Bill Yucatonis of Pro League Network joined episode 209 to talk about some of the amazing sports they are producing and taking bets on. Sports such as slapfighting, pillow fighting, mini golf and more!
Ryan Knuppel
Hey, hey, what’s going on everybody? Ryan Knupple here, episode 209 of the New Sports Show. Thanks so much for tuning in. Appreciate you listening. I know it’s a busy time in sports. We all enjoyed this weekend watching some football, hopefully. I know I did. It just consumed me, but it was awesome and I’m looking forward to next week already. Should be great. But yeah, thank you for spending a few minutes listening. As always, we bring on amazing guests in sports, sports, business, sports betting, iGaming, and today we have another awesome guest. I’m super excited to hear what’s going on here. Really cool company that’s doing some innovative things in sports betting. So I’m excited to bring on my guest today, bill Yuka. Bill, how are you today my friend? Hey
Bill Yucatonis
Ryan, how are you?
Ryan Knuppel
I’m doing amazing. Thanks for asking. It’s sunny and hot here in Orlando, Florida. How is it where you’re at?
Bill Yucatonis
It is raining as it was the last few days. I’m in the northeast and we’ve been drowned like a lot of the country this year.
Ryan Knuppel
I hear you, I hear you. So Bill is with the Pro League Network. We’re going to dive into that here in a bit and kind of tell all of you listeners what Pro League Network is if you haven’t heard of it. But first off, bill, I want to learn about you and what makes you tick. So give me a little bit of your background and what got you to where you are today.
Bill Yucatonis
Yeah, sure, sure. I appreciate that. I’m about 15 years in the gaming and sports industry actually. I developed my chops and really developed an interest back in the poker days. I was a C M O of Everest Poker and the Everest Gaming Network. We had, I dunno, through acquisition, probably about a dozen casino properties online as well as the flagship Everest Poker brand. And then again, through acquisitions we were involved with several sports books including Beck Quick and in France. And so this industry, and we did it a very regulated way across most of Europe, was our target market. And I think the interest for me was developing some of these markets that were from the bottoms up. So take a Poland as an example that was adverse to poker at the beginning and really changing a philosophy and building up the sport as compared to say France, which had poker rooms and more of an infrastructure there and so on. And what we did is we used the World Series of Poker and we did some work with W P T as well, the World Poker Tour as a carrot to really drive acquisition and take a sport of poker and professionalize it. And I think my point in bringing that up is fast forward to today, which we’ll get into more. Really a lot of my career has been taking brands and taking markets that have existed or there was an opportunity to scale and really build out to something that’s a market.
Ryan Knuppel
That’s amazing. That’s cool. Yeah, the good old poker days, I like to call ’em, I hate to say poker’s dead, it’s not, but it was so I guess booming back then. It was such a booming sport I guess if you want to call it that. I miss those days to be honest.
Bill Yucatonis
Yeah, I mean what killed it, it was the pooling of liquidity. I mean that was the big issue and we were, I think the first to get licensed in Malta or one of the first and the Maltese license gave us EU reciprocity to take and acquire users and pull that liquidity across EU representative countries. But when started Ring fans and you now take depending on what your platform was and you take something like parts of Scandinavia where the finished players and so on were great players, but the population’s smaller than say a France say whatever. And so within a poker room now you have to license within a sub-market and then allow those players to pull. It just doesn’t work. It’s harder to do it, particularly when there’s big overlays on guaranteed tournaments.
Ryan Knuppel
That’s awesome. That’s cool. Alright, well let’s dive into Pro League Network. I, I’m curious to hear, and I know our audience, if they haven’t heard of you guys, we’ll be very interested in what you have to say. So why don’t you give us the first of all the high level overview of what you guys are doing at Pro League Network and then we’ll dive into the guts of it here in a bit.
Bill Yucatonis
Yeah, sure. So we started Pro League Network a little over a year ago, I guess it’s been about a year and a half now. What we saw, my co-founder and I was this continuing mega trend around how, I guess it’s really three the intersection of a few different things. One is media and influencers around sports and how influencers and content creation really can amplify certain sports. So that’s kind of one area. The other bucket is just alternative sports more broadly and how alternative sports from an entertainment and an access side and continues to be underoptimized and underdelivered. We just felt a lot of opportunity there. And then thirdly, with sports betting becoming not just regulated for the first time in the US but how it’s really advanced across most of the country. The revenue streams from either directly or indirectly from sports wagering kind of created this opportunity.
