Free Republic

Sports betting is having a big moment in the United States. Prominent voices from professional sports and politics have indicated they’re willing to discuss expanding sports gambling, which is legal only in a handful of states. Meanwhile, Nevada has broadened the types of wagers it offers, and people appear to be betting on sports more than ever before. CALLS TO EXPAND The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, passed by Congress in 1992, made sports betting illegal in almost every state. Nevada, Oregon, Montana and Delaware are exempt from the law, but beyond Nevada, wagering is allowed only on a...

Andy Kiersz February 11, 2015 The Powerball lottery drawing for Wednesday evening has an estimated jackpot prize of $500 million. While that's a huge amount of money, buying a ticket is still probably a losing proposition. Consider the expected value When trying to evaluate the outcome of a risky, probabilistic event like the lottery, one of the first things to look at is "expected value". The expected value of a randomly decided process is found by taking all of the possible outcomes of the process, multiplying each outcome by its probability, and adding all of these numbers up. This gives...

Caesars Entertainment Corp. ’s largest unit is preparing to file for bankruptcy protection as soon as Thursday, the final gambit of a years long attempt to salvage a soured buyout. Caesars Entertainment Operating Co.’s Chapter 11 filing would launch the final stage of Apollo Global Management LLC’s effort to save some of its $1.7 billion investment in the company, which it took private in 2008 with fellow buyout firm TPG.

Days before Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers even suited up for a recent game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, an Irishman named Nigel Eccles had collected millions of dollars from people betting on Rodgers’ All-Pro arm. By noon on game day he was raking in $30,000 per minute. By the time Rodgers took his first snap, Eccles had collected $18 million. The action was happening far from the Vegas Strip or a Costa Rican website out of reach of U.S. law enforcement. Eccles’ company, FanDuel, is situated above a storefront in New York City’s Union Square, and its business...

To get a sense of the deep disappointment felt by many here at the twin killings of two potentially lucrative dreams, hydraulic fracturing and a new luxury casino, one needed to look no further than the front-page headline of Thursday’s edition of The Press & Sun-Bulletin. It was two letters, in red type: “NO!” That cry could seemingly be heard all along New York State’s Southern Tier, which borders Pennsylvania and has long been one of the state’s most stubborn economic laggards. In recent years, both hydraulic fracturing — known as fracking — and casinos had been posited as potential...

Want to bet on tomorrow's NFL game between Chicago and Dallas? I do. Newspapers and websites all over America tell their readers that Dallas is favored by three points. That's the "spread" posted by bookies. Millions will be bet on that game, and billions will be bet on other games this weekend -- college football, NBA games, NHL matches, UFC events ... Most of these bets are illegal. This is not a good thing. Recently, National Basketball Association commissioner Adam Silver became the first major professional sports commissioner to endorse legalizing sports betting. In the New York Times, he wrote,...

Flood of big bucks and tortured history spell turmoil for California's Indian casinos When it comes to controlling California's flashy Las Vegas-style casinos, the stakes are enormous for tribes who own the gambling operations that collectively generate billions of dollars a year to sustain Native Americans up and down the state. With this backdrop, several tribes in the past two years have fallen into nasty, sometimes violent, power struggles pitting factions and families against one another. The most recent case, involving the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians near Yosemite National Park, climaxed in an armed raid on Oct. 9 by...

BETTING on professional sports is currently illegal in most of the United States outside of Nevada. I believe we need a different approach. For more than two decades, the National Basketball Association has opposed the expansion of legal sports betting, as have the other major professional sports leagues in the United States. In 1992, the leagues supported the passage by Congress of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, or Paspa, which generally prohibits states from authorizing sports betting. But despite legal restrictions, sports betting is widespread. It is a thriving underground business that operates free from regulation or oversight....

NEW YORK (AP) — Voters in Oregon and the District of Columbia approved ballot measures Tuesday allowing the use of marijuana by adults, elating legalization activists who hope to extend their winning streak across the country. Oregon will join the company of Colorado and Washington state, where voters approved the recreational use of pot two years ago. And the District of Columbia is on the same path unless Congress, which has review power, blocks the move. Still to come were results from Alaska, which also had a marijuana-legalization measure on its ballot Tuesday. Other volatile issues on state ballots include...

KENOSHA – The issue of the Kenosha Casino is a hot-button issue in the 2014 race for Wisconsin Governor as Scott Walker (R-Wauwatosa) is yet to make a decision on whether he would approve the casino. However, one union that has been actively campaigning against Scott Walker in Kenosha entered into an agreement with the Menominee Indian Nation. The United Food and Commercial Workers Working Families Advocacy Project, an arm of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, has been active in the State of Wisconsin trying to turn out the vote in the Racine and Kenosha Areas. On September...

