Sports Wagering is Coming to Louisville, Kentucky

A race book is coming to legendary Churchill Downs racetrack this fall.

According to the Churchill Downs website:

Wager on all your favorite professional, college, and amateur sports at our easy to use kiosks. Try your luck on parlays, prop bets, and futures, to live in-game betting that lets you wager as the action unfolds.

Score Big on Sports Betting

Churchill-SportsbookGet in the game and place your sports bets at Churchill Downs Race & Sports Book. Wager on all your favorite professional, college, and amateur – football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, boxing and more. Our sports wagering kiosks make it easy to place any kind of bet – single wager, parlay or anything in between. Its simple, convenient and there’s no waiting in line!

Put on your game face and come place your bets, grab a drink and watch the game on our big screen displays!

Add to your experience by coming out and enjoying live racing at historic Churchill Downs for the September and Fall Meets.

Sports Betting and Horse Racing Coming to North Carolina?

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Regulated sports betting and horse racing is expected to begin across North Carolina in the first half of next year, enabled by legislation Gov. Roy Cooper signed Wednesday that greatly expands gambling opportunities in the ninth-largest state.

The Democratic governor held the bill-signing ceremony at Spectrum Center, home to the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets. It could house one of several anticipated sportsbooks allowed at or near professional sports venues as part of the law that received final approval in the Republican-controlled General Assembly last week.

The new law says betting could begin as early as Jan. 8 or as late as mid-June 2024. Supporters say the expansion will bring new revenue and jobs, and attract stronger in-state pro sports franchises.

“This is an historic moment for the state of North Carolina and this will benefit our economy for generations to come,” Cooper said.

The law directs the North Carolina Lottery Commission to issue as many as 12 interactive sports wagering licenses to entities that would offer mobile and online sports betting to customers who create accounts.

But anyone 21 or older could also make cash bets on pro, college or Olympic-style sports at the eight potential in-person betting locales associated with stadiums, arenas, golf courses and racetracks.

North Carolina will become the 29th state where mobile sports betting occurs or has been authorized, according to the American Gaming Association. Gambling on horse racing would be permitted through separate licensing and accounts.

Legal sports gambling in North Carolina is only happening right now at the state’s three casinos, which are operated by two American Indian tribes. Essentially, the only other legal gambling in the state is a lottery that began in 2006.

Neighboring Tennessee and Virginia already allow mobile sports betting, attracting North Carolina residents to cross state lines to wager. According to bill supporters, regulating and taxing sports betting is the best way to control gambling that otherwise was happening underground or through offshore accounts.

The bill advanced this year despite opposition from a coalition of social conservatives and liberals who said the additional revenues paled in comparison to the damage more gambling addiction would place upon families and society.

A similar political alliance derailed sports gambling legislation last year by just one vote in the House, but lobbyists for legal sports wagering providers in other states and pro sports franchises kept pressing the idea and won more support in the legislature.

The defeat “gave us the opportunity to work harder” and build support for the measure this year, Rep. Jason Saine, a Lincoln County Republican and the chief bill sponsor, said at the ceremony. “We got this over the hump and we’re so glad to do this.”

The legislation will tax sports wagering at a rate equal to 18% of gross betting revenue minus distributed winnings. Legislative analysts estimate that will generate over $100 million in sports betting taxes annually within five years, resulting in $71 million in net revenues for state coffers.

Much of the sports wagering tax revenues would go to local, regional and state athletics initiatives, athletic programs at most schools in the University of North Carolina system and problem-gambling programs. Cooper said on Wednesday that he hoped more future proceeds would help public education.

The law also authorizes the commission to set rules for live horse racing.

 

The Making of Sports Betting Lines

TVG Network Quenches Sports Fans’ Thirst for Live Content With Horse Racing From Around the GlobeKeith Goldner, Vice President of Data Science at FanDuel, led a workshop on the conference’s second day explaining how sports betting lines were made.

“Most people are just familiar with seeing bet lines on their phones; how does it actually work?” Goldner asked the crowd at the start of his presentation.

Goldner said the main responsibility of FanDuel data scientists is to put out probability and sports betting lines as accurately as possible. This task is accomplished through a series of data sets implemented in a specific model.

First, data scientists ask what target they are trying to measure for the sport. Are they looking to predict points? Wins? Performance?

