Chase Richardson had long watched the unsanctioned let’s-make-it-interesting betting happening beyond the fences of the many truck and tractor pulls he’d attended or contested.
And as someone who lives 30 minutes from Churchill Downs, he’s wagered on a horse from time to time, too.
An idea formed.
In hashing out new ways to increase the popularity of a sport that consumes much of his passion and mental energy, Richardson founded FullPull, which subsequently launched a daily fantasy sports app reminiscent of many existing games catering to football or baseball fans. With upwards of 60,000 attending live events during summer, from the sport’s Midwestern heartland to Florida, Richardson senses a fanbase ready to engage.
“There’s a cultural aspect of these events when you attend them. People party, have fun,” Richardson told Gaming Today. “I’ve been around this sport my whole life, and 75% of the people — and that’s not an overstatement — are literally betting with their friends on every competitor that goes down the track, one person goes at a time.
“There’s about a minute-and-a-half, two-minute break between each run. So those dynamics lend themselves very well through betting and engaging a friend on a friendly bet.”
Now Richardson will see if FullPull Picks — a real-money daily fantasy app available on the Google and iOS markets — can convert those bettors to his peer-to-peer marketplace.
How FullPull is played:
- Players draft two or more competitors within each class during an event.
- Players venture a dollar figure between $5 and $1,500 and pit their roster against another player.
Inside the Development of FullPull
Knowing he’d have to build something easy and entertaining to lure these bettors onto his daily fantasy app, and hoping he was mining a niche, Richardson hired developers to create proprietary technology. FullPull was created in 2021 and is currently legal in 17 states where daily fantasy laws allow.
Richardson hopes to have FullPull Picks live in state including Florida soon. The game launched as a free-to-play in 2023 to help gauge interest and amass a database before becoming a real-money offering as Full Pull Picks in June.
FullPull has also become a content generator for the sport, with live streams linked off the NTPA website. Whatever helps strengthen the sport’s pull, Richardson supports. The repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018 also figured in the idea, Richardson said.
“It is a passion project for me to help grow a sport that I love, but beyond that, from a business standpoint, particularly since 2018, the thought of being able to bet on anything is a growing topic with niche and alternative sports across the map,” he said.
“But, we kind of come at it with a different perspective — and it really wasn’t by design — where we have proprietary technology in gaming that no one else has that is built essentially around a niche sport,” he continued. “It also one day could potentially be transferable to any type of motorsport in terms of a game of skill.”
Horses, Horsepower, Good Advice
“It is a game of skill. It’s peer-to-peer. There’s no against-the-house aspect of it,” Richardson explained.
“The best way I can describe it, it’s like a paid-entry, DraftKings fantasy model that got married to a horse race.”
Horses played as much a part in the development of FullPull as horsepower as Richardson began as a neophyte to the gaming business. He soon enlisted gambling industry veteran Benjie Cherniak as an advisor.
“I went through some contacts in the horse racing space to say, ‘Hey, why can’t we make this sport like horse racing?’ and it’s been a four-year journey to get to this point,” he said, “from just conversations and people looking at you like you’re crazy to catching a few breaks and meeting good people and the gaming community.
“Benjie Cherniak has been a godsend to us because he saw something in us and we’ve continued to grow rapidly. We’re still small in the grand scheme of things, but I think there’s been doors opened that we didn’t initially see because of this unique situation we have.”
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