Federal agents turned off Internet access to three luxury villas at Caesars Palace then impersonated repair technicians to surreptitiously get inside and collect evidence in an investigation of online sports betting, according to defense lawyers challenging the practice. The FBI employed the ruse against the recommendation of an assistant U.S. attorney, Kimberly Frayn, according to lawyers for four of eight men charged in the case. They filed a motion late Tuesday in federal court in Las Vegas to dismiss evidence in the case. According to a conversation recorded by an investigator for the hotel, the prosecutor told FBI agents "it...

Thirty years ago, disgraced Atlantic City Mayor Michael Matthews stood in front of a federal judge and pleaded guilty to accepting a bribe from an FBI agent posing as a mobster. It was 1984. Atlantic City was a boomtown then, just six years into the casino gambling era that was going to remake the shabby resort town that I was assigned to cover as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Every day, I watched as buses from up and down the East Coast dumped thousands of slot machine mavens and roulette table hopefuls at the eight gambling palaces that had...

No matter what you think of Pete Rose, you can't deny what an electric moment it was on September 11th, 1985, when Rose became baseball's all-time major league hit leader -- a record that still stands today. And yet, the debate over whether his cardinal sin -- gambling on baseball -- should keep him out of the Hall of Fame for life remains as fierce as ever, as correspondent Lee Cowan explains in a profile of Rose, to be aired on CBS' "Sunday Morning" October 19... Take our poll! Do you feel Pete Rose should be inducted into the National...

It never ceases to outrage when those who abide unabashedly and unrepentantly in sin claim to be Christians. Like the two churchgoing San Diego couples whom we previously wrote about – Will and Shirley and Nate and Faith – whose idea of a small group was a casino gambling ring. They were featured in the documentary film “Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians.” More recently there was Alexis McGill Johnson, who this past spring became the chairwoman of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s foremost abortionist. Johnson publicly professes herself a Christian but thinks there nothing wrong with killing...

As one Atlantic City casino after another shut down and left thousands of workers jobless, Mayor Don Guardian insisted that the meltdown that claimed four of his city's 12 casinos since January was actually the opportunity of a lifetime for savvy investors. On Wednesday, someone finally agreed. A Canadian asset management company won a bankruptcy court auction for the failed Revel casino hotel and announced plans to re-open it as a casino....

Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino closed its doors early Tuesday, the fourth Atlantic City casino to go belly-up so far this year. When it opened on May 14, 1984, Donald Trump called it the finest building in Atlantic City, and possibly the nation. But since then, The Donald has left town and cut ties to its casinos. And the Plaza, like many Atlantic City casinos, has seen better days.

For those who promote legalized gambling as a means of economic development or revitalization, or as a painless way to pay for public schools, the recent news from Atlantic City, New Jersey, is sobering. Dominated by its famous boardwalk, the beach resort is familiar to Americans from the popular game of Monopoly, the Miss America pageant and the Democratic Convention that nominated Lyndon B. Johnson for president. Almost 40 years ago, when casino gambling was prohibited by every state except Nevada, New Jersey voters succumbed to a slick campaign that promised to remake the fading resort into Las Vegas East....

Republican Gov. Chris Christie's administration issued a directive Monday allowing the state's casinos and racetracks to offer sports betting, a move likely to be challenged in court by sports leagues. The governor said he took his cue from previous federal court rulings that found that nothing in New Jersey law prohibits the casinos and horse racing tracks from offering sports betting, so long as it's not sponsored or licensed by the state. Soon afterward, one racetrack, Monmouth Park in Oceanport, said it was preparing to offer sports bets "in the very, very near future."

Three premier Atlantic City casinos will be closing in the next two weeks with the lost of almost 6,000 jobs. Another casino closed earlier this year, making the total job loss close to 8,000 - one quarter of casino employment in the city.Over the last few years, tax revenue from casinos has fallen precipitously which have led to massive budget problems for the city. The recession is to blame, but Atlantic City's problems go deeper than it being a one industry town. Philly.com: The closing of three casinos, starting with Showboat and Revel this weekend followed by Trump Plaza two...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Chuck Todd, the new host of NBC's Meet The Press, suggested that Americans who do not pay income tax fund public education more than the rich by buying lottery tickets and going to casinos. While interviewing Ben Carson on CSPAN's After Words, which aired on Sunday, Todd said that Americans who don't pay federal income tax go to casinos or buy lottery tickets and are "spending more money funding our schools, whether it's Detroit or other places." Todd said that though "they are not writing a check to the federal government," poorer Americans "are contributing arguably more money to education...