00:00at rivers right now trying to survive in the sports betting space sam as honestly a lot of
00:06the sports betting operators are i mean it can't be good for a lot of these let's say fifth place
00:12sixth place sports betting operators that prediction markets are just in this business
00:18and jumping so far ahead quite frankly i'm surprised that those sports betting operators
00:22have not pushed back on the prediction markets at all or maybe they have we just don't know
00:26yeah it's a really interesting point you have companies like bet rivers uh they've been
00:33aligned with caesars and bet mgm is kind of fighting these prediction markets while companies
00:39like draft kings and fanduel which have historically been at odds with those other you know legacy kind
00:44of casino operators uh they kind of said you know screw it we'll join in and create our own
00:48prediction markets if this is going to be the case and it is interesting when you talk about fifth
00:52sixth place operators bet rivers which we'll talk about in a sec uh not even in that list
00:57they're outside of the top 10 in sports betting app downloads this entire year so even smaller than
01:03that this week they had to raise their minimum wager size in illinois from one dollar to five dollars
01:10which we've seen a number of sports betting apps in the state do responding to the illinois tax hikes over
01:17the past years with either adding a 25 to 50 cent uh fee per bet onto every bet which fanduel and
01:24draft kings did and then you know bet rivers as well so it now has the second highest minimum in the
01:30state behind circa which is marketed to you know uh sports bettors who want to put down more money
01:37and avoid being limited and get better lines that sort of thing less of the casual better so pretty
01:42notable that bett rivers would kind of you know join that landscape when bett rivers itself has been
01:48wanting to attract the casual better uh but the the story here is the illinois sports books have really
01:54been hit hard by all these tax hikes and you know just this past week you had chicago add another tax hike
01:59on top of it as well where now they have to pay a 40 tax rate for the highest books and as well as the
02:05the percent the the per bet sent fee as well as a 10.25 tax from chicago um since the new taxes were
02:14all enacted uh the bets on that rivers are actually down 32 percent year over year that's just in the
02:20months of september and october combined because those are the only months we have available uh with
02:25the tax rate and the information um and bets overall are down 16 percent so that river is basically
02:30hit twice as hard as the rest of the market again trying to survive in a really tough landscape we'll
02:38see if it changes its minimum rate it's not necessarily set um depending on what the new
02:42chicago tax does to its books and numbers it could go up it could go down we could even see bett rivers
02:48leave the state so i agree with your point craig it'll be really interesting to see what these
02:52smaller kind of tier two or tier three sports betting operators do in the face of these enormous
02:57tax hikes and obviously in the face of new competition from prediction markets as well
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