Yes I am a person who believes sports wagering should be legal in every state after working in sports books as a legal bookie in Las Vegas and Reno Nevada for over 7 years I can tell you people love to gamble and wager on sports but Nevada is the only state that it is legal to wager on sports in America.
Recently some states have allowed sports wagering through the state lottery system including Oregon, Delaware, and Montana. The Washington Redskins have now become the second team that has signed a licensing deal with a state run lottery. The New England Patriots became the first team earlier in the year.
A study done by a university said of the $400 million online bets for the 2004 Super Bowl, only $81 million were legal.
A 2003 NCAA study found that 69 percent of male and 47 percent of female NCAA student-athletes reported participating in any gambling behavior. Thirty-five percent of males and 10 percent of females wagered on sporting events, which is in direct violation of NCAA bylaws.
The NFL will tell you it’s terrified of sports betting because of the possibility someone may try to fix one of its games. But that’s an old and tired argument, and the thought that an NFL game could be tampered with is laughable to a betting industry that analyzes everything from the wind patterns at Lambeau Field to the main course at the team breakfast and would quickly spot any wrongdoing.
In the end, gambling is gambling.
In 1999, the National Gaming Impact Study Commission estimated that illegal sports wagering was as much as $380 billion. The FBI projected that 2.5 billion dollars was illegally gambled on the 1995 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, second only to the National Football League’s Superbowl. Money skimmed from sports betting schemes is used to fund a host of illegal activities including the sale of narcotics and loan sharking. These activities are never evident to the casual bettor but are not lost on the law enforcement community.
A study by the University of Cincinnati of 648 Division I intercollegiate men’s basketball and football respondents indicated that 25.5% had gambled money on other college sporting events, 3.7% had gambled money on a game in which they had played, and that 0.5% received money from a gambler for not playing well in a game.
The NCAA believes there is a very high incidence of illegal sports wagering among college students. It is safe to say that student bookies are present at every college and university, and there is no dispute that the impact of sports gambling is being felt on campuses across the country.
An NCAA-sponsored study completed by the University of Cincinnati uncovered alarming results. Of 2,000 male student-athletes in Division I basketball and football programs surveyed about NCAA rules violations, 25% reported that they gambled on college sports events other than their own while in college. Four percent admitted that they wagered on games in which they had played, and three of the athletes said they changed the outcome of the game in which they participated.
In a separate 1998 study involving approximately 1,000 students at universities in the Southeastern Conference, results revealed that athletes were nearly twice as likely to be problem gamblers than non-athletes. Student-athletes are not the only undergraduates with gambling problems. Several researchers who surveyed 1,700 students from six colleges and universities found that 33% of the males and 15% of the females gambled once a week or more. Research by Howard Shaffer of the Harvard University Medical School Division on Addiction shows that more youth are introduced to gambling through sports betting than through any other form of gambling activity.
It is my theory that if sports betting was made legal than the government and sports industry could oversee any possible wrongdoing and stop the possible corruption that betting would create.
Also sports wagering is a huge money maker in Nevada, and imagine all the illegal betting money that would come to each state and the government.
Also with making it legal you reduce crimes that are associated with sports wagering.
This headline came out after the NFL lockout was over:
Vegas bookies cheer end of football lockout … Resorts posted revenue of $6 billion last year and Las Vegas Sands had revenue closer to $7 billion in 2010.
The casinos in Vegas make millions of dollars of sports betting per year imagine if it was legal in all 50 states.
So my answer to why make sports betting legal is all about creating jobs, cutting back on crime, increasing state and federal incomes, and reducing illegal sports wagering overseas and online gambling.