“This has been an ongoing discussion for a long time - definitely before PASPA,” he says. Interestingly, Kezirian says a show like Daily Wager has been on ESPN’s radar longer than that. Kezirian’s interest in sports betting actually dates all the way back to his first $5 bet on the Super Bowl in grade school, but as he says, “it definitely accelerated when I got to Vegas in 2005, and then continued here at ESPN.” In Bristol, Connecticut, he’s distinguished himself as a gambling guy on the weekly podcast Behind the Bets with Doug Kezirian, positioning himself as the logical host for a betting-based TV show once the Supreme Court overturned PASPA and the barriers between sports betting and the public started falling. I did picks every night on the 11:00 news, I did picks in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. I did bad beats on the show, I did all the odds, I went live from the sportsbook, I had pro bettors and oddsmakers on my show all the time. “So sports betting became a beat for local sportscasts. “People would say about Vegas, ‘There’s no pro team there.’ Actually, there is: boxing, UFC, and sports betting,” Kezirian says. This is familiar territory for Kezirian, who, prior to joining ESPN as a SportsCenter anchor in 2012, spent seven years in Las Vegas, working on air for the local ABC affiliate. There’s so much overlap between what’s valuable to the regular SportsCenter viewer and also to us on Daily Wager.” From the Strip to the Mothership “We’ll discuss all the major storylines that affect bettors and that affect sports fans. “The basic premise is SportsCenter through the lens of sports betting,” host Doug Kezirian tells US Bets. Next Monday, March 11, ESPNEWS will debut Daily Wager, a studio show focused on the intersection between what happens on the field and what happens at the betting window. Now the sports media monolith is wading in thigh-deep. ESPN has dipped quite a few toes into the sports betting content waters, from the “Chalk” vertical on, to a couple of gambling-centric podcasts, to a “Gambling Issue” of ESPN The Magazine, to the popular “Bad Beats” segment when Scott Van Pelt hosts SportsCenter.
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