An Unexpected Guest
With the House Speaker on board, Alabama has a legitimate chance to legalize sports betting (and casinos and lottery) in 2024.
The Bulletin Board
NEWS: With the Alabama House Speaker leading the charge, gambling expansion is on the table in 2024.
NEWS: Let’s talk palps… again.
NEWS: New Jersey and Pennsylvania are one step closer to prohibiting smoking in casinos.
AROUND the WATERCOOLER: Show me the numbers and a female-friendly sports betting ad.
STRAY THOUGHTS: Limit > No Limit Poker.
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Alabama Considers Casino, Lottery, and Sports Betting
The Alabama Political Reporter begins its latest column on gambling with the dubious warning, “For roughly the 15th time in the past 20ish legislative sessions, lawmakers will take a stab at passing some form of comprehensive gambling legislation.”
With that caveat out of the way, the article makes the case for casino and lottery legalization in what is one of the country's most conservative and non-gambling states. That case focuses on the support of House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter.
“Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter, R-Rainsville, has made no secret of the fact that he’s on board with the gambling legislation that will emerge from a gambling committee he put together. That committee is expected, according to sources with knowledge of the committee’s work, to introduce a comprehensive bill that would, if approved by voters, legalize gaming at certain locations around the state and also significantly expand the regulation of gambling and strengthen laws against illegal gambling operations.”
APR also noted the Senate has passed gambling bills four times over that span, only to see them die in the House.
What is Alabama looking to legalize? APR reports it will resemble legislation from 2022 that would:
Legalize up to five commercial casinos
Authorize compacts with the Poarch Creek Band of Creek Indians (up to five locations)
Create a state lottery
More critical for Ledbetter is the increased regulations to rein in the illegal gambling occurring in the state:
“We don’t have hundreds of illegal gambling operations. We probably have more than a thousand…We have some serious criminal activity around them.
“We just can’t let this go on any longer. It’s a public safety issue.”
Online gambling of any kind is unlikely, but sports betting would be permitted at land-based casinos under the 2022 bills (here and here), which the 2024 bill is expected to be modeled on.
But before anyone gets too far over their skies, we are talking about Alabama.
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Palps: A Minor Yet Important Issue We Need to Solve
US sports betting markets are still trying to come to grips with palps. Palpable errors are mispriced sports betting lines, and the cancellation of these “obvious errors” is often covered in sportsbooks’ house rules.
However, regulators have mixed feelings about how palps should be handled.
The first major palp in the US was in New Jersey, but there have been plenty of other instances.
A more recent example was the schoolteacher in Virginia who had to fight for $200,000 in winnings (and basically won in the court of public opinion).
And now we have $575,000 of unresolved wagers (in Massachusetts) that occurred during a 13-minute window, where 137 bettors placed 178 bets on incorrect totals during a Nuggets-Lakers game at DraftKings - the same line was also offered in other jurisdictions.
Massachusetts regulators listened to DraftKing’s side of the story during a November 16 meeting, but the Massachusetts Gaming Commission pushed off a decision until November 30.
DraftKings has also requested a reprieve in New Jersey.
Sports Handle has an excellent write-up of the intricacies of the situation for those interested, but David Purdum has a pretty good tweet-sized summary here:
And Captain Jack summed up the palp issue quite nicely on X:
The more significant issue is each state is handling palps differently, and sometimes differently on a case-by-case basis. This is reason #1,628 that the US could use some national standards.
Are Smoke-Free Casino on the Way?
New Jersey and Pennsylvania casinos are closer than ever to becoming smoke-free after 15+ years of exemptions from indoor smoking prohibitions.
New Jersey banned indoor smoking in 2006 and Pennsylvania in 2008, yet both states have exempted casinos from their indoor smoking bans.
A multi-year effort in New Jersey and Pennsylvania by a group called Casino Employees Against Smoking Effects (CEASE) is finally gaining momentum.
In New Jersey, legislation introduced by State Sen. Joe Vitale has bipartisan support in both chambers and is expected to be considered during the upcoming lame-duck session.
In Pennsylvania, a similar bill, sponsored by State Rep. Dan Frankel, has passed the House Health Committee and is now eligible for a floor vote.
Richard Schuetz, a long-time advocate of banning smoking in casinos, testified in Pennsylvania in September and explained the sausage-making process in a column for US Bets. He also routinely posts about it, with no chill, on X.
Around the Watercooler
Social media conversations, rumors, and gossip.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has been trumpeting the state’s sports betting numbers, but as Bet Kentucky’s Steve Bittenbender points out, the numbers are incomplete.
ESPN Bet delivers a female-focused ad [h/t to PrizePicks VP of comms Elisa Richardson]. This ad is one of the best I’ve seen in terms of overall tone.
The ad in question can be seen here:
Stray Thoughts
A topic on my radar for an upcoming feature column is the limit vs. no limit debate. My working title is No Limit Holdem Saved And Ruined Poker.
This was recently broached on X by former professional Melissa Burr, a mixed-game advocate, who tweeted, “If people watched live limit games, they’d never watch NL ever again.”
