NEW YORK – Several tribal gaming leaders urged caution regarding the implementation of sports betting Wednesday during a two-day conference on the topic. There is significant interest in adding the activity to current tribal gaming offerings, but a legal thicket needs to be navigated.
“The tribes want to bring people in (for sports betting),” Victor Rocha, founder of Victor Strategies and publisher of Pechanga.net, said panel at the Sports Betting USA conference that covered tribal gaming opportunities.
Victor Rocha
“But sports betting in California will happen the way the tribes want it, not the way (anyone else) wants it,” Rocha said.
One of the scheduled panelists, Pechanga General Counsel Steve Bodmar, was absent from the session because tribes in California met on Tuesday to discuss sports betting, Rocha said. A second meeting on the matter is planned for November 20.
California is by far the most heavily populated state that has yet to introduce a sports betting bill, and the state’s wealth of tribal casinos has likely played a role. The complexity of tribal compacts – agreements between the tribes and city, state and federal governments – requires changes to be significantly vetted.
If tribes begin to seriously consider implementing sports betting in their properties, it’s feared the delicate regulatory framework that currently exists might collapse, or at least be significantly altered.
National Indian Gaming Association Executive Director Jason Giles said its ironic historically liberal California seems reticence about potentially opening the doors to sports gaming.
“Hey, sports gambling is legal in America. Everyone can just do what they want with it,” he said. “(But) America doesn’t work like that. Region by region, it breaks down differently.”
Pointing to fellow panelist Bea Carson, Charwoman of the Choctaw Gaming Commission in Mississippi, Giles said the assumption might be that a conservative state would be less likely to embrace sports wagering.
“What happened? Exactly the opposite,” he said, calling the situation a “conundrum of the United States.”
Carson said that the Choctaws decided to jump into sports betting “on the spur of the moment,” even before the PASPA repeal. The tribe researched regulations, technical standards, equipment and suppliers, all with an eye toward what new associations they would need to make to successfully implement the activity when the time came.
The Choctaws took roughly six weeks to get everything implemented. The tribal chair wanted to be online before the start of the SEC football season.
“There was a potential for making a pretty good little profit, as opposed to a big profit,” she said. “But we had to start somewhere.”
Sports betting patterns at the tribe’s smallest casino, Bok Homa, in Heidelberg, surprised tribal leadership somewhat: it outperformed both of the tribe’s other casinos in the state, and local patrons outweighed guests.
Third shift staff, Carson said, are “very aware of who comes in,” and tends to “see people coming in at five and six in the morning to place bets, and then, after work, coming back to see if they won.”
She also said that attendance by the age 21-to-32 demographic had increased, likely due to NBA and NCAA games.
“We see what’s going on,” Rocha said. “There’s a real desire for sports betting around the country, and the tribes understand this.”
California is trending toward sports betting, which was a claim that Rocha said he couldn’t have made at last month’s Global Gaming Expo. Mobile betting, on the other hand, is another matter.
“The tribes need to make sure that (mobile) is right for us,” he said. “The tribes now have an industry that raises $37 billion annually. Before tribal gaming, we were nowhere near this. This is the only thing that’s ever worked to pull tribes out of abject poverty. We cannot make mistakes.”
Rocha added that “everyone is on the same page, and it’s not oppositional. It’s a lot closer than it’s ever been. It’s a matter of fitting (sports betting) into the existing agreements.”
Justin Martin is the associate editor of CDC Gaming. He can be reached at jmartin@cdcgamingreports.com
