Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming October 2016 40 whether to legalize and regulate it, just as they do all other forms of gambling. We agree that the time has come to repeal the current sports betting ban. While the exact amount of money wagered illegally in the US each year is difficult to quantify, a series of recent studies provide some insight into the extent of the problem with Ernst & Young estimating that at least US$149 billion is bet each year. To put that into perspective, US$149 billion is larger than the annual revenues of 442 of the 2015 Fortune 500 companies, double the 2015 revenue of Google and five times that of leading sportswear brand Nike. And that’s only a minimum, with former US Solicitor General Ted Olson recently stating a figure as high as US$500 billion before the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The AGA itself estimates that a combined US$13.6 billion was bet on just the 2016 Super Bowl and the NCAA Basketball March Madness, of which 97% was bet illegally. It is those numbers, according to the Illegal Gambling Advisory Board’s report, that has contributed to a widespread shift in attitudes as to the validity of a legalized and regulated sports betting market. Among those to support the Board’s stance are some of the United States’ major sporting leagues themselves, who once considered sports betting to be a threat to their integrity but now see a regulated industry as their best form of protection. In May, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told ESPN, “Ultimately my job as Commissioner is to protect the integrity of the game. Just like the stock market with insider trading, if you don’t have an open exchange you can’t know what insider trading is going on and to me when there’s an enormous amount of betting … it’s all underground, we have no idea what’s going on and there’s no transparency to the league and you have no sense what’s happening. “Now, don’t get me wrong, we have a lot of ways to monitor activity out there, but for me if all that betting is going on anyway I think it should be legal, I think it should be regulated, it should be transparent to the league and ultimately, it’s our intellectual property as well.” More significant though is the fact that the majority of the Illegal Gambling Advisory Board’s members have a law enforcement background. Chaired by former FBI Deputy Director Tim Murphy, it includes the likes of former Clark County Sheriff Bill Young, former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis and former iGaming Blue Pages iGaming in Depth NBA Commissioner Adam Silver supports a legalized and regulated sports betting industry