New Jersey introduces a bill to legalise sports betting

The legislators of New Jersey have introduced a bill for legalising sports betting. The proposed bill omitted all of the fraud-fighting measures suggested by professional sports leagues, though.

The bill, which moves to the full legislature for a likely vote on Thursday, could make New Jersey one of the first states in the USA to formulate legislation to regulate and tax sports bets.

Ralph Caputo, one of the legislators in the state assembly, still upset after the state’s years-long battle with the leagues over legalisation, angrily rebuked representatives from the leagues at a hearing on Monday and said they would get none of the help or fees they requested.

 “The tool you’re looking for is money. That’s not going to happen,” said Caputo, who heads the state Assembly’s gaming committee.

New Jersey and other states are racing for a piece of the estimated $150 billion spent on illegal annual wagers in the United States, after the U.S. Supreme Court in May overturned a 1992 law that had banned sports wagering except in a few places.

Delaware is set to roll out full-scale sports wagering on Tuesday. It was among the handful of states to already have legal sports betting, though it only allowed limited wagers.

Now, the leagues that oversee sports including baseball, football, and basketball, are asking for a share of revenues, saying their anti-corruption efforts must expand and they need the fees to investigate and enforce fair games.

“You guys are in it to make money. This is hypocrisy to the fullest extent,” Caputo told Bryan Seeley, head of investigations, compliance and security at Major League Baseball.

Seeley said New Jersey’s bill “does not give us the tools we need to protect our national pastime.”

The bill does not require New Jersey casinos to share real-time game data, which leagues say they need to aggregate with other states’ data to identify suspicious activity.

Nor does it require state regulators or casinos to share information with leagues – or each other – if they learn a game is fixed.

The legislation also does not bar bets on minor league baseball.

Al Leiter, a major league pitcher for 19 seasons, described how easy it could be to tempt a minor league player into fixing a bet by throwing a particular kind of pitch, for example, or allowing a trainer, equipment manager or masseuse to use injury information to run out and place a mobile bet.

 “I’m a baseball player. I’m not on either side. What I do care about is our sport,” he said at the hearing.

Source: Reuters