“We have learned time and time again in poker, in fantasy sports, in offshore sports betting, that self-regulation is just not a thing. That doesn’t work in this industry.”
“There’s something about keeping meticulous records of this data that just really, really gets me going. It’s pretty nerdy. It’s pretty boring to do this, but I really find joy in it.”
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In this episode of the Straight to the Point Talking Shop podcast, I welcomed Eric Ramsey, lead writer and market analyst at Legal Sports Report and the creator of Ticker Tracker.
As with all my guests, we started off with Eric’s journey, which started with a love of poker and a job at PokerNews as a chip counter and hand transcriber, roles that honed his love of meticulous record-keeping. After PokerNews, he joined what became Catena Media nearly nine years ago.
Eric takes us through his day, which is spent compiling and analyzing regulated-market data for Legal Sports Report, and how that same numerical curiosity now fuels his coverage of sports betting and the emerging prediction-market sector, including his recently launched project, Ticker Tracker, a free (at least for now) platform that aggregates trading-volume data from Kalshi and other prediction-market operators including Polymarket US, Robinhood’s Rothera, DraftKings, and Underdog. The site offers historical volume, event-level detail, real-time pricing hubs, and tools for journalists, analysts, and investors.
You can sign up for Ticker Tracker here (subscriptions are currently free).
Eric and I talked about the need for strong regulation, which is shaped by our experiences in poker, including the fallout from Black Friday, and our shared concerns with self-regulation, which has repeatedly failed in gambling.
Eric and I also chatted about parallel concerns with prediction markets and state regulators, ranging from insider trading and staffing shortages at the CFTC to a knowledge gap between gambling regulators and the industry and the revolving door between industry and regulators.
Eric explained how the Ticker Tracker project was born from his own need for reliable data when sports contracts launched and the challenges of managing millions of records daily, which led to an interesting discussion about AI, and its dual impact — boosting efficiency while also giving rise to low-value content.
As I wrote earlier this week:
AI has the potential to make workers more efficient, which has two components:
Some roles are no longer needed, as one person (or AI) can do the work of 20.
Projects that were once too unwieldy to take on are now possible, like Ramsey’s Ticker-Tracker.com or my legislative trackers for Forecast Tier subscribers. It still requires human involvement, but as we said on the podcast, without AI, neither project could be undertaken without a massive team and resources.
