Arkansas Eyes Changes in Online Betting Laws to Boost Control
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SportsTranscript
00:00So, a legislature in Arkansas is making the claim that they feel problem gambling, meaning
00:09the offshore sports books, are potentially a bigger problem for them than it is for another
00:15state.
00:16So then I thought about this here, and I'm like, Pat, is this just a little posturing
00:19to try to get sports betting legalized?
00:20Because it very well may be.
00:22I don't know.
00:23I mean, I have no data to back it up or not, but I do have to look at things a little cynically
00:29and say, hey, look, I mean, Arkansas is not the only state where people are there without
00:32legal sports betting, like California and Texas, by the way, on the border, that people
00:38have to go online and bet illegally if they want to bet.
00:42Yeah, Arkansas is a very strange state.
00:44I mean, they opened up in 2022, their online sports betting market, and they'd set a revenue
00:51share of 51%.
00:52So 51% of any revenue had to stay in Arkansas.
00:56So you had no interest from out-of-state operators like FanDuel and DraftKings.
01:00So it's a very interesting market in the sense that the leading sports book is BetSaracin,
01:06a five-year-old casino brand in Arkansas.
01:10I mean, that's kind of, again, a weird market when you look at the US sports betting ecosystem.
01:16And again, it's BetSaracin and the CMO, Carl Tinsefa, who's leading kind of the charge
01:23to get online casino legalized.
01:26So it's a very, again, interesting market.
01:29The way they've set it up is the legislator passed some gaming legislation in 2017, I
01:35think it was, that basically said casino gaming is allowed within four walls.
01:42But it's very easy to change the rules and kind of open it up to say, you know, within
01:48the four borders of the state.
01:49And that's what happened in 2022 to open up online sports betting.
01:53Now they're looking at it and saying, hey, we can do that with casino games.
01:57And the reason they want to do that is kind of to shut down the offshore sports or offshore
02:02casinos, which, you know, we've seen lots of cease and desist, the likes of Bovada from
02:08all sorts of regulators.
02:09And this is just kind of the way they want to get it done.
02:13Talking with that chief marketing officer from Saracin yesterday, he said, you know,
02:17we want to get this done because, you know, it's for the consumer protection more than
02:22anything, but we also want to make sure we're protecting our own revenues, that we're protecting
02:27the consumers, that this gets done.
02:30And he said something interesting.
02:32He said Michigan regulators are the ones who are kind of the gold standard for the state
02:36or for the country.
02:38That's great for me up here in Michigan.
02:40But he said, you know, yeah, we're seeing a lot of cease and desist from these states.
02:46Does it do anything?
02:47Most of them, no.
02:48But Michigan, you know, because there's legalized gaming from authorized operators, it helps
02:53push the illegal operators out.
02:55So I think that's something to watch.
02:57And it could be the next online casino state down there in Arkansas.
03:00Does that mean much for the industry and at large?
03:03Probably not because of their revenue sharing situation.