Bill Simmons is under review by the Massachusetts Gaming Commission after he admitted on a podcast to proxy betting.
During one of The Ringer founder’s recent podcasts, Simmons admitted that he had his daughter’s boyfriend place bets for him in Massachusetts (where sports betting is legal) when he was off in California for work (where sports betting is illegal).
“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 Tuesday statement.
Simmons then addressed the hot water he’s found himself in on a podcast as well, confirming that those bets placed via proxy had been voided and that he was unaware of the illegality.
“I talked about how I got my daughter’s boyfriend to place some bets for me in Massachusetts because I was in L.A. … did not know about the proxy rules,” Simmons said on Tuesday’s episode. “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.”
He finished: “There you go, lesson learned.”
Simmons has nobody to blame but himself. He detailed in full exactly how he went about the proxy betting on “The Bill Simmons Podcast,” which many fans clocked immediately and wondered why he would have aired that all out on the show. The host walked through how he landed on his daughter’s boyfriend.
“I get the code to make sure it’s me to my phone, I give him the code, he logs in,” Simmons said on Monday. “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 … a week later, I called him up, ran it back. We did some more.”
It’s been a rough few days for Simmons. Earlier this week, The Ringer head of content and “The Big Picture” co-host Sean Fennessey took shots at Simmons for his show being sponsored by ChatGPT and using the program to get “reviews” from an AI Roger Ebert on movies that the legendary film critic never got around to reviewing.
“I don’t like it. I’ve told Bill I don’t like it,” Fennessey said. “It’s not my decision. It’s something that he’s done. I think Chris [Ryan] and I have both, when presented with ChatGPT Ebert, we’ve said ‘Eh, that’s not cool,’ you know. I wouldn’t want that done for me after I died, and I wouldn’t want to be represented in that way, and I revere Roger Ebert. I’m thinking very critically about AI and trying to not be an alarmist and trying to be thoughtful about what’s coming, while also having a clearer moral view of what it means and how it’s going to impact us.”
