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 by BuiltRamTough
5 years 10 months ago
 Total posts:   5357  
 Joined:  May 15 2015
Armenia   Los Angeles
Hall of Fame

The NFL has a team in Vegas and there’s gambling kiosks at UK stadiums.

But ya the “integrity” of the game.

Fantasy football gambling too.

 by Elvis
5 years 10 months ago
 Total posts:   38381  
 Joined:  Mar 28 2015
United States of America   Los Angeles
Administrator

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-spo ... story.html

Like it or not, the way games are covered is about to change forever
By RANDY HARVEY
MAY 15, 2018 | 4:05 PM

You could have bet Steve Kerr, who seldom misses an opportunity to comment on current events, would be among the first high-profile sports figures to address the Supreme Court's decision enabling states to decide whether to allow gambling on professional and college sports.

"I take the Warriors plus one and a half," Golden State's coach said before his team's Western Conference final Monday night at Houston. "… I guess I'm allowed to announce my picks for the week. Stay away from Boston. You've got to be careful on those Game 2s.

"… Adam Silver on line two. I'm about to get fined."

It's doubtful NBA Commissioner Silver did anything other than laugh at Kerr, who obviously was joking. But after sports wagering begins expanding to states beyond Nevada, Silver, other league commissioners and NCAA officials probably will insist coaches and players refrain from talking publicly about gambling. It's not good for sports if fans, bettors or not, believe the athletes involved in the action on fields and courts know too much about the action away from them.

It's clear that we are on the verge of a new world in sports.

It will also be a new world in sports media.

In anticipation of the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling, the Chicago Tribune's Phil Rosenthal wrote last week, "Any media organization without a contingency plan to follow suit is missing a possible lifeline in what has been very rough waters for the business."

Among the people who foresaw this future were former sportscaster Brent Musburger and his nephew, Brian, who started the Vegas Stats & Information Network (VSiN) 18 months ago. The Action Network, targeting the same audience of sports bettors and fantasy players, debuted last year.

VSiN's slogan: We're Changing the Way You Watch Sports.

Change will come more rapidly with the Supreme Court's decision.

"This is going to open up a whole new direction of reporting on sports," VSiN executive producer Rick Jaffe said in an e-mail. "Games that normally people might have turned off previously because they were too one-sided in one way or another will hold fans' interest until the end. We talk all of the time in the office about the game itself might have been no good, but it went down to the wire on either the spread or the over-under."

We have research to support that already in the NFL.

According to the American Gaming Assn., non-bettors watch 16 games per season compared to 35 for regular bettors. More to the point, the latter group also accounts for 47% of all the minutes of games watched, although it represents only 25% of the audience.

If gambling on NFL games is legalized in most states, the betting audience is expected to increase to 50% of the audience.

That won't happen overnight. New Jersey, which brought the case to the Supreme Court, will need all of at least two weeks. The state expects to have a sports book open by Memorial Day. Four other states probably aren't far behind. It is projected that 32 states, including California, will be in operation within five years.

Media outlets will start preparing sooner rather than later. Those broadcasting NFL games can use the AGA estimates to start selling advertising today. So can those broadcasting games in other major sports, assuming they also will have more viewers for more hours.

There will be countless of hours of other gambling-related inventory for them as well from media outlets that don't carry games.

Sports gambling has existed as long as sports have, though traditional media never have totally embraced it. CBS was groundbreaking when it hired Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder in 1976 to appear regularly on "The NFL Today" pregame show, but he wasn't allowed to discuss odds or betting lines. The subject is still kept at arm's length.

However, soon you can expect television shows, perhaps even channels, devoted to gambling. Some newspapers and other outlets with websites will begin covering it like they do the stock market.

That's merely the beginning of the possibilities. There will be mobile apps that enable you to legally bet on games as they occur.

