Some fans watch sports out of love for one particular team.

Others are interested in observing great athletic performances no matter who's on the field.

But in the past few years, a different motivation

is turning large numbers of Americans

into obsessive viewers.

They've gotten money, not just on a game,

but maybe on one particular play, a wager made

possible by the Big Bang in online sports betting.

From KERA in Dallas, this is think.

I'm Chris Boyd. Sports betting used to be an under-the-table industry in most states. You could do it, but you had to know a bookmaker and you risked getting in trouble. The Supreme Court overturned that prohibition in 2018, which coincided with the rise of online fantasy leagues and positioned a handful of companies to hit

the ground running, converting all that data into categories for people to wager on. The industry

has grown since at an explosive pace, but as my guests will tell us, it hasn't turned

out to be quite the win that its most enthusiastic boosters were hoping for. David Hill is

a writer for Rolling Stone magazine,

which published his article, is the $11 billion online sportsbook bubble about to burst? David,

welcome to think. Well, thank you so much for having me. Talk a little about why fantasy sports

sites were in such a good position to move rapidly into processing wagers on real-life events. Well, you know, daily fantasy sports sites were in such a good position to move rapidly into processing wagers on real-life events.

Well, you know, Daily Fantasy Sports was sort of an innovation that evolved out of fantasy sports,

which a lot of Americans were playing, but we're operating in this sort of gray area as a quasi-gambling

game that sort of straddled the line between sports betting and

playing fantasy games.

And they built a big customer pool, a big customer base through that particular offering.

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