iGaming Daily

Anaya McDonald (00:06.363)
The legislative gaming landscape is so vast so far in 2025 with nearly 50 different online gambling bills, but there is a very real chance that literally none of them are going to get enacted into law this year. We're going to do our best to separate the wheat from the chaff on today's episode of iGaming Daily. iGaming Daily is brought to you by OptiMove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. Sorry.

I never mess up. Shoot. I thought there was more for a second and there's not. My bad. Yeah. Redo it or? Okay. Yeah. I'm Jessica Wellman, editor of SBC Americas, coming to you from Manchester with media manager Charlie Horner. We're in the same room for the rare, maybe this, we didn't do this last time I was here. So I think the first.

Well no, events, we've done this before. Yeah. Okay, so it's not the first time ever that we've been in person. The topic today, I feel like you have to be happy that you're not on the SBC America's Beat this year. Be honest. In previous years when we've done this, it's been quite fun. Because there's been bills that you think, well that's got good chance of getting through. There might be a really like entertaining hearing.

This year, it's just a lot. A lot. For listeners, Jess was showing me the tracking sheet that we have for the bills this year. And I took one look and thought, wow, yeah, I am maybe glad that I'm not doing it this year. Having covered the state legislature beats of like new bills and stuff for a few years now, I cannot recall a year where we've had more bills.

I think we're sitting on, and we're not even tracking all of them. I think of the ones that we're kind of keeping a tab on, we're up to 50 at this point in time, which is significantly more than in previous years. I wonder how much of this though is, a lot of these are kind of going back in and fixing something about an existing industry.

Anaya McDonald (02:29.342)
that I guess that whole category of bill didn't necessarily exist five years ago when we're rolling out sports betting everywhere. Yeah, yeah. mean, we've talked a lot in the last couple of years about the lack of legislative movement on sports betting and iGaming. So it is quite ironic that there's so many bills that are coming through. But yeah, there's very low likelihood that most of them will actually come into law.

Yeah, in the BetMGM earnings update, Adam Greenblatt, their CEO, was just like, we are not getting an online casino state this year. Save for Mississippi, where they already have retail sports betting. I'm not sure you're really going to get sports betting movement either. Though you do have Missouri coming later this year because of the ballot referendum. California

punted already, Texas meets this year. There has yet to be any bill introduced related to sports betting. In part, I wonder it's because they know that Dan Patrick will not call it in the Senate and there's no point. I guess the governor of Texas, it's one of those non-news stories. basically said, he tipped his hand a little bit and said, I won't.

He's like, I'd sign a sports betting bill, which isn't resounding endorsement. You know what I mean? I mean, I suppose if you did get it to me, I wouldn't stop you. It's not really like, I'm sure my mom has felt that way about some of the people I've dated in the past, but I doubt that you would call that an endorsement of that human. I mean, I'm not gonna make you break up with him, I suppose. Yeah, but on sports betting though, we are down to the last.

the last few states that, you know, if they haven't been in the first 38 states to launch, then it's gonna be a struggle. yeah, I doubt that we're gonna get much movement on sports betting. The hope was that we get a couple of online casino, but it's just, it looks so unlikely. Yeah, I mean, some of them are dead already, keep in mind. So like Virginia online casinos are dead. Wyoming, it's not.

Anaya McDonald (04:50.721)
technically dead, but there was a hearing where was like, does anybody besides the person who wrote this bill want to support it? And it was just resounding silence in the room. So, you know, that one's kind of dead. And then some of the others, like there was one bill to increase the sports betting age in New Hampshire from 18 to 21. There is a New Hampshire

Online casino bill, but I doubt there's a ton of appetite there. That one, by the way, if passed, would be the first state with 18 plus online casino, which kind of wild. Yeah, that would shake up the apple cart a little bit in terms of iGaming because we talk a lot about the opposition to online casino being protections and consumers and keeping people safe. So having a lower.

age limit would be an odd move. was the New Hampshire Senator, Lang, who at Nickeljuice was like, it's a career suicide to have credit card deposits in your online casino bill. And I was like, and yet nobody has pushed back on the idea that literal high schoolers could do this. So yeah, those are kind of dead. I think, you know, we mentioned there's these other categories that are going back and maybe fixing things or changing things on the dead front.

