worked with FanDuel as well as some new apps that are
01:47going to be ushered into the market here because of changes in the budget.
01:51Like I said earlier, before today, you really only had one game in town, which back when
01:57you had Gambit D.C. used to be the only one in town.
02:01It was really a problem for a lot of bettors there.
02:03It lost the city a lot of money.
02:05As a former D.C. resident, I can attest to how bad the lines were.
02:08It was like minus 160 sides on both sides of NFL games.
02:12So it was a really uncompetitive product.
02:14A lot of studies came out that found it lost the city money.
02:17FanDuel now is back and with it comes Caesars, comes BetMGM.
02:21So for the first time ever, Washington, D.C. residents are going to be able to bet on essentially
02:26more than one app.
02:27So pretty big news in D.C. there.
02:29You've kind of been waiting four years for anything like this to happen.
02:33FanDuel took over in April, which was some progress.
02:36And then the D.C. Council made this change and it was finally put into place this week.
02:41So hopefully it's going to be smooth sailing ahead for D.C. sports betting.
02:45But you never know with this market, which, again, is just very unique.
02:48Now, DraftKings has also showed some interest in launching in D.C.
02:53They have not been approved yet, even though they've been vocal on social media about coming
02:57to D.C. soon.
02:58We'll have to see what happens with them.
03:00Fanatics also has a path to launching in D.C., which would leave pretty much two more open
03:04spots.
03:05I'm not sure who would fill those, quite frankly, however, though, with the current environment
03:09in sports betting.
03:10Maybe Bet365, maybe ESPNBet if it's still around.
03:13We'll have to see, Craig.