Hope everyone is enjoying March Madness – it’s been a while since our last post. Here is a quick rundown of today’s most interesting sports betting stories that you may want to check out:
Mike Herndon from the Alabama Press Register authors an incredibly well thought out editorial on the future of gambling. A small excerpt:
Caught up in Gov. Bob Riley’s end-of-term crusade against electronic bingo, Mobile County District Attorney John Tyson danced around the subject last week when asked if office pools are legal. The head of Riley’s task force on gambling, Tyson said he could offer no opinion on whether such pools are legal, but warned would-be bracket-fillers to “seek the advice of their lawyer, and do it immediately.”
Want to hear something even sillier? According to the Mississippi attorney general’s office, office pools could potentially break two laws in the land of the Beau Rivage — a general statute about sports gambling and another provision about gambling outside casinos.
You can blow a mortgage payment playing Texas Hold ’Em, apparently, but don’t dare drop $10 on an office pool.
It’s been estimated that between one-fourth and one-half of the working American public enters a March Madness office pool.
And I dare say just about all of us gamble in one form or another. We buy a lottery ticket when we go to Florida or Louisiana. We wager small favors on the outcomes of petty disagreements, like the couple in the Chase credit card commercial who bet a massage on whether an actual person will answer their customer service call. We settle trivial debates by agreeing that the loser will buy lunch.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts, native’s startup, StarStreet Inc., is treating pro sports like a stock market. Gamers place bets with real cash by buying shares in a team or an individual player. If the team or player does well, those share prices may go up, and the gamer wins.
Levine swears it’s legal. He has the online game in a private beta test at StarStreetSports.com with about 150 users betting cash on teams in this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. He hopes to have the site ready for public unveiling in time for the 2010 professional football season.
“The real simple reason it’s legal is because it’s a game of skill, not chance, that doesn’t depend on the outcome of any single event,” he said.
CNBC put out a well done documentary recently covering the issues of online gambling and the inconsistency of U.S. policies on the issue. Check out a complete description along with air times at the cnbc website : The Big Business of Illegal Gambling.
See a clip of the documentary here:
In other news:
Delaware will take sports betting challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court – L.A. Times
Rhode Island Senate committed considering joining the fight against the Federal ban on sports betting. More details at RecentPoker.com.
The state of New Jersey has introduced the first intrastate gambling bill in the US, potentially leading the way to the opening of the US egaming market on a state-by-state basis. Read more at EGRMagazine.com.
Let the games begin! Tomorrow morning at 10 a.m EDT, the U.S. House Congressional Services committee will debate the white hot issue of how best to regulate internet gambling. Watch it live and read the prepared testimony here:
Reading through the pre-hearing documents prepared by Harvard Professor Malcolm Sparrow, it looks like the anti-gambling proponents are going to have their hands full defending the status quo. Sparrow lays out the heart of the issue plainly and simply:
At a minimum, legalization and regulation of online gambling would give Americans much more protection than does the current prohibitionist regulatory framework. Although the kind of regulation that would accompany legalization would not be failsafe, it would be a significant improvement over the current regulatory and enforcement structure. We believe that safeguards could be implemented that would, on balance, substantially improve protections against the identified risks. These safeguards would also provide protection equal to or greater than that provided within the U.S.-based bricks-and-mortar gambling industry. We recognize that no set of technical or regulatory controls could ever eliminate these risks entirely. But even if the new fence had a few holes, it would be an improvement over having no fence at all.
The view that online gambling, in contrast to its bricks-and-mortar casino counterpart, is impossible to regulate reflects an old-fashioned perception of cyber jurisdictional authority. Many offshore commercial entities that operate online are subject to U.S. legal jurisdiction under existing long-arm statutes and authority. When coupled with governmental licensing authority, the ability to police online activities is even more powerful. Legalization with regulation would provide U.S. authorities with the power to grant or deny licenses and to impose significant sanctions on noncompliant licensees. Those licenses would be highly valuable to site operators. Compliance with any regulatory requirements and strict licensing conditions that Congress chooses to impose in return for the privilege of the license would therefore become a cost of doing business.
Watch this debate, email your Congressman, and continue to visit iBet.pro to keep up on the latest developments surrounding this fascinating clash between the world’s most powerful players.