Bill Yucatonis
And so where we sit, pro League Network is really at the intersection of media and creative content, traditional sports betting and alternative sports. And so Pro League network, we own and operate all of our leagues, I guess we have up to 16 different leagues in our portfolio right now. Everything from Slap Fight championship, which is part of our network since the beginning, regulated now in six or seven markets to the world, putting league which is professional mini golf, et cetera. And so that’s what we do. We go out, we find casual sports that have a market that exists or we believe that if it could be reprogrammed to Reoptimize, there is a market opportunity for it and we build it out from there. And so again, everything we do is we own and operate. The other part of our thesis is delivery of the content.
Bill Yucatonis
And so we live stream everything. We don’t really focus on selling rights fees to a larger network or broadcaster. We’re more about distributed distribution, watch alongs, getting communities within communities to take the content. And so we do a lot of mixed distribution across all of our sports, but everything that we do is live streamed. It’s produced in-house. And back to my point of the other thesis is we’re very focused on time of day, day of week delivery because really when we started the company, we just continued to see big gaps in the wagering calendar. And it’s not just between seasons, right? It’s not just, okay, well N F L’s over now what? It’s even within N F L, the Wednesdays during the week, even during the day, our great times, great day parts to deliver content. And one of our first world putting league events that we did, which again is professional mini golf, I think it was a Tuesday was the first event that we did.
Bill Yucatonis
And some of the feedback we got, we actually got it from a few different people is they said it felt like the Thursday of March Madness because it was like they were sitting at their desk, it was one o’clock. You’ve got something that you can relate to that you probably played today. And as a kid certainly and you’re like, oh my god, this is professional with real athletes. We produce it a way that’s engaging, entertaining, we add some comedy to it and again, most cases get the sports regulated for wagering. And so we’re excited with what we’ve proven in a real short time and back to time of day, day a week. Some of my experience also is in the horse racing space. And if you look at the total handle in horse racing, it’s like almost the 60% is from claiming races and weekday races because they’re on, right? It’s not just heavily polarized to the bigger races like the Derby. There’s just a lot of gaps there. And again, horse races have proven that if you deliver content with velocity and it is optimized to be accessible time of day and across time zones, people will bet on it. And so we’re not sitting on our hands and saying, we’re just going to deliver stuff and we know people will come. We’re thoughtful about what those sports are, making sure they’re approachable and then build some better entertainment around it from there.
Ryan Knuppel
I love the innovation. I love what you guys are up to. It’s amazing and I’d love to hear your answer to this after I give a quick story. So we have a content agency and I have a team of writers and one of the jobs that came in, I don’t know maybe several months ago was SLAP Fighting was Hey, you guys are going to write about SLAP fighting for one of our partners. And I brought that to my team and said, Hey, we got this job. And they all kind of looked at me with a little chuckle, we’re going to write about what and how are we going to write about that and how are we going to get, and so the initial response was that, and then once it started and it got going, they’re like, this is amazing. This is awesome. We love this, which was more of this. And so do you get that kind of puzzled look at first when you’re telling people what kind of sports that you guys are doing and covering and then it turns into this passion for it, right? Give me your
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Bill Yucatonis
Yeah, no, we definitely do. And if I don’t get the smile, I try to create a smile because if you don’t smile at it, you’re kind of bullshit and not paying attention. And so even with regulators, I’ll joke about some of these sports, but I do in a way that makes sense in the sense that at the end of the day in what we don’t really package from a marketing perspective, but we probably should more, but when you peel it back, they’re all professional athletes, they’re all, they all have a story. All of our sports are integrity monitored, we work with us, integrity, love it. We’ve got drug policies, anti wagering policies, et cetera. And so sure you may have an opinion on SLAP fighting. Another one of our sports is, and car you’ve probably seen on social Media.
Bill Yucatonis
Every time we put a about out millions of oppressions, it is spreads virally. We haven’t taken it to a commission yet for waging approval. We will when the time is right. But the point with jitsu is it falls under Brazilian jiu-jitsu rules and even the submission, you can use a T seatbelt to submit, it’s not like choke somebody, but to get ’em to submit in their round. No different than using your GI in Jiujitsu, right? And so when you say it like that, you’re like, okay, yeah, right, maybe I don’t get it or maybe I didn’t get it right away, but now I get it. And mini golf, same thing. We’ve spent a lot of time how it sanctioned the rules, the scoring, the officiating. There’s a lot that goes into all of these. It’s just not a crazy idea. There’s a lot of work that we do behind the scenes on that rules and integrity and structure and so on to make it not only a safe sport, physically safe, but also a financially safe sport from an integrity side. And then we package it all up to make it fun and digestible to the end user.
