Taylor Ballantyne/Sports Illustrated
The Hudson River shimmers below the Manhattan skyline on a still Sunday morning in October. The world outside the the PointsBet office in Jersey City, N.J., is calm, serene. Oddly, so is the world inside the offices, which feels strange given how much is at stake on this NFL Sunday for PointsBet—a sports betting operator attempting to make its mark this side of the Hudson River, in the state of New Jersey, where a battle is taking place with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line.
PointsBet, an Australian online bookmaker, is just two years old, one of several new industry players in New Jersey, where the sports gambling market has been exploding since a U.