Our Beautiful Idiots Finally Legalized Sports Gambling
Our Beautiful Idiots Finally Legalized Sports Gambling
But what Governor Mike DeWine once called "an inevitability" might not happen until January 2023.
Think about where you were in May 2018. The top song on the charts was Drake’s Nice For You. We hadn’t even heard the phrase “the novel coronavirus” yet. It seems like another lifetime ago, right?
May 2018 was also when the Supreme Court struck down Nevada’s monopoly on sports gambling. After all, it’s not like the mob’s right to profiteer on sports-loving gambling addicts in the Nevada desert is enshrined in the Constitution.
New Jersey, which challenged the monopoly in the first place, legalized sports betting almost overnight. Their state has collected a windfall thanks to their legislatures’ foresight. Here is one monthly pull from earlier this year:
Unfortunately the only foresight that Ohio politicians seem to have is how they’re going to abandon a teenage mother once she converts her fetus into a living human that will burden her financially and emotionally for the rest of her life as she’s overworked into an early grave.
I’ve written extensively on why Ohio has failed to legalize sports gambling despite numerous attempts. Basically, it was a squabble over which of their cronies — the Lottery Commission or the Gaming Commission and the companies associated with each — were going to get to enjoy new multimillion dollar revenue streams.
A story almost as old as the state itself.
That struggle went away the moment the Ohio House expelled former Speaker Larry Householder, who was a longtime advocate of sports gambling landing with the Lottery Commission, was arrested on RICO charges.
With that bozo on the fast track to dying alone in federal prison, our state’s most beautiful idiots finally got together and compromised a surprisingly decent bill that doesn’t favor one industry over the other by passing bipartisan legislation the governor is expected to sign in the coming days.
From Mary M. Shaffrey of gamingtoday.com:
The Ohio Casino Control Commission will regulate sports betting.
The legislation says there will be a maximum of 25 licenses for large retailers – existing casinos and racinos – who can support their bets, such as existing casinos who could join forces with mobile apps such as FanDuel or DraftKings. More licenses could be made available, but the applicants would have to demonstrate “the sports gaming market [in Ohio] needs additional …gaming proprietors.”
License applicants would be allowed to team up with at most two “skins,” with a different cost for each, according to The Columbus Dispatch. The first would cost $3 million, the second would cost $10 million.
A bone of contention in getting the bill over the finish line was allowing certain entertainment facilities to host sports betting kiosks for over/under bets. Wednesday’s legislation allows bars and restaurants with a specific license to host the kiosks.
Being able to gamble on some random game I’m watching at the bar is going to feel like my first trip into one of the state’s medical marijuana facilities. Surreal won’t even begin to grasp the surface of the moment.
I have become so used to not having nice things due to living in Ohio that I expected to die before I could exercise my god-given right to lose $20 gambling on the second-half line of a shitty Monday Night Football game while sitting crooked at the local bar… or even Cedar Point! (Ohio rocks, folks! People are saying it more and more.)
Another win in the bill is that yes, we will be allowed to gamble on our beloved Ohio A&M Buckeyes despite the small agricultural school trying to use its influence in the Statehouse disallow that. Head coach Ryan Day better get his shit together, because he was even worse against the spread this year than his pitiful two-loss record already indicates.
Because Ohio remains a police state, however, we will not be allowed to legally gamble on high school games. Degenerate fathers living vicariously through their steroid-addled teenage sons will have to keep handling that kind of business in the parking lot while buzzed on three Busch Lights.
The other drawback—and it’s a big one—is the bill doesn’t set a final deadline until January 2023. Remember, this is Ohio, where the medical marijuana rollout was so disastrous the only explanation was that legislators were intentionally trying to strangle the program in the crib.
Our only hope of beating that deadline is the associated businesses realize how much money they can make by enacting the program before the 2022 football season, and they promptly slap their stooges in the face to get it done before then.
THOSE WMDs. The triumph of right-wing propaganda in America… Failing and aging infrastructure at the core of Southeast Ohio’s water woes… The case of the Martha Vineyards heiress and the Florida psychic that took her millions… The best mystery novels of 2021… Revisiting Hunter S. Thompsons’s weird, brief tenure as local sports editor.