The following impact variables are taken into account and measured through each simulation:

  • Offensive efficiency
  • Opponent defensive efficiency
  • Weather
  • Team pace
  • Opponent pace
  • Defense efficiency
  • Opponent offensive efficiency
  • Injuries

“The more simulations you run, the more accurate your predictions will be,” Goldner stated.  More on the Making of sports betting lines

The Tells for a Fixed Sports Match

old boxing gloves hang on nail 

Integrity Services analysts working 24/7 and operating from their main base in London to hubs in Montevideo, Melbourne, Singapore, Las Vegas and Minneapolis pore over screens of live sporting fixtures and betting odds.

In 2022, they identified 1,212 suspicious matches within 12 sports across 92 countries.

While reflecting an increase of 34% from 2021, the data confirms 99.5% of sporting events are free from match-fixing, with no single sport having a suspicious match ratio greater than 1%.

Harding has at his disposal “a significant network of reconnaissance photographers” who are sent to stadia. Other members of the intelligence unit can also be deployed on site.

“They [the matchfixers] have to be in the stadium to communicate with players, and at times intimidate the players to go ahead with it,” Harding said…

The Tells for a Fixed Match in Sports

Minnesota Sports Betting Act Balances Interests Among Sports Teams, Horse Racing, Tribes

State Senator Jeremy Miller recently announced his intention to introduce the Minnesota Sports Betting Act to legalize retail and online sports betting in the state. Sen. Miller told Gaming Today that his proposed bill will attempt to “strike a balance between stakeholders” to allow Minnesotans to gamble legally.

No Tribal Exclusivity

Unlike HF 776, which passed the Minnesota House last year but failed in the Senate, the Minnesota Sports Betting Act does not provide local tribes with exclusive rights to sports gambling. While some believe that tribal exclusivity is a necessity for any successful Minnesota gambling bill, Sen. Miller feels otherwise.

The Senator believe…

Kentucky Derby Telecast Ranks Higher Than Two Major Sports

“Many around the sports world are well aware that the NFL is king when it comes to viewership in the United States. Based on a latest report on the 2022 Nielsen ratings data by Sportico, that continued to be the case last year.

The NFL accounted for 82 of the 100 most-watched U.S. TV broadcasts in 2022, according to the report. That smashes the previous record of 75 out of 100, a mark that the NFL reached in 2021.

Other broadcast subject categories were able to break through, but not nearly at the rate that NFL was…”

What is interesting is that the Kentucky Derby telecast ranked higher than any event from two major sports – the National Basketball Association (NBA) and Major League Baseball (MLB).

Check out the complete story

 

Betting on Sports – A Hard Way to Make an Easy Living

Sports bettingThat’s how professional sports bettor Cris Zeniuk describes [sports] betting, though he’s made it look easy in recent years.

The Las Vegas resident has had an astonishing run of success in football handicapping contests that includes winning Station Casinos’ pro Last Man Standing last year ($150,000) and college LMS in 2016 ($52,000), and finishing second and fifth in the Circa Million II in 2020 ($244,000)…

1. Fade popular plays

In my first year covering betting in 2017, everybody seemingly loved the Buffalo Bills over the New Orleans Saints in a midseason matchup.

That included nine of the 10 contestants in the RJ NFL Challenge contest who took Buffalo to cover as a 2½-point home underdog. When I alerted VSiN host Matt Youmans, who had picked the Bills, he changed his mind and bet on the Saints. They crushed Buffalo 47-10.

Zeniuk subscribes to the same contrarian theory.

“If everyone is on the same side, I’ll feel better being on the other side,” he said. “I love it when everyone is anti-everything about players or teams. It’s usually a buy spot.”

Get all 10 of Zeniuk’s tips for wagering on football and betting on sports in general.

 

How UK Bookmakers Exploit Sick Sports Bettors and Restrict the Skilled Ones

These 5 States Look Best Positioned To Legalize Sports Betting In 2021It works like this: when a customer opens an account, they might be given a stake factor of 1, meaning they can bet 100% of the normal maximum stake, for example £500.

“As soon as people start winning or losing, that gets adjusted,” said Cameron, formerly of William Hill. “It starts with 50% and if they keep doing it [beating the bookie], it’ll keep going down. At William Hill it went down to 25% to 10% and eventually down to 1%.”

