You’ve checked the injury reports, combed through the statistics, even studied the weather forecast – now you’re ready to place your wager. You may be making a huge mistake. What’s the one thing you’re forgetting? Checking the Vegas Odds On Sports.

Let’s say your betting on the NFL. The fact is, Vegas Odds on Football change from minute to minute and can make a huge impact on your payouts if you don’t know the latest line. If you haven’t got the latest information, you may as well just go an play the lottery at your local convenience store.

Because of the lockout, Vegas Odds on Basketball will be incredibly important to check once the season begins. Players that spent the time off working out and those that spent it as a time to party will greatly affect the performance of their respecitve teams. How will you as on outsider know the impact his will have? I’ll tell you this, your local bookie isn’t going to give you any insights. The fact is that you have to check the Vegas odds. I know this sounds like obvious advice, but you’d be surprised how many people fail to take it to heart when it’s time to lay down a wager.

This week, Businessweek gives us a fascinating look inside a London-based sports bettting hedge fund. I highly recommend reading the entire article.

The Galileo Managed Sports Fund, which launched in April under the umbrella of the nine-year-old Centaur Group, is the world’s first sports-betting hedge fund. The idea has been knocking around for a while. Six years ago, Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the National Basketball Assn.’s Dallas Mavericks, proposed a similar fund, only to see his idea crash on the shoals of American prohibitionism. While the NBA forbids anyone involved with the league from betting on its games, there was a larger problem: Outside of Nevada, Delaware, and Oregon, betting on sports is largely illegal.

There are some interesting comments from a technical perspective over on Hacker News and there is a nice writeup of the financial dimensions at Hedge Fund Lounge.

The Feds have struck back and struck back hard! This story has everything – domain names seized, executives arrested, and billions of dollars in fines agains the three largest online poker companies. Keep in mind these companies operate completely legally in most of the world and are even publicly traded. This is almost the equivalent of Saudi Arabia arresting the executives of the American movie studios because their movies are on the internet and accessible to citizens of that country who are legally prohibited from viewing them. Things are going to get ugly folks…

via the LA Times

The founders of the three largest online poker sites were indicted by the FBI on Friday in what could serve as a death blow to the thriving industry.

Eleven executives at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker were charged with bank fraud and money laundering in an indictment unsealed in a Manhattan court. Two of the executives were arrested on Friday morning in Utah and Nevada. Federal agents are searching for the others.

Prosecutors are seeking to immediately shut down the sites and to eventually send the executives to jail and to recover $3 billion from the companies. By Friday afternoon Full Tilt Poker’s site displayed a message explaining that “this domain name has been seized by the F.B.I. pursuant to an Arrest Warrant.”

The online gambling industry has taken off over the last decade, drawing an estimated 15 million Americans to bet online.

In 2006 Congress passed a law prohibiting online gambling. Most of the leading sites found ways to work around the law using foreign banks, but prosecutors allege that in doing so they broke the law.

“These defendants concocted an elaborate criminal fraud scheme, alternately tricking some U.S. banks and effectively bribing others to assure the continued flow of billions in illegal gambling profits,” Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement.

Read more…

There is a great article today in the Economist about the dangers of corruption caused by sports betting. The gist of the article is that by paying players more, you lower the risk of corruption. It focuses on the reasons that American sports have been less vulnerable to corruption despite the high volume of sports wagering that occurs in this country.

From the article:

THE lengthening shadow cast by illegal betting syndicates over international sport has one curious exception: America. That is surprising, given that Americans are ardent betters on sport and, as with soccer and cricket, sportsmen there are often youths from lowly backgrounds.
…
So how and why is America different? One reason may be that foreign gambling syndicates are less interested in baseball and American football (scandals are rife in tennis). Another is that gambling-influenced corruption in sport has made Americans aware of its dangers.
…
American sports’ governing bodies tend to regard all gambling with disapproval. David Stern, who heads the National Basketball Association, says cautiously that legal betting on his sport “may be a huge opportunity”. He is an exception. Most other sporting big shots are less enthusiastic. The National Football League would rather not have any gambling at all, says Brian McCarthy, a spokesman. When Delaware tried amending its laws to allow sports betting, the NFL was strongly opposed. The league makes a strong anti-gambling pitch to new players, as does the National Collegiate Athletic Association, another oversight body. Violations are now rare. The NFL suspended two players for placing bets on games in 1963 and one for similar reasons in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, corruption continues to be a way of life in countries like Pakistan.

Maybe there are some teeth in the push for legalization and sensible federal regulation of the Internet gambling industry after all.

Sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) — chairman of the House Financial Services Committee — HR 2267 is a bill designed to establish federal oversight of an online gambling industry that currently resides in murky legal waters for U.S. players.

It passed overwhelmingly 41-22 via committee vote last week, advancing the legislation to the House floor, where it hopefully will be voted on before the end of the 2010 session. If it gets that far, it will be the deepest penetration of online gaming law at the federal level in history.

“The good news is this is significant progress,” said Michael Waxman of the Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative. “Last week’s vote showed the bi-partisan support is there.”

HR 2267 has the potential to open an enormous revenue stream in an era where cash is badly needed at all levels of government.

One analysis completed by the Congressional Joint Committee of Taxations concluded that regulated online gambling could generate $42 billion in revenue over the first 10 years of HR 2267 implementation at the federal level.

At the state level, a 6 percent deposit fee could generate an additional $30 billion.

“Those figures assume you are starting with an industry where millions of players are already engaged,” Waxman said. “And with regulation, there is an expectation that many more will take up and enjoy this form of recreation. There is a strong possibility that this bill would be included in a larger legislative package as a way to offset the cost of other programs.”

If HR 2267 is signed into law, sites will have to apply for federal licensing. There’s no language about a cap on the licenses, but in a regulated environment, safeguards against such things as identity theft, compulsive gambling behavior and underage gambling would have to be in place in order to secure one.

Sites able to comply and secure licensing will strike oil. Those that cannot will fade away.

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.

• I don’t really understand how this can be legal (it would be great if someone with a legal background could explain) : Entrepreneur Touts Loophole That Allows Online Betting On Sports.

  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.

• Malaysia to legalize sports betting ahead of the World Cup. Malaysia is a pretty repressive country and even they are allowing their citizens to bet on sports. The United States Congress should take note.

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.

Can this man legalize online gambling?

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:

http://www.house.gov/apps/list/hearing/financialsvcs_dem/hr_112409.shtml

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.