Everyone’s a sharp on those headrest video games.
Air travelers can go bust and buy back in many times between LAX and JFK, with their only concern being whether the guy one row ahead reclines his damned seat.
That’s no way to learn. Education involves consequences. Comprehend them before the training wheels come off. It doesn’t have to hurt. But the threat of pain can be beneficial.
There had been no platform to guide inclined would-be sports bettors into a pastime that, absolutely, can hurt.
So RJ Heller and Ty D’Amore created Bankroll U, a fee-based platform that gives bettors the chance to make low-risk mistakes in a learning environment with real money as more experienced gamblers. It’s the “junior varsity,” they say, that legal sports betting in the United States needs, for a multitude of reasons.
There is enough risk, they feel, to generate interest in the reward. Players purchase “rookie” or “veterans” play packages beginning as low as $5 and, by successfully reaching mileposts for amounts of virtual money wagered and won, can advance to higher levels.
“What we’ve found (with traditional formats) is if it’s five fake bucks with no access to real money, it doesn’t matter,” Heller explained to InGame. “If I’m on the airplane and I have blackjack, it’s just all-in, all-in, just bully, and that’s not how you play in real life.
“But with Bankroll, people want to be able to move through, to be able to advance the level and start making cash. So there’s a lot of incentive not to just be throwing haymakers out every time so you’re still actually challenging and it’s hard enough that you do need to play 15, 20 picks sometimes to be able to move through the level, so it’s like each one of those matters.”
Players have 14 days to reach their virtual bet and profit minimums. If they fail, they start over. If they advance, they have another 14-day cycle ahead.
(NOTE: InGame tried out the platform in the bottom-rung “combine” level. We finished with $62 profit, falling short of the $70 needed to pass.)
“A big portion of what it is, is educating and creating more responsible gamblers,” Heller explained. “You walk into a sportsbook, it’s 100 lines on 100 games that all don’t have definitions. It gets pretty confusing. In here, when you put in that $220 so you get five grand [in virtual money], you don’t only get the total amount of money, you also get points.”
Points are redeemable for various educational materials such as betting courses.
“You’re also buying access to different levels of our courses, elevating your game, building a self-definition of how to manage your bankroll, like concept of units and aggressive strategy, like psychology of betting,” he continued.
Points can also be used to “buy” picks suggested by Bankroll U handicappers.
Advancing through the levels at Bankroll U
Those skilled enough to advance into the veterans combine can begin earning real money based on their virtual bankroll beginning at “P10.” It’s already happened once. User “Colin” won $26,000 in real cash after participating in various “3K” and “5K” combines that cost $139 and $229, respectively, to enter.
“[Colin] moved all the way up to P10, and just got really hot,” D’Amore said. “[Colin was] betting at like a 74% clip, but it taught them levels. Our players love it because it starts to teach them how to bet smarter.
“They’re not betting crazy parlays. We don’t even allow parlays. They’re not taking +500 on the money line. They’re playing very disciplined and really trying to hit these targets in a consistent fashion to become profitable. That’s really how that leveling system works, and they’re never putting in any more money than what it cost them to buy the original [package].”
Winnings, D’Amore noted, can only be withdrawn and not plowed back into bets. The site also has bet limits for each level.
The platform has about 1,500 users in two months of full operation. Players must be 18.
Founders on why Bankroll U exists
Heller and D’Amore, who helped build AudioEye into a NASDAQ-list company more than a decade ago, are self-funding Bankroll U. AudioEye helps companies address accessibility issues for disabled users.
If you want to get business-y about it, our mission statement is to create the number one sports betting community.
R.J. Heller, Bankroll U co-founder
Heller, 33, notes that “if you want to get business-y about it, our mission statement is to create the number one sports betting community,” which includes a site with multiple forms of access to professional handicappers such as EJ “The Rainmaker” Garr who offer advice on platforms including Discord.
Offering customers the chance to compare notes with seasoned handicappers is an important part of the project, Heller said.
“I want to make sure that I can gut-check myself and see if other people are betting the way that I am because I don’t really know,” said Heller, noting that he’s a moderate gambler. “But if I know I have a couple professional handicappers that are on my side, at least a portion of the community there, that makes me feel both fun to engage with that and also confident in what I’m doing. It just kind of takes some of that anxiety out of it.”
