In 1992, Foxwoods Casino opened in Ledyard, Connecticut, and it hasn’t closed its doors since. Four years later, Mohegan Sun opened in Uncasville, just 15 minutes away. Both locations have been staples for both residents and visitors in Connecticut and have only grown more popular due to the influx of gambling. Until this past October however, sports gambling has been illegal in the state.
The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PAPSA) or the Bradley Act was introduced in October of that year in hopes to overturn sports gambling from being legal. The only states exempted from this decision were Oregon, Delaware, Montana and Nevada. It took until early 2018 in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) when a court ruled that PAPSA was unconstitutional, opening the doors for states to legalize sports gambling.
After New Jersey swiftly rolled out legal sports betting, Connecticut would then introduce two bills in March of 2020 and then another in January of 2021 which was eventually set into motion.
“Luckily in the state of Connecticut, there were only three major players that really needed to be at the table to you know, negotiate how we were going to set all of this up,” Bunnell said. “With those three being the two tribes (Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot) and the Governor (Ned Lamont) we got a little lucky this time around because of how this state works, but other places aren’t as lucky.”
Contrary to card games and slot machines, sports gambling offers a vast amount of options to put money on. In table games, participants bet money in hope of a profitable result and sports gambling works the same way. There are many moving parts and options, from the result of a match down to the outcome of a play and even predicting a player’s statistical output for a given contest.
With over 450 commercial casinos in the United States and over 9,200 worldwide, sports gambling is now legal in more than half of the 50 states. Casinos have existed for decades, so why is and was sports gambling, a $150 billion industry, illegal in so many places?
“It’s really complicated,” said Charles Bunnell, chief of staff for the Mohegan tribe. “We went through the federal level and the state level through multiple governors and building a deal that all parties would agree on was extremely difficult.”
One of the bigger concerns in legalizing sports gambling was the probability that new forms of betting could lead people into addiction, which the National Center for Responsible Gaming estimates to be around one percent of the adult population in the United States. Many of the largest scandals in the history of sports were centered around gambling on games, whether the gamblers were involved in them or not. People like Pete Rose, Hot Rod Williams, Tim Donaghy and the Chicago “Black Sox” of 1919 are just a handful of cases that stacked the odds against the return of sports gambling.
As to why states have pushed in favor of legalizing sports gambling has been the rise of offshore gambling websites that allow minors and residents of states where sports gambling is illegal to place bets through paid bookmakers. Since these websites are private and do not publicly report earnings, all there is to look at are projections. Credible gambling researchers at H2 Gambling Capital, the American Gambling Association and Eilers & Krejcik have estimated that offshore sportsbooks see between $50 billion and $200 billion in annual wagers. By legalizing sports gambling, states are able to solve part of the problem in roping their eligible residents to verified sportsbooks. Underage gambling is hard to catch, but promotions and advertisements that apply to eligible customers helps draw them to official sportsbooks.
Financial success has been the opposite of a deterrent for states deciding on whether to pass this specific legislation or to start conversations around legalization. According to an ESPN article, as of April 2021, a wave of 20 states have some legislation in place, while Idaho, Wisconsin and Utah are the three states with no legalization activity to this date.
“Our problem gambling committee meets regularly to address problem gambling concerns and remain at the forefront of addressing those issues. Our website, Mohegansun.com, has a page solely dedicated to gambling responsibly, and that details some signs of a problem developing. Mohegan Sun also has a self-exclusion program, as does FanDuel. FanDuel also has in-app tools that allow customers to set time, deposit and wager limits” said Ray Pineault, president and CEO of Mohegan Gaming and Entertainment.
Both Bunnell and Pineault highlighted the programs that the casino and FanDuel have continuously worked with to ensure customers know the risks of gambling:
- National Council on Problem Gaming (NCPG)
- Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling
- PlaySafe (FanDuel support service)
New Jersey quickly became one of the hubs of sports betting after sports betting became legal. With its neighbors in Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts not having legal sports gambling, New Jersey saw more and more visitors in places like Atlanctic City. However, the pandemic weakened the market as from May 2019 to May 2020, New Jersey saw a 65.4% decrease in revenue according to New Jersey’s Office of the Attorney General. With every major sport making a return in 2021, New Jersey broke records in terms of monthly revenue from gambling, becoming the first state to bring in over a billion dollars in a month.
Considering that until Connecticut legalized sports betting at the beginning of October, New Jersey was the only state in the Northeast that had no restrictions on how participants can bet and what they can bet on. The rapid revenue jump did not come as a surprise, considering the aforementioned return of sports.
As previously mentioned, sports gambling is a $150 billion industry and has grown quite rapidly over the last calendar year, with online sports betting gaining popularity right before the start of the pandemic where major professional sports and NCAA contests were canceled due to COVID-19.
Statistics for the first month of legal sports gambling have yet to arrive, but early projections from PlayCT have been in the range of $1.5 billion by the third year of operating, with around $100 million of that going to the state. Both in-app gambling and casino games could bring in millions more, providing even more tax revenue to the state.
While standing in front of the Fanduel Sportsbook at Mohegan Sun on Sept. 30, Governor Ned Lamont stood by as James Gessner, chairman of the Mohegan Tribal Council, cut the tape and later placed the first legal bets, wagering $50 on the Connecticut Sun. Since then, sports gambling has been legal in Connecticut, with the FanDuel Sportsbook application opening to the public on Oct. 12.
In an interview with CT Insider, Lamont admitted that legalizing sports gambling “wasn’t one of my big priorities to tell you the truth, but again, the time was right, the world was going virtual, I want the casinos here to thrive and it means real revenues for the state, so we put it on the front burner.”
The exclusive partnerships between the casinos and sportsbooks came quickly and were showing of the potential that Connecticut has as a sports-gambling hub. Between the two companies, there are around 20 million verified users which will certainly grow with over 2.4 million Connecticut residents being eligible to gamble.