Ryan Knuppel
I love it. Let’s talk a little bit about the sports betting side of it, because for me personally, I got some questions around that. I know odds making is not an exact science and even setting the odds of N F L games and college games and these sports that have so much data and so much news and things around them is not easy to do. I’m curious how you guys go about or what the odds lines making process looks like for you guys and how difficult that is with the limited amount of, I don’t know what the limited amount of data that you guys have on these new sports, what has that process been like for you in setting those odds?
Bill Yucatonis
So we don’t bring a sport forward until we know it’s ready. And so if we don’t have enough data, we’ll run a lot of simulated events to capture data from the athletes or whatever the data points are within the sports. But believe it or not, we have a lot of data. And so when something like mini golf or slot fight or whatever is brought forward, and we feel like either that match or the sport overall is ready for line making, again, it’s based on real fact and not just a stroke of the pen that we think it’s going to be x. I mean, to your point line making, it’s a science but it’s an art to some extent as well. But there is real data behind it. And so I guess it’s a long way of saying we do have a lot of data and we do build it through I think a couple things.
Bill Yucatonis
I think one, a lot of the bets that we put forward now are pre-match, which is fine. I don’t think what we’re really building this for is a full inplay live betting. And because if you look at our sports, the entertainment value is meant for watching wager. And so having the video up and then seeing the lines move and be able to bet on that, it not only helps handle, but it helps set entertainment value and it helps the pricing as well because that pre-match pricing that you put up can be evolved by the bookmaker based on gameplay. And so we price internally, we’ve got pretty rigorous models that we’ve built out. All of our book partners on the trading team, our team meets with ’em and takes them through our models. I mean ultimately it’s on them to finally price it and to decide obviously how that moves once it’s in place. But we put a good baseline forward. But one last point I’ll say is I guess was there two events ago for the world putting League BET 3 6 5 did Inplay.
Ryan Knuppel
Oh cool.
Bill Yucatonis
And we had on the outright and it was a game changer not only for the viewing experience but for being able to manage that volatility of margin as the event goes and the athletes perform whether it was as expected or there’s some change. And so yeah, it’s a long way of saying Inplay helps with that and I think our sports are meant for live betting.
Ryan Knuppel
So I mean you’re doing live betting and you got production studio and all of that. Talk a little bit about where these can be seen. I mean are you producing ’em out on different channels online? Are we getting mainstream at some point? Talk about the future of that as well. Are you looking to get these out on E S P N and things of that nature? Talk a little bit about where people can and will be able to watch this stuff.
Bill Yucatonis
Yeah, sure. So some of our sports do get the higher the primetime exposure. For example, pillow Fight Championship, who’s one of our partners was on the OCHO on E S P N this year. And that was a live event. Most of our sports, and this is done considerably, it’s just not by default. We produce, it’s streamed on Pro League Network. We work with Panda Interactive who has a great interface that allows us to insert e-commerce opportunities as well as if it is a embedable sport, what the lines are, they’ve got all the geofencing in place based on where the user is to then drive market specific lines there. And then they too are connected to the books. It just makes it easy. But pro league network.com is where we stream modes and then we have our other owned and operated websites for some of our other sports as well.
Bill Yucatonis
And we’ve got a couple, one big sport that we’re going to announce in a couple of weeks that we will probably secure a bigger broadcast deal with. I think it warrants it in a lot of ways, but for us, back to what I was saying at the beginning, we’re really much about take the signal, obviously take it live, we care about latency and so on. Obviously if it’s a live betting product, but we’ve built an infrastructure that allows at Subsecond, we work with Phoenix R t Ss on the Subsecond delivery. And so between Phoenix and Panda and just our infrastructure, we can give anyone our feed willingly and we want that feed to be out there as many places. And then when appropriate and when needed and when it makes sense strategically, we will look to secure bigger broadcast seals as well. And I think with a writer’s strike and everything that’s going on there, I think there’s some day parts there that across the broadcast that are going to need to be filled with content as well.
