The gambling laws get massively confusing, but the long and short of it as I understand is that Texas is still one of the 13 states in which online sports gambling isn’t legal - and that even if it were, technically, online sports betting is still illegal on a federal level.
So for those of you in the other 37 states, how do you do it? And if there are any Texan Dopers here who like to bet on teams online, how do you do it?
You’re thinking of marijuana.
I used to place bets on one of the apps - Draft Kings or MGM - but I quit last year. I ended up about $1000 ahead, but I disliked the process.
Sports betting became legal in Kansas about 18 months ago. There are now 4 or 5 legal betting parlors located in various casinos in the state, while most, if not all, of the online betting apps are available to use while you are physically located in the state. Each of those apps has a plug-in that checks your location before you are allowed to place a bet. Once you drive across the state line into a state where betting isn’t legal (like Missouri), you cannot place an online bet.
There are, however, some online sites that are not located in the US and as such are not bound by the laws of the various states. If you do a Google search for something like ‘offshore online sportsbooks’, you probably will find one or a dozen of such sites.
The sites aren’t bound by those US state laws, but isn’t the gambler located in those US states bound?
One of the sites is called Bovada. According to Legal Gambling At Bovada | Is Bovada Legal For USA Players? (legalgamblingusa.com),
Players from the United States are welcome to sign up at Bovada. However, residents in the states of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Nevada are not accepted. For the rest of the 46 states, Bovada allows them to play, providing a legal online gambling option for American players.
Now, I have no idea why residents of those four states are not accepted, but if this site is to be believed, Texans would be legal to bet via Bovada.
They’re not allowed there because those states made it explicitly illegal there.
I recall the online poker boom. The sites were based offshore and were thriving until the Feds decided that they didn’t like it. It was never explicitly illegal but you couldn’t use a US Bank to transfer money back and forth. There were relatively easy ways around that but I never bothered.
That big SCOTUS case a few years back ended Nevada’s monopoly which allowed US sites to operate and US Banks to be available. Lots of States voted or legislated legality in to get that sweet tax money. Texas apparently didn’t. Neither did California and it recently lost when it was put up for a vote despite the tens of millions put into that election. The gambling interests didn’t expect to win and are playing the long game. It’s just a matter of time.
Bovada is not illegal in Texas, has been around for a while and is trusted. They have poker and slot machines and everything else and you can bet on everything from NFL to Chinese volleyball. They make it easy. Web based or phone ap. Credit, debit, Venmo, crypto. They’re based in Costa Rica and are probably making billions.
Before Massachusetts made online betting legal, you could just travel to NH to place your bets, which was feasible for a large portion of the state (depending on how desperate you were to place a bet). As usual, once MA saw all that tax revenue heading north, they held their Puritan noses & legalized it here as well.
Here in Maryland we have both online betting and retail brick and mortar sports books. I’m not very proficient at it but I wager such small amounts that I’m still playing off my initial sign up bonus from November 2022, when sports betting first became legal.
RedZone Sundays with a few small bets and text chains with friends are a fine way to pass the time.
The scams also helped to kill it off.
I was playing a lot of poker back then and followed it closely. Of course there were scams but they were overwhelmingly dwarfed by the legit sites. That had nothing to do with it.
never mind
One site even released their source code to prove that they were totally legit. The problem was that their randomizer (I probably going to describe this badly) was based on something knowable like the exact UTC time at the point of the shuffle. Clever people then knew the exact order of the deck and could bet accordingly. Luckily a white hat pointed it out fairly quickly and it was fixed.
Another issue is that two (or more) people who know each other could be at the same table and communicate with each other over text to help their odds in various ways like knowing when an opponent was drawing dead or whipsawing. There are algorithms to help detect that now. It’s significantly more lucrative to run a clean game so no reason to scam, especially now. The old days were the Wild West.