Business of Betting - Ep 213 - Adam Bjorn

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hagrinBPR Review Date: 2024-06-25 04:18:56
Rating: 6.75

Notes:
Adam is the CEO of Plannatech. (Prime Sports) This was good. My bias with Adam is that I think he's pretty smart & have followed him forever, but he's got this super anti-American schtick and these colors don't run Adam, Rock Flag and Eagle.

3:30 - Offshores: The more Adam dives into the business costs and regulators that "No one in their right mind would try and enter and do business in a regulated market in the sense of making money" because you're getting destroyed by regulators. "Growth over Enforcement." Jason brings up the "secret shopper" attack and Adam smartly shuts that down as it's far more complicated than that.

8:20 - "The real high VIPs don't want to play local." I actually have never heard anyone say this specific thing before, but it took like 2 seconds thinking about it that Adam brings up a really interesting point I never considered. 9:30 - Mentions good results in NJ pushing the arbs between Prime and Sporttrade in their golf matchups.

10:45 - More crypto and money laundering talk. Super uninformed, too annoyed to address it here. Repeated intellectual laziness from this pod on this topic. Adam actually "corrects" the host about 10 minutes later on this.

11:40 - "Sports is super low margins." "DFS was a trojan horse to sports betting, sports betting is a trojan horse to get to iGaming to make your money / margins there." Very well said. 13:30 - "US is like 50 small countries." (which is very smart considering this came out before the SC tribal casino writ denial). 14:20 - talks about the tax structure in Jamaica which actually sounds just about as good as it's structured around the world. Mentions Michigan, "no one good solution / structure" but mentions there's good pieces here and there. 16:35 - "The regulators aren't meant to know the weeds of this industry and have been led down a path by consultants, etc, but they need to get into the weeds to get put in the right direction." Well said.

19:10 - Plannatech & Prime: Plannatech is B2B / B2C for Prime. Also have BetCris as a client in Latin America / Philippines. "One day we'll try and get them together."

21:00 - Adam actually understands onchain privacy! (or lack thereof).

23:25 - Exchanges: "Exchanges are a waste of time." Huge reliance on market makers, need federal liquidity. "Sporttrade has a lot of dead real estate." 26:40 - Talks about this potential for a hybrid model of the exchange backend with the sportsbook frontend and maybe everything drifts to some type of hybrid model (interesting). 27:30 - Adam brings up the liquidity of sports betting markets vs other financial markets for capped upside for large market makers (this is a point many people don't get until you start dealing with bug numbers, HBob famously made a post about this which I agree with it, but deep liquidity is just not a concern for many people).

30:00 - Mentions the cost is the most difficult part of US operations, but users not being price sensitive is a very, very large problem with the US player. Has had to almost relearn the player from an operator perspective.