Much the happiness of the industry measures in Michigan to up taxes on both sports betting and online gaming. Lots of tax ones. Not a bill, but we do have to take a minute to note that the Ohio governor is going back to the well he already went back to, Mike DeWine, and is like, hey, we have a budget shortfall and I need to pay for some stadiums. So how about we double the sports betting tax?

Again. Yeah, a 400 % tax increase in the space of 12 months. would be... not 12. Two and a half year. No, two years, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Because it was six months in to 2023 that it went from 10 to 20. Wow, it was that quick? It was... Yeah. It was around this... As soon as it launched in that first month was like a billion in handle.

Anaya McDonald (07:18.5)
I think somebody, and I will say that time around, somewhat rightfully it was like, we probably lowballed how much we should be charging them. But to go from 10 to 20 to now 40, it takes you from being on the low end of things to basically trailing only New York in terms of oppressive tax rates. I feel very bad for the number of small operators that came into Ohio.

under the pretense of a 10 % tax rate, a relatively low licensing fee, given how, we'll see if there's pushback, but how easily it was doubled last time, don't know how much, it's in his budget, I don't know, with budget bills you always have lawmakers kind of saying, it's horse trading, right? You have to decide what's worth fighting, what concessions you're willing to give.

I don't know how much the lobby from the SBA and such has pull in Ohio that somebody can prioritize that as something to get down. Make it like 25%, you know what I mean? That makes more sense to me than just being like, I can't be bothered to calculate anything, just multiple, just double it again. It's really, really greedy. But I feel like sports betting and gambling in general is a...

bit of an easy target for some of these lawmakers and governors where they can just say, you know, look at all the terrible consequences of gambling, let's tax the eyeballs out of it. But we always come back to it. Sports betting, not the highest margin industry in the world. It's, know, taxing them to the eyeballs isn't gonna turn the dial too much.

Yeah, like they were, the fan duels and drag kings of the world were willing to operate at a loss for a certain period of time. But at a point you do, we've still yet to see egregious changes in New York in terms of maybe they have different numbers than other states, maybe the promos are much less generous. Like that hasn't happened yet. But I think if you have a growing number of states in which

Anaya McDonald (09:35.749)
you know, the margins just simply don't support the tax rate. You probably see some of these go away. I will say the industry, I'm so mean to the industry sometimes when it comes to this, but they didn't do themselves a tremendous amount of favor with how they passed this in the first place, which was during the pandemic and people are scrambling for revenue. It was kind of insane how many states we got to agree to do this in a very quick amount of time.

And it's because all of these government affairs people are like, do you need revenue? Here's a very easy source of revenue. So if that's what you get in your head of the lawmakers, it's fundamentally crazy greedy of Mike DeWine to suggest 40%. Let me say that. But if you put in the heads of every Ohio lawmaker that the chief selling point of your industry is tax dollars without infrastructure,

Yeah, not surprised people are kind of coming back to this number now and being like, well, let's just up that, you know? Yeah, if we're going for egregious bills this year, then, you know, it's not a bill yet, but I'm sure we'll be tracking it when it does come through. That's definitely going to be in the egregious category. Are there any others that you think are particularly out there in terms of what they're trying to achieve? There's a weird kind of movement now.

I almost like it, like we'll corrupt them from within. It's like, what is it, the Public Health Advocacy Institute? That is the group that has sued some operators and Harry Levant is involved with the Safe Bet Act. They have their hands on like a Massachusetts online casino bill that is like the most prohibitive online casino bill ever.

where it's just so untenable to any operator. It's like you can't advertise, you can't do all sorts of things. In Minnesota, which I think you recall, we always get four or five sports betting bills because there's so many competing interests. There's one, it wasn't that PHAI said they were involved with it, but it was interesting that the one that came out this week, it has,

Anaya McDonald (12:01.002)
increased ad restrictions compared to other states. Not just that we're gonna ban risk-free, but we'll ban the synonyms of these kinds of things. There are lots of places where it's like, you recall Massachusetts, I don't remember, it's like 40 % of a sporting events crowd, if they're children, you can't advertise there or something. It's something like 30, 40%. This one is like,

anything be it an ad channel, a television program, and a sporting event, if more than 10 % are young, are under the betting age. Which, I was trying to Google around for it, like I would assume your average NFL game has at least 10 % people under the age of 21 watching. Yeah, absolutely. I would imagine, yeah, at least 10, possibly even 20%.

