Wild Gladiators

What is Wild Gladiators?

It was an encounter with that disconnect during the 2022 FIFA World Cup that ultimately set entrepreneur George Yashin on the path to founding Swipe Games.

Yashin had spent around 15 years building businesses across industries ranging from fashion technology and retail hardware to sneaker cleaning, as well as investing in early-stage technology companies. Yet when he attempted to place a football bet, he found the interface so impenetrable that he eventually headed to a betting shop to ask how to do it.

When he subsequently looked at casino games, something else struck him – the experience did not seem dramatically different from the slot machines he remembered seeing years earlier.

About Wild Gladiators

Just eight years after the state of New Jersey successfully petitioned the US Supreme Court to repeal the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which opened the floodgates of sports betting expansion across the country, the Garden State has again petitioned the high court, this time to defend its sports betting jurisdiction against the rise of prediction markets and sports event contracts.

On Wednesday, New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport announced that her office had filed a petition for writ of certiorari following an appeals court verdict from earlier this year that went in favour of prediction markets. That 2-1 verdict from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals was handed down in April, and New Jersey had until Thursday to petition the high court.

The petition poses the question of whether the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was enacted in 2010 in the aftermath of the Great Recession, “preempted states from regulating sports bets that occur within their jurisdictions if those bets are offered on markets registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission”. Prediction markets have argued that their event contracts are financial derivatives regulated by the CFTC whereas many states contend that they are simply sports bets by another name.

About Wild Gladiators

Station’s corporate leadership had approved and announced a new benefits overhaul for all of its 14,000 employees across ten properties on 19 November 2019. Two days later, Culinary, which represents workers at seven other Station properties besides Red Rock, petitioned to represent workers at that casino.

Red Rock employees rejected unionisation the following month by a 627-534 vote, although the NLRB and the DC appeals court have held that the company took steps to prevent a fair and honest election. The timing of the benefits rollout and unionisation petition have been a central issue in the matter in the years since.

“Despite the enhanced benefits implementation starting before the union sought recognition of any Red Rock employees, the District Court found that the timing and rollout of the benefits were intended to deter the union’s organising effort and ordered Red Rock to recognise and bargain with the union pending completion of the board’s administrative proceedings,” Station’s SCOTUS petition reads in part.