Let's say you took Cleveland over Boston in Game 1 of the NBA's Eastern Conference finals. It was clear early you would lose. But you might still have won had you correctly bet during the game the over-under on how many points LeBron James would score. If you had Houston on Monday night, maybe you could have recouped your losses with the over-under on how many times TNT's Marv Albert would say, "Yes!"

You don't like this new world of sports media?

It doesn't matter. It's coming.

sports@latimes.com

 by Hacksaw
5 years 10 months ago
 Total posts:   24523  
 Joined:  Apr 15 2015
United States of America   AT THE BEACH
Moderator

As long as all that new money coming in doesn't somehow change the outcome of games, I'm all for it.

 by Elvis
5 years 10 months ago
 Total posts:   38381  
 Joined:  Mar 28 2015
United States of America   Los Angeles
Administrator

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/th ... 538twitter

The Supreme Court Made It Easier For More People To Place Bad Sports Bets

By Ty Schalter

Filed under Gambling

With the Supreme Court’s landmark gambling decision this week, many more Americans might soon be able to place a legal wager on their favorite sport. So what kind of money are we talking about?

The U.S. casino industry says Americans illegally bet at least $150 billion on sports every year. But it’s hard to measure exactly how much of that money might flow into legal establishments as a result of this decision; underground bookies don’t readily publish their balance sheets. But the casinos in Nevada do, and a closer look into the action taken by sportsbooks over the past few decades gives us a window into how Americans bet on sports — and how well they’re doing.

According to data published by David Schwartz of UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research, legal sports gambling has steadily been on the rise. Nevada sportsbooks have shown consistent growth in the number of outlets that take wagers, the wagers handled per outlet and the share of wagers kept (more on that later). In fact, Nevada casinos took in 55.6 percent more sports-betting money in 2017 than they did in 1992.1

Clearly, a lot more people feel confident enough in their sports opinions to put a lot more money where their mouth is.

Unsurprisingly, football has ruled this world. After cracking $1 billion wagered in 1994, in unadjusted numbers, football betting followed the industry’s slow downward trend until 2005, then bounced back upward, growing year-over-year nearly every year since. But the other sports are growing even faster: Nevada casinos’ 2017 basketball handle was $1.48 billion, 84.4 percent of the amount wagered on football take. Baseball is just a little further behind; bettors put down $1.14 billion in 2017, 64.9 percent of the football bets. Back in 1992, those shares were 69.3 percent and 58.9 percent.

But even if our ability to place legal bets is changing, there’s one thing that will probably stay the same: our inability to place good bets. Despite the wealth of information available in 2018, sports bettors aren’t any better at handicapping — in fact, they’re notably worse.

Let’s say you went to Hypothetical University, and you have a friend who went to Hypothetical State. The night before the big game, you go to a casino together and each bet $11 on your respective teams. The next day, Hypothetical U wins and covers the point spread, so your friend is out $11 while the casino pays you $21 — double the money you bet, less the service fee skimmed off of winnings.2 Effectively, $10 of your friend’s lost $11 went into your pocket.

In this case, the “drop” (the money you and your friend dropped on the game) is $22, but the “win” (the amount the casino kept) is $1. This is the ideal: An equal number of dollars bet on both sides guarantees that the casinos’ win rate equals their service fee. But the betting public rarely obliges — and if casinos set the point spread in a way that entices more money to be put on the losing side, their win percentage goes up.

Casinos kept just 2.81 percent of the sports wagers they handled in 1992. But over the next 15 years, casinos set the betting lines in a way to entice lower-information bettors,3 and their win rates soared well above the standard service-fee rate, peaking at a whopping 7.89 percent in 2006. Casinos are still winning in the 4- to 5-percent range over the past decade, with the house taking 5.11 percent of all wagers in 2017.

It really starts to get interesting when you look at how well casinos do on individual sports. On Tuesday, NBC Sports baseball writer Craig Calcaterra caused a stir when he tweeted that baseball is so random that only people with “a problem” would try to bet it:



But since 1992, bettors have done much better against the house in baseball than in football, basketball or the other remaining sports. That’s still true today, 11 years since casinos’ 2006 peak.

