How are these games financed?
Dupre Trickshots explained in his video that the games start when a player tells Haas that he would play him for $30,000. Where does the $30,000 come from? No one seems to be watching Haas and Joao at their match --- there appear to be no tickets to the event. It sounds like Haas and his manager make money from theirs and others bets. Bookies make money from others bets but these two aren't bookies.
This is from Dupree' video at 0:55
So, there's kind of an order of operations to all of these matches.
So, a player or a player's backer would reach out to Sam or Thomas, say, "Hey, my guy wants to play Thomas a race to 21 in nineball for $30,000." They would agree on the match. Sam would make some kind of AI generated poster with all of the match details. He would share it on Facebook in all of the groups, particularly the Dunsky Dungeon, which is the biggest action group on Facebook.
And then from the moment the flyer is posted to the moment the match begins, they're taking bets from everybody. from Facebook commenters, from well-known pool players, from random people, just anybody that they can take a bet from, they're taking a bet from.
