Want to wrestle another person? Join a jiujitsu gym. Want to take that bout to your car? Enter: CarJitsu, a professional league for jiujitsu-ing in a car.
The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement recently approved CarJitsu for the New Jersey sports betting catalog, according to ESPN.
CarJitsu is backed by the Pro League Network (PLN), the same organization that’s launched slap fighting competitions and pro putt-putt. PLN also has relationships with DraftKings, BetMGM, and bet365, and sought the New Jersey sports betting market as its launchpad for CarJitsu’s foray into the wagering world.
“We wanted to stand it up there first, and we felt if we could meet all the expectations and requirements in New Jersey, it gave us a flight path for other parts of the country,” PLN co-founder Bill Yucatonis told ESPN.
The company’s SlapFIGHT Championship and World Putting League have both been approved for sports betting across multiple states, and has 16 sports competing or in development.
Built for digital consumption
PLN tries to be a match made in heaven for online sports betting sites in the United States. It literally says it on its website:
“We are a sports wagering company at our roots, focused on bringing exclusive, fun and inherently bettable sports for sportsbook operators to fill under-optimized dayparts on the sports betting calendar.”
With CarJitsu and its other obscure sports programming, the company is hoping to fill gaps in the sports calendar where there are few to no betting opportunities.
Mike Salvaris, PLN’s co-founder and Yucatonis’ partner in the company, pointed to the opportunity they’re trying to take advantage of.
“Three of the four professional sports have an overlapping schedule in the months they are active, let alone the days of the week, and we thought there was an interesting opportunity there to really own the other parts of the schedule,” Salvaris said to Sportico last year.
He asserted that “we don’t care about ticket sales, concession sales, or anything like that,” and that PLN’s programming is all about the home-viewing and wagering experience.
PLN didn’t seek betting commission approval for CarJitsu until about a year into its existence once clips of the sport did excellent numbers on social media.
CarJitsu’s Instagram page has more than 145,000 followers. Opponents are literally trying to choke each other out with seat belts, and the brand got more than 27,000 likes on a post demonstrating this tactic.
LaRoy Davis apparently prides himself on fast seat belt chokes and calls himself the Seat Belt Assassin. His tactic even drew a commentator to exclaim “this my friends, looks like a crime in progress.”
PLN's various sports programs reach into more than 100 countries and draw tens of millions of impressions per week.
And heck, sportsbooks in Colorado just collected $13 million in wagers on table tennis in April alone, so maybe CarJitsu will have some legs when it formally launches in the New Jersey sports betting market.