Casinos are keeping a bigger piece of the sports-betting pie

The share of money bet at sportsbooks that casinos kept

1992-2017 2007-2017
Football 4.66% 4.79%
Basketball 4.83 5.40
Baseball 3.17 3.98
Other sports 5.73 6.99
Total 5.06 5.39
SOURCE: UNLV CENTER FOR GAMING RESEARCH


Any one out of 2,430 regular-season MLB games a year could have a wildly unforeseen result — but baseball bettors have consistently put more dollars on the winning side over the past 25 years, keeping the average casino win rate below the standard service-fee average of 4.55 percent. It’s a different story in basketball, where casinos have kept 5.4 percent of all money bet on hoops over the past decade. In football, the most heavily wagered sport, casinos have kept very slightly more than the service fee (4.66 percent) over the past 25 years.

Those thinking they’ll outsmart bookies by betting more obscure sports appear to be sadly mistaken; casinos are keeping nearly twice as much of the money bet on “other” sports as good old-fashioned baseball. There was one glaring exception: 1996, when casinos took a bath on Evander Holyfield’s upset of Mike Tyson. Holyfield opened as a 25-to-1 underdog, and so much money came in on him that the line moved all the way to 5-to-1. (Similar action led to similar exposure in last year’s Conor McGregor/Floyd Mayweather fight. Casinos stood to lose millions if McGregor had won, but Mayweather’s victory allowed the casinos to bring in almost twice as much in “other sports” revenue in 2017 as they did the year before.)

Regardless of which sport(s) they’re betting on, though, today’s sports fans are betting, and losing, more than ever.

In 1984, the first year for which Schwartz has data, 51 sports betting locations kept 2.34 percent of the $894.6 million bet, for a total casino win of $20.9 million. In 2017, 192 locations kept 5.11 percent of $4.9 billion wagered, for a total win of $248.8 million.

So, in light of the Supreme Court decision, are Nevada casinos worried about an influx of sportsbooks cutting into their bottom lines? Probably not. In the context of the greater gambling industry, the sportsbook is relative chump change.

According to the Nevada Gaming Control Board, the 24 major Vegas Strip casinos generated $70.3 million in sports betting revenue last year — just 1.26 percent of their $5.56 billion overall gambling revenue. For comparison, slot machines pulled in a whopping $2.8 billion.

Legislators in states where sports betting will soon be legal, may be seeing dollar signs as the dust settles on the Supreme Court’s decision — imagining a $150 billion pot of gold ready to be taxed. But though Americans seem ready and willing to hand their money over to sportsbooks, it remains to be seen just how much money that will be.

Ty Schalter is a husband, father and terrible bass player who uses words and numbers to analyze football. His work has been featured at VICE, SiriusXM and elsewhere. @tyschalter

 by haroldjackson29
5 years 10 months ago
 Total posts:   842  
 Joined:  Feb 27 2016
United States of America   LA Coliseum
Veteran

St. Loser Fan wrote:That crying you are hearing is from the executive offices of the Las Vegas casinos.

lol Vegas isnt worried about crap.. And they were barely 1% of nation wide betting revenue that wasnt legal in the first place.
underground gambling is still tax free and is still done by the people you think are giving you honest competition to begin with.

 by Elvis
5 years 9 months ago
 Total posts:   38381  
 Joined:  Mar 28 2015
United States of America   Los Angeles
Administrator

Was talking about this with friends at lunch the other day, do we know what this means for Indian casinos? Can they start sports betting immediately or do they need state approval?

 by BuiltRamTough
5 years 9 months ago
 Total posts:   5357  
 Joined:  May 15 2015
Armenia   Los Angeles
Hall of Fame

Elvis wrote:Was talking about this with friends at lunch the other day, do we know what this means for Indian casinos? Can they start sports betting immediately or do they need state approval?

They’ll figure it out. A lot of money to be made.

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112 posts Mar 29 2024