Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts faces cameras on the field inside the Caesars Superdome during the Super Bowl Opening Night on Feb. 3, 2025, in New Orleans. (Michael DeMocker/Getty Images)
When fans, both casual and committed, place their bets on Super Bowl LIX, many will be focused on proposition bets, such as the distance of Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ first touchdown pass (the over/under is 9.5 yards even money at the Rampart Casino in Las Vegas, as of publication), or dozens of similar wagers.
They’re unlikely to ponder the illegal betting operations that siphon tax dollars from state and local governments, the millions of Americans devastated by gambling addiction, or the dozens of athletes and coaches caught up in recent betting scandals.
In the seven years since the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PAPSA), the federal statute that gave Nevada a monopoly on legal sports betting for a quarter of a century, sports betting has exploded.
In 2024, legal bettors wagered a record $142.5 billion, with operators holding $13.2 billion, or 9.3% in revenue. States and local governments collected $2.9 billion in taxes.
By comparison, in 2017, the last year of Nevada’s reign as America’s only legal sports betting option, legal bettors laid down $248.8 million, with the state’s sportsbooks holding 5% of the action.
Americans are expected to legally bet $1.39 billion alone on Sunday’s game, reports ESPN.
Nevada, just years ago the mecca of legal sports gambling, is no longer a major player. Its sports betting action, in the national scheme, is insignificant.
“Proliferation is definitely diluting the Vegas brand,” says Jim Dowling, a former Internal Revenue Service agent who is now an anti-money laundering consultant.
More than half of the states with legal betting ended 2024 with a double-digit percentage hold, according to Legal Sports Report, which noted Nevada’s 6.4% take is “still the leanest of them all” thanks to a “relatively sharp base of Las Vegas bettors and a comparatively limited menu of props and parlays…”
Last year, Nevada’s sports betting win of $482 million was flat from the previous year. The $7.9 billion handle, or amount bet, was down 4.5% from the previous year. But mobile sports betting in Nevada was up almost 19% year-to-year with revenue of $285.8 million.
New York’s sports betting economy is twice as large as any market in the country and growing, with a handle of $22.5 billion in 2024, up 18% from 2023, according to Legal Sports Report.
Sports books in New York, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island pay 51% in taxes, compared with Nevada and Idaho, which pay 6.75%, the lowest rate in the nation.
“Once sports betting was legalized, it was a rush to the death,” says Dowling. “Everyone ran to get into sports and it’s gone crazy. The rules have been bent. There are no athletes, just paid performers.” The only limitation to the online gambling market, he says, may be the threat posed by bad actors trying to launder illicit money, ‘lay off’ action for illegal betting rings, affect odds, and coerce or threaten athletes.
It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game
Americans bet nearly $64 billion with illegal online sportsbooks and bookies a year, says the American Gaming Association. A majority of gamblers want to place legal bets, according to the AGA, but are “deceived by unlicensed, offshore websites that pose as legal operators.”
State gambling regulators ask feds for help combating illegal offshore betting
Matthew Wein, a former Policy Advisor to the Department of Homeland Security, says some may wonder about sports league’s reliance on revenue from partnerships with online sportsbooks, and “are concerned they won’t be able to push back against negative things the platforms might do to affect the integrity of the sport.”
Last year, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell estimated the league had suspended 13 players and 25 league employees for gambling. League rules require that players be suspended one year for betting on league games and two years for betting on their own games.
“Betting integrity monitors within a league can tell if an athlete is betting on a sport, especially from a facility owned by a team,” says Wein, “But if an athlete gambles through an illegal bookie and loses a large sum– even if the bet would otherwise be allowed by the league’s gambling policy– it opens them up to outside influence. And this would take place (potentially) beyond the view of integrity monitors. This is especially concerning if they are using an illegal bookie to wash bets on their own team or their own sport.”
