SportsHandle and friends deliver another round-up of the week’s big developments in US sports betting.
Researchers Take Their Shots At Explaining Gamblers’ Behavior At Vegas Gathering
It’s not a proper Wednesday morning on the Las Vegas Strip until the trays of shots come out.
This held true this week at UNLV’s 18th International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking, only the shot glasses were filled with non-alcoholic smoothies containing spinach, kale, apples, and pears.
Booze, however, was a focal point of a presentation by University of Memphis grad student Tori Horn titled “Alcohol Consumption While Gambling: New Evidence Within a Responsible Gambling Framework.” Working with a sample group of 769 weekly gamblers, 70% of whom said they’d gambled under the influence of alcohol, Horn found that there was a “high likelihood that people who report gambling problems might also be at risk for a drinking problem.”
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ZenSports To Offer Cash-Back Rewards To Tennessee Sports Bettors
As ZenSports prepares to make its entry in the U.S. online sports betting scene — as Tennessee’s 13th online sportsbook — it has designs on an approach to bonusing not yet attempted by any other sportsbook.
“We look at the industry, and it’s a little surprising to me that a lot of sports betting operators bonus up front before they even know if you’re going to stick with them,” said Mark Thomas, the CEO of KeyStar, which acquired ZenSports last year (Thomas founded ZenSports). “When you go to Vegas you don’t get comped just walking in the door. You have to show you’re going to play.”
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MLS Player Alves Enmeshed In Brazil-Based Match-Fixing Probe
Five months after the death of Brazilian soccer legend Pele, the sport has been rocked by a historic match-fixing scandal that threatens the lifeblood of the national pastime in South America’s largest country.
While leading U.S. sportsbooks have monitored foreign match-fixing schemes closely in the past, one that has embroiled several major Brazilian clubs resonates much deeper on North American soil. State prosecutors in the Public Ministry of Goias this month charged 16 individuals, including seven professional soccer players, in a comprehensive scheme involving at least eight 2022 matches.
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NCAA Study Of College-Aged Sports Bettors Finds 61% Have Placed A Live Bet
A survey shared by the NCAA and conducted by Opinion Diagnostics suggests a majority of college-aged adults are betting on sports, even with restricted access to the legal sports betting market.
The survey was conducted from April 18-25, and it included 3,527 responses from people 18-22 years old. Of those survey participants, 1,702 of them are attending universities in the U.S. The survey found that 58% of respondents have placed a sports bet, and 67% of students living on campus are bettors. College students regularly wager on their own school’s teams (41%), and about one third of college students have used a student bookmaker.
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New York Regulator Backs Off Of Plan To Ban Third-Party Sports Betting Advertisements
A pair of prominent Northeastern states this year have considered new regulations on affiliate marketing in sports betting, including the possibility of banning sports wagering advertising by certain third-party companies.
In February, the New York State Gaming Commission (NYSGC) approved proposed rules that would prohibit compensation of third parties based on the volume of customers, bets placed, or the outcome of the wagers. In Massachusetts, the state gaming commission prohibited affiliate marketers from entering into revenue-sharing deals with sportsbooks, but allowed other forms of advertising on a limited basis.
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Reading Between The Lines: Financial Literacy In Sports Betting
The British are coming.
Since late April’s release of the U.K. government’s white paper on gaming regulation reform, the reaction in the United States sports betting industry has collectively been, “We’d better start doing these things ourselves if we want to avoid a similar bureaucratic intervention.”
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In The Money: Remembering The Summer When Poker Went Mainstream
Chris Moneymaker went from an anonymous Tennessee accountant to the most recognizable name in poker almost overnight.
It’s taken 20 years, but he’s finally inching back toward anonymous status at the poker table.
For the better part of two decades, opponents wanted to take a shot at him. They wanted to be the person who eliminated Moneymaker from the World Series of Poker Main Event. Or they wanted to at least beat him in a big pot or run one bluff on him and come home with a story to tell.
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