The Austin Gamblers are Austin's professional bull riding team, and they compete in a ten-team league called the PBR Camping World Team Series. Over a full season they ride in Fort Collins, Oklahoma City, Nashville, Anaheim, Greensboro, Fort Worth, Glendale, New York, Kansas City, and Florida.

They ride at home once.

Gambler Days is that weekend. Three nights at Moody Center, five games each night, plus a free Fan Fest with live music, food trucks, and local vendors before every session. Concerts and afterparties are included with your ticket. If you have never been to a bull riding event, this is the one built for you, because roughly a third of the crowd every year is out-of-towners and first-timers.

Wednesday, August 19: Texas Tee-Haw Butler Pitch and Putt, 201 Lee Barton Dr, 4 to 8 p.m. A fundraiser for Folds of Honor and the Central Texas Public Safety Commission on one of the best little par 3 courses in town.

Thursday, August 20: Gambler Days Kickoff Party YETI Flagship, 220 S Congress Ave, 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Open to the public. Drinks, music, autographs, and a chance to meet the riders before anyone straps into a chute.

Five games each day. Austin rides in the anchor slot all three days, so the Gamblers game is always last.

Friday, August 21

Saturday, August 22

Sunday, August 23

Schedule subject to change.

Why Austin's three games matter. Florida swept the Gamblers 4-0 last season on the way to a league record 20 wins, and one of those games ended 434.25 to nothing. Saturday is the Land.com Texas Cup against the Fort Worth Rattlers, the only in-state rivalry in the league. Sunday is a rematch with Carolina, the reigning champions who knocked Austin out of the playoffs in Las Vegas last October.

Bull riding was an individual sport for nearly 30 years. In 2022 the PBR turned it into a team league, and the format is easy to follow once you know five things.

A game is five riders against five. Each rider gets one bull. Add up the qualified ride scores, and the higher total wins the game. Ten teams, each with a drafted roster and a head coach.

A ride is eight seconds. One hand on the rope, free hand in the air. If the free hand touches the bull or you come off early, you score zero. That means a game can genuinely end 0-0, and occasionally does.

Scoring maxes out at 100. Four judges award up to 25 points each. Half the score grades the rider on control and rhythm, half grades the bull on how hard it bucks. The bull is scored as an athlete too, so drawing a rank bull is an advantage, not bad luck.

Coaches pick the pairings. Each team is dealt a balanced pen of five bulls by the PBR Director of Livestock, and the coach decides which rider takes which bull. It is the closest thing this sport has to a pitching change, and it is where most games are won.

No event winners, just wins and losses. Records build a standings table like any other league. The season runs July through late October and ends with the PBR Teams Championship at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, November 6-8.

Five games a night times ten riders means 50 outs per session, 150 across the weekend.

Five seasons in, no franchise has stacked up more hardware than Austin.

Only four teams have ever won the title: Nashville in 2022, Texas in 2023, Austin in 2024, and Carolina in 2025. Austin is the only one of the four with regular season crowns on top of it. Somewhere along the way people started calling them the New York Yankees of PBR, and CEO JJ Gottsch has never once objected to it.

Jose Vitor Leme is a three-time PBR World Champion and owns the highest-scored ride in the history of the sport, a 98.75 aboard the bull Woopaa at the 2021 World Finals. That ride included the first perfect 50-point rider score anyone has ever earned. He was also the first overall pick in the first PBR Teams draft ever held, and he is back in green and black for 2026.

Dalton Kasel is the last rider still on the roster from the 2022 founding team. He is 25 and already eight years into a pro career, in a sport where making your mid-30s counts as a long run.

Michael Gaffney, the head coach, was one of the 20 bull riders who each put up $1,000 in April 1992 to break away from rodeo and start the PBR. He won the world championship in 1997 and now coaches the team in the city where he lives.

Adriano Moraes, one of only three riders in history with three world titles, runs the Gamblers' Brazil operations.

Last year's Gambler Days generated roughly $4.5 million in direct economic impact to the greater Austin region, according to Austin Sports Commission executive director Nathan Kopp. That worked out to about 5,800 hotel room nights and $218,000 in local tax revenue, and Kopp's point is that hotel numbers undersell it, since those visitors are eating and drinking and shopping here the whole time.

Attendance ran 22,861 across the three days, with roughly 31% traveling more than 100 miles to get here. For scale, the entire ten-team league drew 272,315 fans across the 2025 season, so this one Austin weekend accounted for more than 8% of it.

When is PBR Gambler Days 2026? August 21-23, 2026 at Moody Center in Austin. Friday at 7:45 p.m., Saturday at 6:15 p.m., Sunday at 1:45 p.m.

How much are tickets? They start at $34 before taxes and fees, and three-day passes are available. Our link takes 15% off.

Who is performing? Dustin Lynch and VAVO on Friday, All My Groovy Friends, VAVO, and Nelly on Saturday, and Tejano Queen Forever on Sunday. All performances are included with your event ticket.

Is it family friendly? Yes. Sunday is Family Day presented by SCHEELS, and the 1:45 p.m. start is the easiest session with kids.

Do I need to know anything about bull riding first? No. The scoring takes about one game to pick up and the eight-second clock explains itself.

How many championships have the Austin Gamblers won? They won the 2024 PBR Teams Championship and were regular season champions in 2022 and 2023, the most combined titles of any team in the league.

Do the Gamblers play in Austin again this year? No. Gambler Days is their only Austin appearance of the 2026 season.