The Bulletin Board
THE LEDE: Las Vegas had a rough 2025, can the city turn it around in 2026?
ROUNDUP: A look at the stories you may have missed.
QUICK HITTER: A look behind the GeoComply curtain.
NEWS: CFTC Chair talks prediction markets in WaPo op-ed.
QUICK HITTER: Momentum to restore the gambling loss deduction cap.
AROUND the WATERCOOLER: Mention markets on prerecorded shows.
STRAY THOUGHTS: STTP Tiers.
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The Lede: Are We Still Pretending Las Vegas Is Fine?
I’ve been sitting on this Nate Silver column for a while (pre-Christmas).
In the column, Silver writes:
“And because state regulators obsessively track the gambling industry’s performance — tourism reflects more than a third of Nevada’s economy — Vegas is a surprisingly data-rich environment. So, for instance, we might ask questions like these: How much additional profit can you squeeze out of your customers before they rebel? Even if you’re doing it in ways that initially might be hard for them to notice?”
This is the key question that most people overlook: How long does it take for evidence to show up?
Whether we are discussing tourism in Nevada or cannibalization (online effects on land-based or prediction markets on traditional sportsbooks), the idea that a lack of immediate evidence refutes the claim is lazy.
And sometimes we are simply looking at the wrong data points. Consider the recent employment numbers in Las Vegas as an alternative data point to gambling revenue.
And then there is visitation. Gaming revenue is solid, but as Silver notes, “They’re up 1.1 percent year-over-year before inflation or down 1.6 percent after factoring it in,” but visitation is down significantly, for the first time since the Great Recession in 2008 (not including the 2020 COVID shutdown):
“Tourism [is] down 7.6 percent for the first ten months of the year as compared to January-October 2024. Still, the numbers are on pace to reflect the biggest year-over-year drop in tourist arrivals on record — except for the COVID year in 2020.”
As Las Vegas Locally put it on X, this has been an ongoing concern:
“Las Vegas didn’t suddenly get much more expensive in 2025, and high prices alone didn’t “kill” Vegas tourism. High prices and years of stupid “nickel and diming” made Vegas’ fragile tourism-based economy even more fragile, and susceptible to a systemic economic slowdown.”
“The shift from Las Vegas as a ‘value’ destination to a ‘premium’ one began well over a decade ago. The post-Covid travel surge just acted as an accelerant.”
This take from Sonny Bunch (a Bulwark editor) has been my experience in Las Vegas since about 2018:
“My own anecdata from last month: the gaming felt more or less the same for me, a low-stakes blackjack/hold ‘em player. ($15 tables are the new $10 tables, I guess.) But EVERYTHING ELSE felt insanely expensive in the casinos. Meals, drinks, etc. Crazy expensive.”
Silver later noted that it is middle-class visitors that will feel the increasing prices the most, noting the double-gut-punch of stingier payouts across slots and table games and non-gaming price hikes like “$8 bottles of Fiji water and ubiquitous resort fees.”
As Silver put it:
“Vegas has long relied on repeat business. ‘They were all based upon the same principle. Make people feel special. Come to Las Vegas to live big,’ Steve Wynn, who opened several of Vegas’s flagship properties, including The Mirage (RIP), The Bellagio and The Wynn, told me when I interviewed him for the book. ‘And they go home and … they’re happy and they tell their friends. If they get treated beautifully, they’ll come back next year and pay more for the inevitable increase.’”
Here’s how I explained this back in September (I also wrote a long-form column on cheap vs. value here):
“Rather than scaring away the first-time visitor, what Las Vegas may be seeing is the slow burn of return visitors (evidenced by the anecdotal evidence in this excellent Nevada Independent article that also offers the industry perspective)… As I’ve said in the past, part of the allure of Vegas was that the little guy got a taste of the high-roller treatment.”
And as I wrote in this entry on online cannibalization:
“I was always in the, yes there is cannibalization, but it’s trivial and the door swings both ways camp, but it’s clear that perspective is not as airtight as it was made out to be. New data means readjusting those beliefs…
“… Cannibalization takes time. If we use the term demand shift (which is what cannibalization is in the gambling world), slow-burn cannibalization makes far more sense, as shifting consumer behaviors doesn’t happen overnight. Adoption of new products or delivery channels takes time. The changes, like the data in Atlantic City, are subtle, and often messy.
