Technological advancements for sports betting were showcased at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas this week.
Sportsbooks evolving in casinos isn’t a new topic. The evolution shown at G2E fits the physical change to the sportsbook experience we’ve been seeing. Sports betting tech is real and it’s fantastic. More importantly, the technological advances from overseas are finally in US casinos.
An MLB representative called for a 0.25 percent “integrity fee” on legal sports wagers during a panel at the expo.
“The state is going to designate these three, four, five very specific licensed entities: You guys get the right to make money from sports betting,” he said. “From a fairness perspective we think, if you are going to designate someone to be able to make money off of what at the end of the day is our sport and our events because if the Yankees weren’t playing the Red Sox last night, you are not betting on the Yankees and the Red Sox … we think we should be involved in that.”
The top three Connecticut gubernatorial candidates are all in favor of legalizing sports betting in the state.
“I gotta show we’re gonna have a significant cut in property taxes and how I pay for it,” he said. “So it’ll be a priority for me first thing next year.”
Republican Bob Stefanowski agrees with Lamont that Connecticut should move toward legalizing sports betting as a way to bring in additional money for the state.
“We need to look at it further,” he said in September. “It’s just starting to come out. Unfortunately, Dan Malloy has left us with a situation that we can’t rule too many things out, and if it’s gonna happen in the country anyway, then we need to look at how to control it and get some revenue out of it.”
The Dallas Mavericks hired former professional sports bettor Bob Voulgaris as director of quantitative research and development.
In part, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is expected to utilize Voulgaris as a strategic thinker who will help examine on-court strategy in big-picture ways.
Public bettors have been backing the Lakers and Celtics to win the NBA championship this season.
As of Wednesday, out of the hundreds of NBA championship wagers placed at MGM sportsbooks, the Lakers had just 18 more bets than the Celtics. However, both teams had drawn more than three times as many bets as had been placed on any other team. The Houston Rockets are a distant third.
“After the Lakers and Celtics, there’s a very wide gap,” said Jeff Sherman, manager at the Westgate SuperBook in Las Vegas.
Sportsbooks say they won big on the McGregor-Nurmagomedov fight last weekend.
“It was amazing how many five-figure bets we were getting on McGregor,” MGM sportsbook director Jeff Stoneback said. “I would see a $30,000 [bet] come across, another $30,000, then $20,000; so not only was the public betting small amounts, there were some large public play on McGregor, too.”
The price on the fight fluctuated throughout Saturday. Nurmagomedov got as low as -160 at some books, before closing as around a -200 favorite. Sportsbooks said there was plenty of respected, big money on Nurmagomedov, too, just not as much as was bet on McGregor. Nurmagomedov submitted McGregor in the fourth round, a profitable outcome for sportsbooks from Nevada to New Jersey.
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