The early months of Bankroll U have revealed unexpected demographics of customers, D’Amore said.
“Bringing a new market in is something that’s really interesting, and for us it’s the female market,” he continued. “We are seeing that a small portion of our user base is females that are coming in and maybe their husband bets or their friends bet, their community, and they want to start dipping their toes in. They want to start throwing in some bets.
“So that’s been really interesting for us, understanding this new customer profile coming through that’s either female or a younger crowd. We are 18 and up, so we are also getting 18-year-olds maybe in college that don’t have $100 to throw in. They can come play with us for $5 or $10 and be able to actually get action in all the games.”
Heller and D’Amore view Bankroll U as the flight simulator in a business where, they assert, sportsbooks are the jet pilots. While only six U.S. jurisdictions allow 18-year-olds to wager, the founders point out that they’re not running a sportsbook, but a proactive, preventative platform to educate young adults who will make their own decisions about whether to gamble.
“We believe that effective education is crucial to establishing preventative measures for problem gambling to complement existing reactive initiatives. But we are not so naive as to believe a YouTube series covering the Kelly Criterion’s application to wager allocation would garner many views from users in the 18-25 demographic,” Heller said. “The progressive structure for our gameplay levels is designed to provide users a safe yet realistic environment to interact with real-time markets and odds and to experience the variance inherent in real-world sports betting.”
Users, Heller noted, don’t encounter “real-money risks” during gameplay and are “compelled to take all real-money profit bonuses they earn off the table, preventing the ‘house money’ effect.” Each purchase, he added, earns tuition points toward educational content.
Bankroll U as a responsible gambling tool
D’Amore, 32, said he’s learned through his nephews how gambling has permeated college campuses, with them describing “how their entire fraternity is always betting” at the University of Arizona, where he played football. There was no illusion that they would simply stop. But creating a less costly betting-like alternative that could improve their survival skills and maybe even offer an off-ramp was intriguing. Virtual money that could eventually translate into real money, they thought, could be the solution.
“For me, I was thinking there’s got to be a smarter way to do this, to teach people how to do it, but to still give them the opportunity to make real cash,” D’Amore said. “They’re betting $5, $10, but they want to bet bigger. They want to put $200 on a game. They want to bet $500 on a game and be able to win the money, but they couldn’t afford it at that size, but they would stack up their losses over time.
“[Sports betting] was everywhere, but no one was creating a model yet in which you could teach them and still give them the level of fun that sports betting brings. How could we blend that?”
Bankroll U is billed as an educational platform
Billed as an educational platform by Visa and Mastercard’s merchant category code (MCC) system, Bankroll U is operating in 45 states. An analysis of the business model conducted by ZwillGen, which specializes in the legality of emerging tech, declared it compliant to gambling laws in those states.
Nevada, Louisiana, Washington, Idaho, and Michigan were excluded, a ZwillGen representative told InGame to take “a more cautious posture based on regulatory risk, not a clear legal prohibition.” Those states, the representative added, had regulators that have been more active or unpredictable “either through aggressive enforcement histories, ambiguous guidance, or political sensitivity around gambling products.”
D’Amore believes the MCC code designation will be a boon for business by underscoring the responsible gambling aspect of the site.
“That was a huge win for us,” he acknowledged. “We did a ton of work with Visa and MasterCard. They actually classified us as education after they did a full thorough look through with us.”
In an era when the legality of sweepstakes casinos is a hot topic in gambling think tanks and state houses alike, Heller and D’Amore were cognizant that they could be negatively impacted if their business was over-simplified as a sweepstakes of sports betting start-up.
“There is a sweepstakes element, the funding side of the equation once you get into pro levels,” D’Amore said. “The reaction that we’ve got from the community — and we’ve talked to a lot of folks — has been a lot different than I thought.
“I thought we were going to deal with the people-hate-sweepstakes type of [reaction], but I think because we’re taking the approach of responsible gaming and responsible gambling and really leaning into the education side of it, we’ve got a lot more positive response than we were expecting.”