“Amazon didn’t kill bookstores in a year, but over a decade, consumer preferences tilted toward online convenience, leading to widespread closures. Or streaming services like Netflix versus cable TV: initial growth coexisted, but eventually, cord-cutting became the norm, with cable subscriptions plummeting from over 100 million U.S. households in 2010 to under 50 million by 2025. In gambling, we’ve seen similar patterns, even if total industry revenues mask the transition for a while.”
Bottom line: Evidence often takes time to emerge.
Roundup: So Much News; So Little Time
Accel Entertainment says there is “no shot” of online casinos in IL [Citizens’ Note]: The team at Citizens recently met with Illinois-based slot route supplier/operator Accel Entertainment and the topic of online casino was broached. Per Citizens, “Management noted, “there is no shot” of iGaming legalization in the state.” Citizens caveated that with, in its words, ‘in the current environment.’
US Senators want the CDC to look into sports betting harms [Press Release]: A group of five US senators led by Katie Britt (R-AL) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) have sent a letter to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “urging the department to further study the alarming rise in sports gambling among America’s youth and the potential adverse effects on teens and young adults.” The letter reads in part: “We write to urge the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to study how America’s youth are being impacted by the rapid rise of sports gambling across America.” STTP Thoughts: I’ve been sounding the alarm about federal action, and this is yet another example of the growing interest of putting the genie back in the bottle. And as I’ve said before, being anti-gambling is not a partisan issue.
Missouri regulators consider college prop ban [Sports Betting Dime]: “The Missouri Gaming Commission… is evaluating the possibility of eliminating NCAA player props and first-half unders after NCAA President Charlie Baker requested state gaming commissions prohibit those specific markets. Missouri sports betting currently does not allow any NCAA player prop bets on in-state teams, but does allow for player prop bets for out-of-state teams.”
Louisiana Lottery is exploring online sales [Business Report]: Louisiana is looking at expanding into online sales as lottery revenue has fallen three years in a row. “Rose Hudson, president and CEO of the Louisiana Lottery Corporation, says lottery officials are ‘always looking at the broader marketplace and having thoughtful, responsible conversations about how the industry is evolving,’ including the potential for ‘iLottery legislation’ and ‘partnership models’ with stores that sell tickets.”
WV bills would raise sports betting and online casino tax rate [SBC Americas]: As already reported in my Premium Subscription Tier (The Forecast), West Virginia Del. Adam Burkhammer has introduced two bills, HB 4397 and HB 4398, that would raise the tax rate on sports betting and online casinos in the state from 10% to 25%.
Nevada regulators’ guidance on prohibited foreign activities [CDC Gaming Reports]: Last week, the Nevada Gaming Control Board “issued additional policy guidance to Nevada licensees about offering online gaming outside of the state and highlighted countries that are prohibited.” The memo issued by Board Chair Mike Dreitzer highlighted “presumptively prohibited” countries and activities in online casinos, “… all which rely on operating platforms, systems, or software and/or other content designed for online play.” Dreitzer said, “The overall goal of this guidance is to reduce potential adverse consequences for licensees and applicants under the Board’s foreign-gaming requirements and in particular (Nevada state law).”
Quick Hitter: GeoComply a Big Piece of Dabble’s Successful UK Launch
GeoComply recently offered a glimpse behind the curtain of its KYC and fraud detection capabilities on its website (I highly recommend clicking through and giving it a read).
Dabble, a social sports betting company founded in Australia, recently announced that in partnership with GeoComply (a newsletter sponsor) it has introduced precise device and location intelligence into its KYC process in the UK (launched in June 2025), and that “Within weeks of launch, these signals enabled Dabble’s lean fraud team to confidently close more than 200 fraud cases.”
Per GeoComply, it surfaced coordinated patterns of fraudulent activity—insights that legacy KYC approaches built on static, point-in-time identity checks typically cannot detect:
A single residential address in Preston was home to +250 “unique” devices, revealed to be a bonus-abuse cluster.
What looked like ~2,000 “unique” devices turned out to be a concentration of emulator- and VM-like environments in central London.
Stolen and synthetic identities that would have passed traditional KYC checks were surfaced.
Dabble has been working with GeoComply in the US since 2023.
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News: CFTC Chair Michael Selig Talks Prediction Markets
If you were wondering where new Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chair Michael Selig stood on prediction markets, wonder no more.