One gambler, Bernard Henry, shared the results of a demand sent to Coral to see what data it held on him, known as a subject access request.

“He’s allowed to lose 40 times what anyone else was and it was astronomical what he was punting. There was no conscience to it.”

It showed he had won just £38 over four years but had been prevented from placing sports bets after the bookie realised he had beaten their odds 73% of the time. He was still allowed to bet on casino products where the house never loses over time.

Henry believes bookmakers shared data about him with other operators, via software that companies are permitted to use which is intended to prevent fraud but might also be used to shut down a smart better.

Everyone the Guardian spoke to said accounts were rarely closed completely, for good reason.

According to Paddy Power’s manual, “warm” customers are “of use to us as marks”, meaning they are worth monitoring to assess if your prices are wrong. Even arbers, seen as cheats in the industry, would be set at a factor of 0.01.

One former employee of Betfair believes this is about satisfying City investors, who see customer numbers as one measurement of success. “If they close all the bad customers, you go from 50,000 active users to 10,000,” he said.

The flipside of factoring down winners is that losers have, over the years, been given more leeway to place ever bigger bets.

The biggest stake factor Rory recalled a customer being allotted was 40. “He’s allowed to lose 40 times what anyone else was and it was astronomical what he was punting. There was no conscience to it.”

One former employee of Betfair believes this is about satisfying City investors, who see customer numbers as one measurement of success. “If they close all the bad customers, you go from 50,000 active users to 10,000,” he said.

 

More on how UK bookmakers operate

Runhappy’s Owner Shakes Off Losing $9.5M on Super Bowl 56

Mattress Mack may have lost $9.5 million betting on the Cincinnati Bengals to win Super Bowl LVI, but he’ll sleep well tonight. That’s because Mack, whose real name is Jim McIngvale, sold $20 million worth of furniture thanks to a Super Bowl promotion he hedged with his wager on the Bengals…

McIngvale has been running these types of promotions and hedging against them with sports wagers for about 15 years, so he says he’s not feeling too sore about losing his $9.5 million wager.

“The biggest thing I’m disappointed with is the fact that my customers didn’t get free furniture,” McIngvale says minutes after Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp caught a pass from quarterback Matthew Stafford in the end zone to win the game 23-20.

Last week, he laid out a $4.5 million bet on Cincinnati to beat the Rams at +170. On Friday, which happened to be McIngvale’s 71st birthday, he wagered another $5 million on the Bengals. According to Caesars Sportsbook, with whom he placed the bets, his $9.5 million stake would’ve paid $16.2 million.

More on Mattress Mack and his Super Bowl wager

Super Bowl 56 Package from Dr. Alan

The Hottest Sports Handicapper in the Land
Over 80% ATS Winners in 2022!

My friend The Wizard, New York’s legendary public handicapper, has never endorsed another handicapper… until he met Dr. Alan, the best sports handicapper and bettor he has ever met. This is why Dr. Alan is the featured sports handicapper on Wizard Race and Sports. Dr. Alan has not disappointed, going on incredible win streaks and producing a profit every year for his loyal followers. Dr. Alan is currently riding a NINE game win streak AGAINST THE SPREAD and he is 13-2 with his select plays, covering college basketball, NBA, and previously college football. This isn’t luck. This is hours of hard work, dedication and experience based on Dr. Alan’s unique method of selecting games.

Dr. Alan is now live with his Super Bowl package – the ATS side selection, the Over/Under and a bonus: his 3 best prop wagers. Put the Doctor in your corner this Super Bowl Sunday!!!

$100 for Super Bowl 56 Package – 5 wagers

 

Dr. Alan the expert

One of Dr. Alan’s Big Wins at Westgate!

Meet Dr. Alan

Dr. Alan got his start in football handicapping and sports wagering over two decades ago through his enjoyment of watching and attending sporting games.

He started off just like the rest of us. Dr. Alan saw that there could be a tremendous opportunity in sports wagering through successful sports handicapping in addition to the enjoyment of being a sports fan.

Dr. Alan decided to pursue the art of football handicapping and sports wagering by approaching it from a business perspective. Dr. Alan went on to invent his special unique method of sports handicapping, which is psychological handicapping, thus earning Dr. Alan his honorary Ph.D. in sports psychology!