The legal sports betting industry raked in $11 billion last year, plus billions in tax revenues for states. You can’t get through a 30-second TV timeout without 90 seconds of commercials for legal gaming sites. Since 2018 when the U.S. Supreme Court in Murphy v. NCAA opened the door for States to legalize sporting betting, 38 States, plus D.C., permit some form of sports betting and 30 of those states permit wagering online.
Claiming state regulation is “too soft”, a few days ago, the SAFE Bet Act (Supporting Affordability and Fairness with Every Bet Act) was introduced which would establish, in essence, a federal licensing procedure for sports betting. If passed, the SAFE Bet Act would authorize states to allow sports betting by operators as long as the state gets approval from the U.S. Attorney General by showing that the state meets the minimum standards on advertising, affordability, and artificial intelligence, including prohibiting ads between 8 am and 10 pm and during live sporting events; prohibiting operators from accepting more than 5 deposits from a customer each 24-hours and taking credit cards for bets; and prohibiting AI from tracking individual gambling habits and creating individualized microbets.
Not to be left out, non-licensed sports betting websites offer a new craze – sweepstakes betting. These sites try to take advantage of the sweepstakes legal framework by using virtual currency and providing an AMOE in combination with games and sweepstakes in order to ultimately allow users to bet on real-life sporting events and ultimately turn their virtual currency into cold hard cash. Currently, the legality of these sweepstakes betting sites has not been tested, but they are on the cutting edge, to say the least, in their effort to offer a free-to-play platform that uses promotional sweepstakes and loyalty rewards to allow users to win cash prizes with no purchase necessary. [A sufficient explanation of how this all works is well-beyond this article.]
We’ve come a long way from the days when a smug A. Bartlett Giamatti put the kibosh on the greatest hitter that ever lived, replaced by ESPN touting its sportsbook during sports highlights, with a message to call 1-800-GAMBLER if you think you have an addiction. It’s obvious that legal sports betting is here to stay and it’s equally obvious that everyone from licensed and unlicensed operators to the government want to cash in. If the SAFE Bet Act were to pass (despite vocal opposition from states), it’s a safe bet that it’s constitutionality could be addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court. If sweepstakes betting websites continue to pop up, it’s likely state regulators or licensed sports gambling operators may test their legality. Right now, we’re still not out of the wild west, but the more noise sports betting continues to seek and to get, like the squeaky wheel, the more likely it will eventually come to a definitive resolution. Stay tuned sports fans!
