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LAS VEGAS—What ever happened to Doug Kezirian?
The Las Vegas-based professional sports bettor was the co-host for several years on ESPN’s sports betting show, “Daily Wager.”
But then, in 2023, he was abruptly fired from the show without explanation, even though he was clearly the most knowledgeable of the show’s three co-hosts (the other co-hosts were Joe Fortenbaugh and Tyler Fulghum).
Kezirian, 47, was MIA from the media scene for a while, but now he’s back, and quite literally all over the place.
He hosts a sports gambling show called “Betting Weekly Live” on YouTube, where he has his own channel.
He is also the betting analyst for the FanDuel Sports Network.
He also appears on Amazon Prime Video shows.
He also publishes a newsletter.
And he writes about sports betting for the New York Post and the Athletic, the sports section of the New York Times.
He also pens sports betting articles on his website, dougkezirian.com.
Gambling 911 caught up with Kezirian recently to see how he’s doing since his untimely axing from ESPN.
Still residing in Vegas, he was eager to talk about his past, present and future
“Linear television is dead,” Kezirian told Gambling 911.
“When I was on Daily Wager, it was the least visible I ever was,” he said.
“At ESPN, the most visible I was was when I appeared on SportsCenter on ESPN or did columns that were on the homepage of ESPN.com.
“My show ‘Daily Wager’ aired on ESPN2 and doing a linear show on ESPN2 is not visible.”
Linear television is traditional television, airing via broadcast or cable, as opposed to streaming television, which airs on the Internet.
Kezirian said ESPN never really cared about “Daily Wager,” as evidenced by how it was programmed.
“Look at the timeslots they gave us,” he said.
“We were on ESPN2, often opposite SportsCenter on ESPN.
“We were always moving around. You never knew when it was going to be on.
“That shows you it was not a priority.”
ESPN and other television networks that air programming about sports betting are “just trying to appease the (betting) sponsor for sponsorship money, those networks are not gambling networks,” Kezirian said.
“They're doing just enough to cash paychecks for sports sponsorships. Anchors can read a DraftKings promo, but they're not really incorporating betting into the presentation of news.
“They don't understand it because the producers don't understand it. It's still relatively new.
“No one knows how to say Tarleton State beat Virginia in college basketball. To give it context, you should say they were 20-point underdogs.
“People don't think to use that as a metric. No one has figured out a way to use betting to tell sports stories.”
Kezirian says he is the man to do that.
“I'm geared towards sports bettors,” he declared to Gambling 911.
“I'm a sports betting production company. We are doing daily shows that are distributed everywhere.
“I take my day-to-day interactions with oddsmakers and professional sports bettors and make a show out of it. I make content.
“The whole industry has gone the way of a very gray area. It’s loose.
“You have sports anchors making sports betting picks on TV. You have random people who have never made a bet giving out picks.
“It's just going the route of a very casual mindset and that's not betting. A SportsCenter anchor will give out his pick on a game and they're treating it in a very elementary way.
“This is the equivalent of news anchors giving out stock picks.”
Kezirian, who appeared on radio and local television in Las Vegas before coming to ESPN, compared the evolution of sports betting media to the evolution of financial media.
“At some point, Bloomberg came into demand by defining financial coverage. Then came CNBC and the FOX Business Channel.
“Am I trying to be the next Jim Cramer?Maybe.
“Somewhere along the way the stock market had a demand for people who knew what they were talking about and could simulate the day-to-day business of a stock investor.
“There was a demand from people who don't have a lot of time and don't care about learning.
“I want to do the same thing for sports betting.”
