Let me set the stage. Its 1am, the kids are in bed, the night is over, and you have just finished binging the latest show on Netflix. Things are boring, so you log onto Whatnot to see if there are any breaks going on to keep your interest before going to sleep. Shockingly, multiple rooms are up and running, with close to 100 people viewing and/or participating. You enter one of the rooms, greeted by a full heads up display of craziness. Two guys are on camera in gaming chairs, and the rest of the screen is a still shot of an LED screen with snazzy graphics behind a wall of weird looking boxes with insane names on them.
On the screen is a slider bar where you can bid on any number of things that are flashing across the screen. “Pick 3, choose 1!” a giant dancing astronaut boogies across the screen. The number assigned to the item jumps into the multiple hundreds of dollars, and the buyer spits out numbers which corresponds to cards in a stack. Its all a blur, but after about an hour, all the boxes on the screen get ripped open, and the cards sent to their respective buyers.
This experience is now a major hub in the hobby experience for many people out there. I have affectionately named it the “24/7 Card Casino” not only because of what the experience reminds me of, but also because of how it operates. Hundreds of millions of dollars of product in one space, running at all times every single day of the week. They sell everything from boxes, to cases, to singles, and more, sometimes in formats that might be like learning craps for the uninitiated.
Before I get into my own understandings, let me spell out how insane some of these rooms have gotten. Because products like Prizm and Flawless in the NFL and NBA have become so expensive to obtain, many of the breakers are unable to sell enough slots in an old fashioned “pick your team” setting to run breaks through an entire cycle. Therefore, many have resorted to buying single cards in bulk, grading them, and repackaging them into products of their own. They use these self architected products as a way to get people to buy into a break for just about every product that exists.
Now, when you decide to start gambling in the card casino, most users have to engage in gambling style game, where the host will have a deck of cards with teams to choose out of a large stack. Each card has a city’s worth of teams, so the Minnesota card would have the Vikings, the Timberwolves, and the Twins on it. Because the repack products are multi sport, all teams need to be represented, and this allows the breaker to make it more easy to determine which buyer gets what card broken.
In the past, breakers would sell teams based on the amount of cards they have in a break, and assign a relative value derived from the total cost of the case, plus fees and shipping. Now, the boxes of product being broken almost have as little value in the break as anything, because the repacked boxes from the breaker themselves are almost always the focus.
Its a pretty ingenious way to offset the need for a constant flow of product that is becoming borderline unmanageable in costs because of how many people want access to each allocation of cases released by the manufacturer. Creating your own product becomes a sustainable venture for growth, as long as people continue to trust the results of what is shown on camera.
This is where things get really complicated, as if they weren’t complicated already.
Most casinos are HEAVILY regulated by a gaming commission. Of course there is still an illusion of regulation upheld by the major houses in Vegas, but for the most part, if you go to a casino anywhere in the world, it is usually under scrutiny by some sort of governing body, from the whale spending millions to the casual gambler spending a few dollars, or even just eating in the buffet. This is oversimplifying it grossly, but for the sake of this post, lets digress from the minutiae of the matter.
When it comes to the online card casino that Whatnot has become, there is almost no oversight. There is no regulation outside a set of rules delivered from the owners of the platform. More importantly, so many of their major breaking outfits that are on the platform have had issues, that many collectors have sworn to never go on the platform again. Backyard Breaks, one of the pre-eminent “companies” (in quotes for a reason) has been brought before the hobby social media tribunal so many times that its become a meme. They have been accused of stealing from consumers, rigging breaks, and all sorts of other nefarious things, with seemingly NO repercussions from the overall Whatnot platform oversight. If you go on at 4am on a Sunday, they remain one of the active rooms at all times.
The scariest part is that Whatnot provides tools that seemingly could have impact on oversight, things that these major breakers could use to give more of an illusion of oversight, but few of the rooms actually use the tools. The wheel has become a staple of this entire scenario, where “random” spins determine a team or a player for a slot purchased. Whatnot has a native wheel built into the technology for their platform. Few, if any, of the big rooms actually use it, opting for showing laptop screens or using decks of cards they shuffle casually like a friendly game of poker at your buddy’s house.
Its crazy to believe that there are actual people that trust these breakers to provide a fair and equitable gaming experience, using tools that are befitting of a house game, not a card break with 10k worth of product in one fell swoop. In fact, I believe that the few hundred people who read this will be as shocked as I am, only because the people who have a normal and critical thought process around experiences like this are not the target market for big breaker rooms on whatnot.
The market most of these rooms align to is the same market of people who love daily fantasy sports, love betting on games, and have little interest in actually collecting the cards they “win” from these breaks. Im over generalizing here for a reason – this class of people in the hobby is loathed by most of the circles ive surrounded myself with over the last 10-15 years. Most of the collectors out there see these gamblers as vermin, infesting the hobby they love and making it generally uninhabitable. The problem is, the members of the old guard are generally outnumbered 10:1 by this new class of hobbyist.
In fact, Fanatics seems to be leaning quite heavily into the category themselves, launching their own breaking platform, and offering five figure bounties when big cards are pulled in their rooms. Michael Rubin, CEO of Fanatics, has infamously claimed that he wants to “10x the hobby.” Well, they seem to believe that catering to the gambler tendencies many collectors have displayed is the way to do it.
I actually dont disagree there. We all are gamblers at heart, especially if it comes to wax and opening packs. Ive said on this site before, there is no better legal rush in life than pulling a huge card from a pack. The dopamine release from that card being revealed in your hand is enough to have people chasing dragons for life.
The main issue that I see here is just a lack of oversight and a lack of trust. Allowing people to police their own money making schemes is a power no one should have, especially given the amount of money being traded here. Because the rooms run all day and all night, its impossible to keep track of what is going on, and because the packs are built by the breakers with no transparency, the collectors just have to trust that these packs deliver. Word of mouth around quality of content doesnt really impact much either, because all it takes is one big hit to get people back on board.
If that isnt enough to turn your stomach, most casinos are required to have some level of mental health staff on hand to monitor abuse and mitigate potential disaster. In all seriousness, it likely only helps to a minor degree, but its there. Entering into a platform like this, with no support for the tragic tendencies that tend to accompany a gambling addition may even be illegal at this point.
Although the card casino operates in a gray area between true gambling and goods/service, its without a doubt something that deserves more operational criticism than it gets. More importantly, the big rooms operate on a level I refuse to participate in, only because its not my realm of collecting. I absolutely participate in the lower levels of the platform with Wrestling Cards becoming a staple of the small niche I do operate within. The difference there is that most of the rooms at my level seem to operate very closely to the way things used to be – for now.
That being said, its hard to avoid the snazzy animated graphics and in your face marketing of the big rooms that fund the platform. I would even venture a guess that the embedded relationship between breakers like Backyard, We The Hobby, and others is noticeably light in regulation for a reason. They realize that right now, all parties involved should continue to expect golden eggs from their golden goose until things get too far down the wrong path.
If and when newly interested parties like the government and other regulatory bodies do get involved, either through a class action lawsuit or just general interest given the money changing hands, Im curious if the card casino will need to change. Right now, trusting my thousands of dollars to a bunch of college kids who are breaking to make ends meet seems a bit of a stretch. But for hundreds and hundreds of people out there, it isnt.
This is the hobby now, and though there are still major breakers out there still grinding away the old fashioned way, its becoming more and more difficult to ignore the way this platform has changed the face of the collecting mindset.