I mean they say the youths aren't watching live sports like they used to but like 10 % is not that hard of a number to get to. know my nephew is 15 and watches all sorts of sports on TV and stuff every day. So yeah, there's that. It would prohibit in-game betting altogether, like no wagers after the whistle, which again, so it's interesting to me that

There are now bills in there that seem designed expressly by people who don't like sports betting, to legalize sports betting, maybe as a means to potentially compete with other bills. Or, we had a nice chat in the Manchester office yesterday about tacking on amendments to bills. It might make it simpler to tack on some of these amendments to other sports betting bills, potentially in the future.

Minnesota, it's still kind of early to tell on that one too. You really don't know how much traction there is. if you can get, you know, I recall Stevenson, the rep there saying he had some sort of truce between the tribes and the card rooms, that if that's true, maybe we'll see it go forward. We've spent such a long time bagging on things, so we'll take a moment to let you guys recalibrate. We'll take a breath. I'll try to see if I can find the size of an NFL television audience of children.

Anaya McDonald (14:22.687)
We'll come back and talk about anything that actually may move forward.

Anaya McDonald (14:32.714)
too loud, huh?

Anaya McDonald (14:40.93)
All right, welcome back to iGaming Daily, where we are running down in early February where we stand legislatively. I know we've said there are basically no bills that stand a chance of passing. I will say there are a few that do seem to be making some progress, and some of them are not necessarily like expansion bills. Some are, and one that I feel like

You know, it's Groundhog Day all over again. Mississippi expanding from retail to include online sports betting. Already making similar progress as it has last year. I wouldn't be surprised if this one maybe has the legs to pass. There's still so much backlash from smaller casinos about cannibalization and the lack of it being useful for them.

And that's a lot of the time when these bills are going through, each state has its own different context in terms of it will either tribal interests or the land-based casino interests. And you have to account for those vested interests because vested interests, they carry a lot of weight. And, you know, again, we were talking in the office about why certain things aren't happening or things are slowing down. And that was the big point was there are vested interests and they are powerful.

Sometimes you just need a compromise or a way through or a deal that you can make through back channels or whatever that you can get these people just to agree and it's particularly difficult. Yeah, it's it's not simple, but you kind of segue right into a category that it's kind of hard for me to ballpark how these are going to do. There are several bills. Most of them are prohibiting sweepstakes.

or in the case of New Jersey, it's unclear what kind of license they would need to obtain, but it sure seems like a full, potentially a full casino license to which if I'm VGW and I have to become a licensed casino in New Jersey, like I'm going to get rid of this dual currency thing that takes me 30 minutes to explain to everybody and I'm just going to become a regular online casino, you know?

Anaya McDonald (17:05.433)
But your point is you need a middle ground. And I hear a lot of people saying we're gonna get into like regulating sweeps and I struggle to picture what a middle ground of that looks like. Like if you're bed MGM and like what kind of regulation on Chumba casino is satisfactory to you?

Yeah, there isn't a middle ground because you're either competing with them or you're not. So if they regulate these sweepstake casinos, is BetMGM going to launch a dual currency? I don't think so, but on the same token, how do the sweepstake casinos compete with BetMGM? I don't see how it overlaps.

Anaya McDonald (17:59.601)
Charlie, stop lying to me. Oh, sorry. It's all right, don't worry. I keep messing up today. Well, I can't help sneezing. Yeah, and so that's kind of the question. If you created some track that's like, you know, it's $250,000 a year for a sweepstakes license and you don't have to get the same compliance and oversight or.

Maybe you're taxed at a different rate.

I can't envision a situation. This is the only way that I see BetMGM being like, well, if we can do that as a publicly traded company and I don't have to worry about potential legal ramifications, we're shutting down this other thing and I'm gonna go do that. Yeah, I just can't figure out for these people that say there's some version of this where it just becomes regulated. Like they let DFS be regulated because like,

it's not the same experience as sports betting. still, they've gotten very creative in the kinds of things that they can offer, but it's still fundamentally not the same product as a sports book, whereas this stuff's the same. Yeah, but as well, we did have the whole DFS 2.0 saga, and as soon as DFS started to take a step towards sports betting, the states were very, very quick to...

send out cease and desist letters and say, you can't do this anymore. But now when you look at it, most of them have these peer to peer versions of the product in these, and they've reentered so many states that like, doesn't seem like it's that bad for them. Also this year, many multiple bills, I say many, at least two, Maryland and Illinois bills to explicitly legalize against the house fantasy, which.