The recently confirmed Selig penned an op-ed in the Washington Post (which is also available on the CFTC website) praising President Donald Trump’s approach to new technology, while blasting former President Joe Biden, saying that “Instead of developing guardrails that foster ingenuity, the Biden administration focused on regulation by enforcement—subjecting novel products such as digital assets and perpetual futures to legacy rules that could not fit the product, but could fit the prosecutor.”
In the op-ed, Selig writes that “under my leadership, the CFTC is charting a new course.”
“To future-proof the CFTC for tomorrow’s innovations, the agency’s regulations must adapt to meet our nation’s builders where they are. That is why I have launched the “Future-Proof” initiative… Just as American businesses are modernizing legacy financial systems by harnessing new technologies, the CFTC must upgrade its approach to unleash innovation. As part of this initiative, the CFTC’s staff will undertake a comprehensive review of the agency’s existing rules and regulations and modernize these requirements to ensure a level playing field for new entrants and incumbents alike.
“As new asset classes emerge and the CFTC’s role evolves, guidelines we establish should not just fit the product, but also serve a tailored regulatory purpose. Prediction markets have exploded in popularity as broad swaths of market participants seek to hedge portfolio risks and test their abilities to forecast truth. Similarly, the digital asset economy has grown from a mere experiment in cryptography to a more than $3 trillion market with ever greater types of assets being generated on blockchain networks.”
The most interesting part of Selig’s op-ed is the part about clear rules:
“Arbitrary, cumbersome and opaque rules will not stand the test of time. The CFTC’s approach should be to deliver the minimum effective dose of regulation—nothing more and nothing less. This means an end to policymaking through enforcement. And this means the agency’s policymaking divisions will develop clear rules of the road for market participants that will be codified through notice-and-comment rulemaking to ensure that the regulatory requirements do not change wildly from administration to administration.”
First, recall that Selig essentially said that sports contracts would be decided by courts during his confirmation process, so it will be interesting to see if any proposed rules address those specific offerings — which are really the only contentious offerings at prediction markets.
“These are complex issues as to the interpretation of what it means to constitute ‘gaming.’ And of course, I have the utmost respect for our judges who are working on these issues in the court system, and I intend to always adhere to the law and follow the judicial decisions.
“I also believe that these types of issues are ones we can work through together. Some of them are Congressional issues as to whether we change statutes in certain areas. But of course, I was not at the CFTC at the time that this portion of the Dodd-Frank Act was drafted. I was not working in this committee or on the Hill at the time. And so these are just very challenging interpretive questions that I will look to the courts on.”
More importantly, as attorney Andrew Kim noted on X:
“Notice-and-comment rulemaking—even to repeal existing rules to lower the "dose of regulation" to the "minimum effective" level—takes a lot of time. And I have to imagine that such rulemaking will be contentious, at least as to prediction markets."
“There may be a lack of consensus on what the rules of the road should be. And I have to imagine the states/tribes/other gaming interests will oppose efforts to formally loosen restrictions on event contracts, cough Rule 40.11. Litigation may inevitably drag out the process.”
Kim also brought up something Straight to the Point has been hammering home: There is no permanence. Supreme Court rulings are not permanent (they are just the current law of the land), let alone regulations from a government agency whose makeup will change every four years or so.
Quick Hitter: Gambling Loss Cap Discussed in Congress
Representatives Dina Titus and Steven Horsford of Nevada testified during a committee hearing on the Consolidated Appropriations Act, HR 7148, to try to attach an amendment that would restore the gambling loss deduction cap to 100%, after it was reduced to 90% by last year’s Big Beautiful Bill.
No final decision has been reported yet on whether the amendments will be made in order for inclusion in the bill, which is expected to move forward this week.
Standalone efforts (linked below) and previous attempts to attach similar amendments to other bills have come up short, however, the current effort has gained additional cosponsors and visible industry support from gaming giants like MGM and Caesars.
STTP Thoughts: If you had asked me a week ago I would have said unlikely, but there is a growing push from the industry that is raising its chances. That said, the same Congress that passed the bill is still in place, and fiscal hawks in the GOP-controlled committee have blocked similar fixes. Furthermore, assuming it passes the House, it would need to survive the Senate.
Around the Watercooler
Social media conversations, rumors, and gossip.
The important part here is that Hayes filmed a segment in front of a live studio audience of around 400 people (the size of Colbert’s studio audience) that could then hop on a prediction market (or tell a friend) and bet on what he might say on a show that airs in several hours.
Dumb indeed.
Stray Thoughts
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