betting on eSports? Has it grown the industry? VV: I think betting on anything is the function of eyeballs, right, a function of viewership. So if you have a billion people watching something that will be 100 million bettors or something like this. Anytime when there is demand the bookmakers will come, and they want to do something with eSports. It started in around 2015 People were saying that it’s more and more professional and eSports is growing 10% 15% 20% in betting handle, it’s really a big opportunity for some bookmakers. But it can be seen as a success and a problem that in some jurisdictions that eSport is regulated. It’s a sign they understand that it’s here to stay as long as the regulation is reasonable. You don’t need to go event by event because this is not possible in eSport. The events are very dynamic, sometime popping up in three weeks and the regulatory approval takes a month which is obviously a mismatch. So it’s complicated, but it’s changing and the regulators see that and they want to work on it. The challenge can be that some regulators don’t just want to regulate eSports they want to ban it, because they think it’s just kids playing on computers with other kids. This is a big misconception about eSports: they are really professional players, 18+, regulated bookmakers, who don’t accept, underage betting and so on. So there is still some prejudice. Some you know, people don’t want to accept it, it will take some time, but it will come. And we can discuss what can be done. And that’s why I’m here to help people and regulators understand that. It’s not a child thing, and it’s here to stay. And it’s a big business opportunity for everybody., AB: That is a perfect transition into our next topic of discussion, which is what are the challenges that exists at the intersection with sports and betting? Vlastimil that’s actually a great point that you make because in Indiana, where I’m from, we have a specific law that bans betting on eSports because the perception is it’s my 15-year-old kid in his bedroom and we don’t want people betting on that. And the misconception is broad. But it’s interesting because we talk about how driving out the black market is the purpose of legalizing sports betting. But when we’re leaving out this gigantic sector of the sports market, which is worldwide, it seems like we’re still driving people to that black market. So what are the challenges here with this intersection? And what do we do to make it better, going forward? PL: In Spain, we have 17 autonomous communities, and each one has its own regulation on what can be bet on and what can’t. So one operator wanted to provide in their gaming halls and betting shops the ability to bet on eSports. So we went to all those 17 autonomous communities and out of those 17, two were problematic. But then we provided all sorts of studies, including that the average age of who bets on eSports is 32. So we convinced most of the jurisdictions, but now the second challenge was on the online level, where do they fit in? Is this sports betting? Is it not sports betting? So we don’t need regulation from the gambling regulator to say what this actually is, we need the gambling regulator to take a step back and say, ‘what does my jurisdiction already consider this to be? Is this a sport, is this not a sport in Spain, it’s not considered a sport’. And that is a very good starting point where all the legislators and regulators, not only from the gambling industry, but also from the Labor perspective, have framed the sector. Other big challenges for that collaboration and that win-win situation between the sports industry and the gambling industry is the omni channel aspect, I’m not going to disagree with the panel we had earlier, but obviously, from a marketing perspective, in situations where you have compartmentalized regulation and advertisement in land-based, and you to apply it to online, then that gets really complicated. It doesn’t mean it cannot be done, you will be able to find a way. Other challenges, data protection, what any type of IT project, and obviously, we’re all in the IT industry, whether land based or online, there are data protection challenges, if you want to use the data, you need to make sure that you have collected it properly, that you have everything in place, because even if you don’t care about gambling sanctions, you’re going to care about the GDPR sanctions. So some of the challenges are there. SP: I think we could dedicate an entire panel to that. From an integrity perspective, I’m going to just touch upon what we what we mentioned about seeing dangerous trends in prohibited types of bets. As you mentioned, like the scandals and the general opinion would be betting is really bad and we need to do something about it. That will drive decision makers to take quick fix decisions that are not fixing anything, but making the situation worse. When it comes to
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