Bill Simmons, the popular sports podcaster who has championed sports betting, is under review by the Massachusetts Gaming Commission after he admitted on a recent episode to using his daughter’s boyfriend to place bets for him.
The commission announced the review Tuesday, two days after Simmons said on an episode of his podcast that he’d used a proxy on multiple occasions to log in to his account and make wagers in Massachusetts.
Simmons, founder of The Ringer, is based in California, where sports betting is not legal. In Massachusetts, mobile and online betting is allowed.
But proxy betting — having someone place bets on behalf of someone else — is illegal in Massachusetts and is not allowed by FanDuel, the sportsbook with which the wagers were issued.
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“The Commission is aware of the comments made on the Bill Simmons Podcast and staff are currently reviewing the matter,” an MGC spokesman said in a statement.
FanDuel is the exclusive sports betting partner of The Ringer. A spokesperson for the sportsbook told NBC News it reported the matter to the MGC and voided Simmons’ bets.
On the podcast episode, Simmons said there were bets “that I really wanted to get in — the UCLA overs. But Houston, the market had not shifted appropriately yet. I can’t have my daughter do it; my dad would have no idea how to do it.”
But, Simmons said, he trusted his daughter’s boyfriend and allowed him to log in to his FanDuel account.
“I get the code to make sure it’s me to my phone, I give him the code, he logs in. And I have all this money that I had from last year because I actually hit a bunch of futures last year. And he’s putting in bets for me,” Simmons said, adding that “it was a real bonding moment for us.”
“A week later, I called him up, ran it back,” Simmons continued. “We did some more.”
In a new episode released Tuesday, Simmons said he was unaware that such bets could not be made.
“I talked about how I got my daughter’s boyfriend to place some bets for me in Massachusetts because I was in L.A. [I] did not know about the proxy rules,” he said. “Yeah, there are some real rules with this stuff, and they’ve ruled that not only are the bets going to be voided — and I learned my lesson.”
Simmons said he thought proxy betting was allowed. “There you go, lesson learned,” he said.
Simmons, a former ESPN columnist and commentator, is one of the most popular podcasters in the country. “The Bill Simmons Podcast,” as of Tuesday, ranked No. 22 overall and No. 2 in the sports category on Spotify.
Spotify acquired The Ringer — a sports and pop culture website and podcast network — in 2020 for more than $200 million, according to reports.
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