Mathew Bowyer, one of the illegal bookmakers who admitted last year to laundering ill-gotten gains in Las Vegas casinos, booked at least 19,000 bets from September 2021 through January 2024 for Ippei Mizuhara, the interpreter who stole some $17 million from Major League Baseball star Shohei Ohtani. Ohtani, authorities say, was oblivious to Mizuhara’s betting.
Bowyer, however, says athletes were among those who placed bets on his Costa Rica-based websites.
“If 50 percent are gambling, I would think 10 percent of those are compulsive gamblers,” Bowyer told the New York Post this week, adding he believes less than 3% of athletes wager on their own sport.
In January, Bowyer, who has pleaded guilty to money laundering, making illegal bets, and filing a false tax return, revealed on Instagram that former baseball star and manager Pete Rose, who was banned for life from baseball for betting on the sport, was among his clients. Rose died in September.
“When I met Pete Rose at the Palms Casino race and sportsbook, one of the things I really liked about him was how authentic he was,” Bowyer said in a video. “He was there betting horses almost every day. He was a complete degenerate, very similar to myself, in all sports. He started betting with me through my website, and we became friends, and he’d been with me for a few years.”
Nevada has long considered itself the gold standard of gaming regulation, but it took federal agents out of California to bust Bowyer and others.
“Our illegal market has been minimized, because we have a legal market,” Nevada Gaming Control Board chairman Kirk Hendrick said in December during a presentation at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas. “But if you’ve read the newspapers lately, we’ve had a couple of instances where illegal bookies from other states have been coming into Nevada.”
Hendrick was Gov. Joe Lombardo’s newly-minted GCB chairman in 2023 when board member George Assad, also appointed by Lombardo, unilaterally announced that regulators determined allegations involving money laundering “against Resorts World and its president, Scott Sibella, were found to be unsubstantiated.”
Sibella looks forward to working in gaming after guilty plea. Can he get a license?
Months later, Resorts World terminated Sibella, following news of a federal investigation and issuance of a federal subpoena to the hotel. He has since pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of failing to report a $120,000 cash payment to MGM in 2018 from Wayne Nix, a former minor league baseball player who admitted to operating an illegal sports betting ring.
State gaming regulators eventually filed a complaint against Sibella, who agreed to relinquish his gaming license. However, regulators have taken no action against MGM.
Hendrick, at a critical time for gaming regulators, is leaving his post on the GCB at the end of the Nevada legislative session in June, after serving two years of a four-year term. His replacement, to be appointed by Gov. Joe Lombardo, will be the sixth person in seven years to chair the GCB.
The GCB “seems to be focused on problem gambling, underage gambling, advertising, whether the consumer is being cheated, although they’re mandated to ensure that casinos comply with state and federal regulations,” Dowling, the anti-money laundering consultant, said during an interview. “That’s a wide breadth of responsibility. I don’t think they had people with the skill set to identify money laundering and they weren’t looking at it. It’s hard to see unless you get in and do some analytics or have someone on the inside telling you.”
“The U.S. Attorney’s office in Las Vegas is broken. These are political appointees,” Dowling asserts. “Do you think they’re going to authorize or pursue a criminal case against the casino that four years from now, they’re going to ask for business?”
Jason Frierson, who served in that capacity during the federal probe but left the post recently, has not responded to numerous requests for comment.
The GCB has yet to resolve a complaint against Resorts World for allowing Bowyer, poker player and admitted illegal bookie Damien Leforbes, and others to gamble. The complaint alleges compliance officials knew Bowyer was a bookie, and the hotel’s sportsbook approached Bowyer to ‘lay off’ its action, thereby reducing the hotel’s risk on games with lopsided wagers.
Illegal bookies “come to Vegas because they have a lot of money. If they win great, they’ve laundered money. If they lose, they’ve laundered money,” Hendrick said at G2E. “It’s up to our licensees here to be sure they know their customers and where their customers’ money is coming from, and making sure their play equals what they’re bringing in.”
