Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00All right. Let's get to the latest in California. Sports betting alliance involved. California is still looking to legalize sports betting. It seems like the alliance, by the way, in some of the discussion here is looking for the tribal companies basically essentially to do a better job of regulating or at least institute more regulation. What is going on here?
00:21Well, what we have here, Craig, is that there is a form of gaming out there called sweepstakes gaming. There are various websites that offer casino like or sports betting like experiences that are not regulated through the same rules.
00:36They are regulated through sweepstakes rules. When you think sweepstakes rules, you think about when you see something that says no purchase necessary, right? You think about the McDonald's Monopoly game, and that's kind of what they are linking it to here.
00:52And California wants no part of that. They want to make sure that when sports betting comes to California that they are in control, that they know what's going on, and that they're the end all be all.
01:05And they're saying that this is simply an unregulated sports book hiding under the sweepstakes laws. And I don't know if you can call it that. If the sweepstakes laws are legitimate and they are operating legitimately under those laws, then I think you have a different issue here that gaming is going to have to figure out altogether.
01:25But what strikes me about this, Craig, is you have the California tribes on one side. Now, on the other side, you have the Sports Betting Alliance who's made up of FanDuel, DraftKings, Fanatics, and BetMGM. And just remember until the last time we tried to get sports betting passed in California, these guys hated each other, man.
01:41And now the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And so we see them partnering up and doing what they can to get these sweepstakes shut down. But it's trickier than that. They tried to go to regulatory agencies and say that this is unlawful gaming.
02:01And yeah, maybe it's unlawful if you're trying to apply iGaming laws to it. But that is not what these sweepstakes companies say they are. And it's going to be interesting to see how this shakes out because right now, Craig, there are some sweepstakes websites out there that maybe are even offering a better price on some things than a sports book might be.
02:28And the regulated industry will say, well, of course they can. They're not paying the same taxes as us. They're not paying the same license fees as us. They don't have as much regulation as us or oversight. And so the sweepstakes guys are saying, no, we do. We do the same know your customer. We do the same kind of checks that everybody else does.
02:47And not all of them do, but some of them do it very well. Some of them use the same vendors that the gambling operators use. So really kind of crazy story here, Craig, with how it's going to shake out. But California, the tribes are insisting that they want no part of this. And look, the California tribes are a powerful entity in California.
03:11Usually if they want something, it happens. So we'll have to see where exactly they take the sweepstakes conversation in California.