00:00But our stories today lead off with where they have been for the most part this summer and fall, which is the prediction markets.
00:08And another company has decided to solely focus on them in a certain state.
00:14I don't want to steal your thunder, so you'll tell us more about that and maybe why the decision was made.
00:21Yeah, and I expect that will be the case going into the winter as well.
00:24And even into next spring and next summer, where prediction markets are really dominating all of the sports betting news, the latest here being that Underdog, which only had a sports book in North Carolina, is now shutting down that sports book.
00:39Next Wednesday is when it will fully stop being a sports book, and instead it will replace it with prediction markets.
00:45It was the only state where Underdog had a sports book, launched there about March of 2024.
00:51So kind of the company's original plan had been to acquire a lot of users and customers as a daily fantasy sports product.
01:01It obviously had a lot of kind of controversy over how it did that originally with its pick'em games, which a lot of people sort of likened to parlays without following the sports rules.
01:12It's really just kind of abandoning its sports betting hopes, switching fully over to prediction markets, where it's now live in about 25 states under a partnership with Crypto.com, which is the one that supplies the markets and Underdog kind of just puts it on its platform.
01:28But kind of the details around the shutdown really signaled that it's going to be solely focusing on prediction markets going forward now.
01:37It's going to actually pay out any outstanding bets in the maximum amount before that date.
01:44So even futures you have on things that haven't happened or likely won't happen, it's, according to its website, going to pay out.
01:51And customers don't even have to, like, go in and take their funds out, as they usually have to do by a certain date in a lot of places, because Underdog is just switching over to its fantasy product and prediction market in the state.
02:04So if you get paid out any of the bets you had outstanding, you don't need to rush in before next Wednesday.
02:09You can kind of just wait and use it on the new product that they're going to have there, which, again, is probably part of their plan to kind of convert everything over to a prediction market.
02:19And I think really signals just how massive prediction markets have become in the sports betting industry when you have a company like Underdog, which spent so much time acquiring licenses in states to eventually build out its sports book, had its sports book.
02:35And now all of a sudden you have prediction markets, which seem like they're here to stay, and a major company is switching over to that as its main product.
02:43So it never signaled that it was going to not do this.
02:46It withdrawed its license in Missouri just before the launch about a month ago.
02:50So it never really said quite out flat that it was going to be only prediction markets, but now it looks like that's very much the case.
02:57And it'll be really interesting to watch next year as, you know, you have prediction markets in this Wild West and companies now fully kind of betting on them.
03:06DraftKings, Vandal, of course, expected to follow as well.
Be the first to comment