Ryan Knuppel
That’s really cool. That’s really awesome. So what’s the future look like, bill? I mean what’s the future look like for prolea network? Is it as simple as adding more network, I mean adding more sports and getting more attention or what else is in the works for you guys for the future? Yeah,
Bill Yucatonis
We’re very focused right now on building out studios. We have an acquisition that we’re going to announce next week around our first studio out in the Midwest and a couple of brands that go along with that. But we’re looking to also build a larger, what we’ll call studio A on the east coast somewhere, probably the Philly jersey area, to really domicile some of these sports and have a central place for production with some modularity to how we set up the production floor to again, to kind of move content through at frequency. So we’re really kind of moving towards that. I mean some of our sports do require onsite depending on the complexity of the sport or if it needs golf sometimes needs to be in a facility. But even long drive, which is one of our sports as well, we are working on some simulator based stuff there. And so it’s the only way of saying here that studio-based, high velocity, good production, accessible and distributed on lots of platforms, that’s our future. And yet, yes, everything as much as we can, if we can get regulated for betting, we will. But there’s some great sports that just make great shoulder content that fills in the gaps as well that we will continue to invest in and build out as well.
Ryan Knuppel
Man, you certainly sound like you have it all together and that this is just going amazing for you guys. But what I want to ask more from a business side now more from an entrepreneurial co-founder business side, we all go through challenges. We all have things that it’s not always green everywhere. And so tell us maybe one of the challenges you guys have experienced in developing this pro league network or are still
Bill Yucatonis
Challenged by currently. Yeah, I think one of the challenges, and this is broadly in the sports betting space, is that the platforms that the operators are on, if it’s a white label platform like a Cambi or something, there’s a one to many there, meaning you’ve got to get integrated and cambi in order to then do business with X, right? Sure. Or whomever. I’m just using Cambi as an example. I didn’t mean to name call them, but I think the way that data flows in the industry is there’s just way too many bottlenecks, way too many. The bigger data providers, the genius radars, they are like the pipe for a lot of these sports. And if you’re not in the pipe, it just makes it really hard because you’re not going to get integration elsewhere. So I think it’s the sure point here is that that bottleneck I think is really not only affecting P L N, but it’s affecting the industry around innovation because everyone just says, oh, it’s football season.
Bill Yucatonis
Talk to me in February because the bandwidth and that bottleneck just gets more exposed. So that’s been frustrating and I appreciate why it’s frustrating. It doesn’t necessarily slow down our opportunities. I just think it makes us think a little bit differently in the evolution of how we build and scale some of these. So that’s an area that we don’t have control of that I wish we could change from an industry perspective. I think that’s probably the biggest one. I think there’s a couple smaller ones that are just entrepreneurial pains, whether it be team related or you’d want everything to go faster and cheaper. It’s just the reality, right? Protect, burn, really build on what we have. But I think what we have done is on a positive side is we’ve built out a good team. We’re still small-ish. I think we’ve done a good job building out some of our brands in a very short period of time.
Bill Yucatonis
Our growth in multiples event to event is double digits every time we do another event. So a lot of things going and well, it’s just getting all together. You just want it all come together faster. And it’s like from a pro league network perspective, it’s like how do we storytell better top down? And I think any entrepreneur can empathize with the fact that you start maybe in one silo and you build that out like, okay, wait a minute now I’m going to do this over here. But then how do you tell that story differently? That’s why the evolutions that we’re going through from a P L N side is that, yeah, we’re not just slot flight, we’re not just mini golf. We’re actually this platform, this network that has all these own and operated brands that have network effects between each other and can build off each other very efficiently and effectively.
Ryan Knuppel
Well, thank you for that long candid answer. That was amazing. I appreciate that. It’s never easy to talk about any challenges, but it’s always on the other end of hearing some of that. It’s always great to hear. So I appreciate you doing that Bill. Of course. What else did we miss? How can people get ahold of you? Where can they go to find out more about Pro League network? Yeah,
Bill Yucatonis
Sure. Pro league network.com is our website. You could find us on all the socials as well. Same handle. I’m on LinkedIn. I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my life and spend a lot of time also mentoring other companies and other founders and other early stage concepts, which is something I’m very passionate about personally. So anything that anyone wants to chat about, feel free to reach out. I’m easy to find and happy to share some of these stories. To your point, it’s not all the green grass, right? There is always opportunities or challenges that you can turn into an opportunity. And then there’s other things we’re like, you know what? This is just a bad idea. I got to pivot. That’s okay too. And so I’m happy to share some of those stories. If you’ve been an entrepreneur with eyes wide open, you’ve experienced both the good and the bad. To me, it’s just a reality.
Ryan Knuppel
Absolutely. We’ll put all those links in the show notes Bill. We’ll make sure to do that. Hey, one last question, and this is a little more lighthearted I guess. Some of these sports seem like, and I’m sure these athletes are very well-trained and very well, but some of them feel like, man, I could do that. I could play mini golf, I can pillow fight. So how do people get involved with sports like this? I mean, do you go through a whole draft and training and all the above or is it, talk about that from a More of an Athlete.
