Hey, it's Adam.
​
A few weeks ago I argued the IRL economy is coming for combat sports. That people are drowning in AI slop and paying for things that can't be faked, and nothing delivers that like a live fight.

I still believe it. But I found something that says the exact opposite and I can't stop thinking about it.

Anonymous buildings across Eastern Europe host fake teams that play 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to an empty room. Table tennis, floorball, water polo, four on four soccer. Bellingcat geolocated the streams to sixteen venues and counted nearly 1,300 short football matches in a single day.

​Sports betting farms.

The players aren't competing. One said he was paid thirty dollars a day and told never to score more than five goals. It is not a business to admire.

But look at the demand underneath it. Somebody decided the appetite for something to bet on overnight justified building continuous competition in warehouses across three countries. Nobody does that for a small market.

And the sport best built to feed it isn't table tennis. It's ours, aka combat sports.

Red and blue. One question the market cares about. Short duration, so markets settle and reopen fast. Props on rounds, finishes, method. And every fight produces clips that travel with no commentary attached.

Outcome matters more than narrative. No room, no crowd, no experience. The precise inverse of what I just argued.

Here's the version of this I keep coming back to.

Imagine a promotion runs a card out of a studio. Tens to a few hundred thousand dollars all in, with fighter purses, travel, crew, the full build. It does 40k views.

Two weeks later, someone points an iPhone at a sparring session in the same room. 35k views.

Part of that is the platform. A raw single-camera stream is native to how people watch now. It looks like something happening rather than something produced, and the polished broadcast version reads as an ad, which is the one thing every feed is trained to skip.

The instinct is still to say those aren't comparable, and under the old model they're not. A card monetizes through gate, sponsorship and rights. A sparring stream monetizes through nothing.

But change the buyer and the math inverts.

If what you're selling is a market rather than an event, production value stops mattering almost entirely. A sportsbook doesn't need a walkout package. It needs two competitors, a clean feed, a verified result and a settlement time.

So which is it? The room or the feed?

Both. That's what I got wrong.

Live experience has never been more valuable. Crowdless, always-on content and betting has never been bigger. Both are true right now, accelerating in opposite directions.

Now the objection, because it's the right one. Those warehouses are exploitative. Underpaid workers, instructions on the scoreline, teenagers, books banned in half the countries they operate in. Why would anyone want more of that?

They wouldn't. But none of it comes from the format. It comes from running the format somewhere nobody can look. No commission. No medicals. No records. No address anyone can visit.

The people doing this chose those conditions on purpose. That's the entire point of a warehouse in Russia.

Which is also why nobody legitimate has done it yet. The moment real money is priced on your results, everything that makes those farms work is the thing that shuts you down. You need the opposite of a warehouse. A fixed address, a permanent record, and somebody who can walk in unannounced and check.

That's a capital and operating problem, not a content problem. Which is exactly why the field is empty.

I keep coming back to what it would mean if somebody solved it. Seventy thousand gyms in this country and almost nowhere for the people in them to fight for money.

There's no clean answer here, and I've stopped looking for one.

Live experience is bigger than it has ever been. So is streaming. So is betting. They're supposed to be in tension and they aren't. All three are compounding at once, and the only thing that can't serve all three is what most of this industry is currently doing.

I'm building the infrastructure for it.

If you're building something in this space and want to think through the business side, that's what SKOVAX does. Reach out.

And if you have capital to deploy in combat sports, that's a different conversation and I'd like to have it. Reply to this email.

Talk soon,

Adam

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