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You know them because you’re one of the millions of customers who assemble football or baseball lineups on their sites, hoping to score payouts worth hundreds or thousands, maybe even millions. Salerno is up against many things - startup costs, consumer whims, a complicated and inefficient regulatory apparatus - but most immediately, he’s up against FanDuel and DraftKings, behemoths that have dominated the industry for the past half-dozen years.

“But I feel great.” On this day, Salerno was in crunch mode on USFantasy Sports, a new daily and weekly fantasy sports startup that launched last week - at first only in Nevada sportsbooks and casinos, but, if all goes according to plan, nationwide and on smartphones by year’s end. “Right now, I’m going crazy, to tell you the truth,” Salerno said, laughing. In four other rooms, a handful of employees alternated between watching games out of the corners of their eyes and typing on laptops. On a floor newly subleased from a real estate firm, in what he likes to call his “war room,” flat-screen TVs streamed sporting events from everywhere in the world. On a hot August day, Salerno steered his 2011 Lexus convertible to an office park two-and-a-half miles south of the Strip. It’s a fight with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, money that the established gaming industry in Nevada largely missed the boat on and may now want to capture. His longtime friend Michael Knapp calls him “the godfather of the industry,” adding, jokingly, that “it has nothing to do with the fact that he has a vowel at the end of his name.”īut now he’s taking on a pair of tech titans in a fight that pits his rule-following philosophy against the move-fast-and-break-laws ethos of Silicon Valley. He is “one of sports gaming’s great innovators,” according to the American Gaming Association, which named him to its hall of fame last year. And made sure that when it came to sports betting, there was an app for that. Helped usher in the era of over-the-phone bookmaking.

The Los Angeles native, who now makes his home just outside Las Vegas, is a sports-betting legend who almost single-handedly brought his industry into the wired era. But Salerno, an amiable 72-year-old with a raspy voice and a cleft chin, isn’t just an ordinary gambler. He believes in rules, and that if you follow them, no matter how seemingly arbitrary, you’ll get the outcome you want.Īll gamblers have their superstitions. To avoid jinxing a team - his favorite being whichever is on a winning streak - he watches their games on the same television and drives the same route to work. Vic Salerno always puts his left shoe on first.

Draftkings gaming nevada legalsportsreport