Coming of age
The evolution of sports betting may be best illustrated by the NFL’s 2003 response to Las Vegas tourism officials’ attempt to buy an ad on the Super Bowl. “The NFL has a long-standing policy that prohibits the acceptance of any message that makes reference to or mention of sports betting,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy told the Washington Post at the time.
NFL Commissioner Goodell said the NFL’s members “still strongly oppose legalized sports gambling” even after team owners approved the Raiders’ move to Las Vegas.
Today, sports betting is legal in 39 states and the District of Columbia, and plagued by growing pains, on and off the field. Leagues that avoided alliances with casinos now have lucrative partnerships with multiple online sportsbooks.
Last year, Las Vegas hosted the Super Bowl and Southern Nevada is now home to NFL, NHL, and WNBA teams, with Major League Baseball coming to a partially publicly-financed stadium soon.
“The leagues saw the Supreme Court ruling as a huge money making opportunity for them in terms of licensing and how they monetize that,” says Prof. Harry Crane Jr., a sports betting expert. “It’s also made the value of the teams in these leagues go up significantly.”
Even Mickey Mouse is in on the action: ESPN Bet is owned in large part by the Walt Disney Company.
Athletes are under investigation for betting on their own sports, under attack for failing to meet the demands of individual gambler’s proposition bets, and facing the prospect of federal regulation.
“When a bet doesn’t hit, angry bettors often take it out on the players,” Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, said in his opening statement at a December hearing on sports betting before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “In a victory over Michigan State in last year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, North Carolina star Armando Bacot had a great game, scoring 18 points and grabbing seven rebounds in his team’s win. But he didn’t have enough rebounds to make certain gamblers’ bets pay off. Bacot reported getting over 100 messages from gamblers after the game berating him because they lost their bets.”
Dr. Harry Levant, a recovering gambling addict, told the Judiciary Committee he made his last bet in 2014, “and on that same night, nearly took my own life. With gambling addiction, the risk of suicide is omnipresent.”
Levant noted that gambling is the only addictive product not regulated by the federal government. “Sadly, with gambling the exact opposite is occurring,” he said, adding the business model “is designed to deliver constant and nonstop action on every phone, tablet and computer. With the use of technology and AI, the industry and its sports and media partners have turned every micro moment in each game or event into more and more gambling action.”
A bill introduced last year, the SAFE Bet Act, seeks to address the public health threat posed by sports betting proliferation.
“Arguably, the (regulatory) talent would be less diluted, and you’d be able to have the best people working on it,” says Crane. “The flip side is when things go federal, they tend to be more corrupt or just more bureaucratic.”
U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, and Rep. Dina Titus, also a Nevada Democrat, favor state regulation over federal. The other members of the Nevada delegation did not respond to requests for comment.
‘A currency by any other name’
Casinos in Nevada prohibit the use of cryptocurrency to buy chips on the casino floor, although kiosks allow gamblers to convert digital wallet currency to cash, a popular means of money laundering.
Crypto is also used to purchase chips, not from the casino, but from individuals, especially in casino poker rooms, which are not regulated in Nevada to the extent that table games are monitored. “People swap both ways all the time,” says an illegal bookie the Current agreed not to name in order to gather information. “Chips, cash, crypto, etc., back and forth. Supply and demand based on who needs what.”
Sports books disallow bets with crypto because the value could fluctuate between the time the bet is made and when the book has to pay out.
“In many instances because everything that happens on the block chain is recorded there is more of a record than simply using cash or chips,” says Wein. “So in some instances it actually may be easier to track the use of cryptocurrency.”
The bookie, however, says digital currencies are “essentially the same as cash,” in that nothing “is tied to you and only you.”
GCB Chair Hendrick has declined to discuss crypto in casinos, sports betting and the integrity of sports with the Current, but said at G2E that if companies are “tilting the scale or not being fair to the consumer, that would be a ripple that would go through the industry and cause a lot of harm,” the same as if “a major sports organization had a significant systematic organizational failure, like match fixing, which would cause people not to trust that sport. I don’t think either is going to happen, because regulators and the industry are working together, but those would be very big issues.”