Anaya McDonald (20:02.096)
It's funny to me, it's just like, are you guys just so focused on sweeps this session that the prize picks and what is it, the FSA, the FSC, Fantasy Sports Coalition or whatever it is, are they just getting in the ears of lawmakers and being like, hey, well, no one's looking, can you make this explicitly legal? Everybody else is paying attention to other things. So yeah, we have these sweeps ones in, where are they?

New Jersey's the one that is, they need a license. There's one in Maryland, there's one in Connecticut, there is one in Iowa, there is one in Mississippi. So we'll see if any of those gain traction. Interesting thing, none of them have the same definition of what fantasy sport, or what a sweepstakes casino is.

feels like that needs to be ironed out at some point. Well, the Connecticut one, it's like, for those of you who don't look at legislation, there's what's called a marked up version of legislation where you are taking a piece of legislation or piece of the Constitution that already exists and you're just inserting new language and new sections in it. You can kind of see what the new sections are because they're underlined. And they really just kind of amended this one section about how sweepstakes

in general, like whether it be for McDonald's or for Chumba work, that it has to be for legitimate good or service. can't be, it can't mimic a gambling device. And then this new one they've added, or like can't explicitly allow gambling. Again, I think you're gonna create situations where it's like, if KFC wants to do a bingo game.

are they now not allowed to do that? This is where, yeah, the lines kind of blur and things can get quite confusing very quickly. Yeah, it's unclear. Again, and then, you know, which one was it? One of the states I remember reading, Mississippi is the one, they don't even bother. They're just like, online sweepstakes casinos are now illegal. And I'm just like.

Anaya McDonald (22:27.381)
you don't even you're not even going to tell us what they are. Okie dokie then. So that's the part that remains interesting to me. And we'll see there there's getting a lot of pushback. The Connecticut one, I'm going to point out one last trend. You can read about this more on Lottery Daily. Our colleague, Victor Kaed, wrote about this within that Connecticut bill. They're also amending the language to explicitly outlaw lottery couriers.

that's interesting to the likes of these third party apps that allow you to... Jackpocket. Which have been expanding into states and save for New Jersey and New York where they actually are regulated and licensed. Most of these states they're going into, it's just kind of gray. For those who don't know what a lottery courier is, essentially you download the app Jackpocket or jackpot or lotto.com or whatever.

And instead of me going to the gas station to buy lotto tickets, I'll just on the app be like, I wanna buy three Powerball tickets and I want you to randomly pick the numbers or I want them to be these numbers. And then on the other end, they go to their retail partner and buy lottery tickets from them. Connecticut is state that the gaming is really just the two tribes and then that third license for sports betting is the Connecticut Lottery. Because that's the only other group that's really there.

So that's a state where the lottery kind of has an outsized influence compared to other gaming states that that might explain why that got in there. Victor was asking me, he's like, why would they oppose it? And I'm like, I think some of it is that you wanna make sure that your retail partners like gas stations and grocery stores don't feel like they're being undermined. I mean, you're still set,

It's true they're still happy to sell tickets, but that might be kind of the explanation to it. Yeah, we'll see how much lottery influence. At Nickelgeese, it was interesting. The lottery was like, we're fine with you doing online casinos, but we would much rather, it was like Maeve who works with like a NASBAL or something like that. One of the lottery trade groups was like, we'd rather you legalize online lottery first so that we can get a head start.

Anaya McDonald (24:52.109)
For those who don't know, online lottery games, scratch-offs are just slot machines. Or commiserate, we'd rather have a head start. We certainly don't want you to legalize online casinos and then legalize online lotteries. So that's another one to keep out for. I think that's a really interesting one that we should keep an eye on because the lotteries have had a big influence in the past in a lot of states and their influence has

kind of dwindled as online sports betting and i-gaming in certain states has risen that, maybe look out for some bills that give a little bit of control back to the lotteries. Especially if you're looking to maximize how much money is going straight back into an account from the state that you reside in. All right, this has been a bit of a long one. I can't help it. I'm in person with Charlie. Also, 50 bills, we didn't even cover half of them, take a long time. So.

Keep tuning in to SBC Americas. They've got some bill coverage on iGaming Expert, our recently rebranded slash launch new site that I will be contributing to, as well as some stuff on Lottery Daily. So check out the whole SBC network throughout the coming months to keep tabs on 50, if not 60, if not 70, of which two might eventually become law. All right, thanks for tuning into iGaming Daily. We will see you again next time.