Bill Yucatonis
Side. You would be surprised about the amount, I’m sure I would of hours and time in years that some of these people put in. And I’ll give you some stories on the mini golf side. I mean firstly, if you think you can beat ’em, you’re wrong. I’ve tried and everyone, and no matter how good you think you are, even professional golfers, they’re going to smoke you because they’re that good. And a couple points, one is they play these courses at such frequency and detail. They carry a greens book in their pocket. Oh my. Yeah. And literally they have every angle, undulation, brick, time of day that they’re playing it because even though it’s a synthetic surface, it swells depending on the heat, the weather, water, et cetera. So it’s a real science on whether they’re hitting it. It’s kind one point. But from a training perspective, like Olivia Kova who’s one of our pros and probably one of the best known professional mini golfers in the world, she’s from the Czech Republic.
Bill Yucatonis
She has been playing, I forget, I want to say since she was 12 or something like that. Her father started taking her the course. There’s a whole interesting backstory, but one of the fascinating things I found was, I don’t have it right near me, but a few events ago, her parents were over and they gave me a book. They couldn’t speak a lot of English, but they gave me this book and she’s like the Michael Jordan of the Czech Republic and yes, it’s mini golf. That’s cool. They wrote a book about her. You have all these pictures of how she’s played and she’s got a hole in her backyard that I think she trains four hours a day every day and then when it’s before an event, she does all day. And that’s not different than some of the other pros as well. They are constantly training and playing.
Bill Yucatonis
And then if you look at some of the other sports, again, they’re athletes, they’re cut weight, they’re go through their physical regime. I mean they practice other sports, gymnastics and so on to get some of the moves, even like pillow fight, some of these mixed martial arts like moves, flips and so on. That helps ’em be successful because it’s not just brutally whacking somebody, it’s getting out of the middle of the way and then being able to a sneak attack and get somebody the other side. So anyways, I go on and on, but I have been like you. It’s like, I could do that. And then you really look at it and you’re like, there’s no no, you can’t.
Bill Yucatonis
Forget about in my shape. There is no freaking way that I’m going to do that. And I think it’s just a testament for these athletes. I think broadly speaking, it’s a testament that there’s professionals in a lot of different trades, in a lot of different sports that should be recognized for what they do. And as an entertainment product, you should be able to enjoy that.
Ryan Knuppel
That’s amazing. So you’re saying don’t quit my day job to become a slap fighter? Actually, that’s one that there was no chance I’d ever do. I’ve watched some of that and it’s like, I don’t think I could take one even half of one of those slaps. No, thank
Bill Yucatonis
You. And I’ll tell you what, it’s about taking it, not giving it is the skill in that sport.
Ryan Knuppel
I hear you. I hear you. Well, bill, I appreciate your time here. Any last words, anything we missed? Anything you wanted to say before we let you go here?
Bill Yucatonis
Oh, thanks. I’ve been, but I appreciate you taking the time to bring me on the show and yeah, pro league network.com, reach out anytime. Follow some of our sports. We’ve got a bunch of new announcements coming in the next couple of weeks. And yeah, continue to keep building this out.
Ryan Knuppel
Amazing. Well keep up the great work. If anything I can do to help, please let me know. I’m looking forward to having you back on maybe in a year or so. And you guys are well established and have 30 or 40 sports going. I can’t wait to do that again. That’s awesome. Thanks Ryan. Appreciate that. Awesome. Thank you. Cheer. Alright, bill UCaaS Pro League Network, that was an amazing interview. I hope you enjoyed that as well. I learned a lot about what they got going on there and like I said, I was sury on some of the sports. I’ve seen it, we’ve written about it, we’ve covered some of them. But hearing all that goes into one, just creating the media around it and the coverage around it and then but two at the end, hearing some of the athletes’ preparation to play these sports really intrigues me and it’s really cool, really cool to see.
Ryan Knuppel
I’m excited to see where the future of that goes. I urge you to reach out to Bill seems like a great guy in the industry doing some amazing things. So reach out to him. We’ll put all of those links in the show notes so you can go to the show notes, click on ’em, check out what they got going on at Pro League Network. Alright, that’s all I got for today, Ryan Knupple. You can find me out on any social media channels out there. I appreciate your time today as always, and until the next one, take care. Stay safe. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
Relevant Bill Yucatonis Links
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- Connect with Bill Yucatonis on LinkedIn
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