00:00NBA player Terry Rozier is accused of gambling on games he played in, and it comes at a time when sports betting keeps getting more popular.
00:10Rozier allegedly tipped off bettors before a March 2023 game that he would leave early due to an injury.
00:16That allowed bettors to cash in on Rozier's lackluster performance, and Rozier allegedly received $200,000 for the tip.
00:24That's despite Rozier making more than $160 million in his NBA career.
00:30All it takes is one or one or two sort of athletes to sort of get greedy and to have an incident like this.
00:36Sports betting is now legal in some fashion in 39 states.
00:40The industry posted a record $13.7 billion in revenue last year.
00:45That will only go up if large states like Texas and California join in.
00:49California is like the golden goose.
00:51The industry is going to double in size once California and Texas legalize.
00:56The big players in the industry are DraftKings and FanDuel, who make up 77% of the market share.
01:02There are a couple other sort of smaller companies around the fringes, and many of them are sort of well-known casino properties in places like Las Vegas.
01:10For those living in states where it isn't legal, there's a way around the law.
01:14The first is illegal sports betting, which landed Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani's interpreter in trouble.
01:21Otherwise, there's a new player in the sports betting game, Prediction Markets.
01:25Kalshi and Polymarket, which are places nominally for betting on things like elections, but over the last few months have basically become sports books themselves.
01:33There's also daily fantasy sports games like Prize Picks and Underdog.
01:37It's basically sports betting in disguise, but you're betting on sort of individual player performances rather than team performances, and there's some other sort of niches to it.
01:45Meanwhile, Rozier's arrest comes at a time when sports leagues are embracing gambling.
01:50This regulated structure of legalized betting, we can monitor it in ways that were unimaginable years ago.
01:56However, Rozier's alleged point shaving happened in 2023, and the FBI bust didn't happen until this year.
02:03If your system is so good, why did it take two years for the FBI to catch these people, especially when the NBA already conducted its own investigation of Tara Rozier and by all accounts cleared him of any wrongdoing?
02:13It's not just the sports leagues embracing sports betting, but sports broadcasters as well.
02:18I'm staying away from the point spread, and I'm going Alabama team total over 29 and a half.
02:24It's commonplace for segments during sports broadcasts to be sponsored by the betting sites.
02:29It's even more common to see full-on commercials for them during timeouts.
02:34I see it as a problem for the children who are watching these games and her sort of being fed gambling material without sort of context and without understanding, for example, that gambling addiction exists.
02:44For Straight Arrow News, I'm Lauren Keenan.
02:46If you want more on this story, download the Straight Arrow News app or visit san.com.
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