Sports betting stumbles early
All 3 casinos self report mistakes on colleges
The state’s gaming commission has learned that all three of its licensed casinos, in the short two weeks since sports betting went live, have broken regulations and taken prohibited bets.
“We’ve had three of these, now, in a week-andhalf’s time,” Commissioner Nakisha Skinner said.
Commissioners, last week, revealed that both Encore Boston Harbor and Plainridge Park Casino, in Plainville, in the days after the Jan. 31 launch of in-person sports betting, had allowed a few hours of betting on college basketball games involving Massachusetts teams.
An Act regulating sports wagering, passed last summer, allows betting on most professional and college sports through licensed bet-takers, but prohibits bets on games involving a Bay State college that isn’t a tournament or championship event.
Apparently, sometime after the first unlawful bets were revealed, MGM Springfield notified the commission that they had also allowed betting on college games, this time over the course of two days.
All three incidents were self-reported by the casinos and betting on the prohibited contests stopped when discovered, the commission was told.
Violations of the rules require some response from the commission, they said last week, but since the industry they are attempting to regulate is so new, they weren’t sure what to do about it.
Commissioners learned from staff Tuesday they could hold a full hearing on the matter whenever prohibited bets pop up and issue fines or suspend licenses as appropriate, or they could allow their Investigations and Enforcement Bureau to look into the facts and make recommendations on how to respond to the commission.
“As we were reviewing operator applications we learned that these are relatively routine matters,” Skinner observed, suggesting it was a problem that was perhaps going to pop up frequently, and was therefore best seen to by the IEB before taking over the commission’s schedule.
The rest of the commission seemed to want to keep the ball in their court, preferring to make their decision based off presented facts but without input from investigators.
Commission Chair Cathy Judd-Stein suggested the commission hold a pair of hearings on the issues at Encore and Plainridge in the coming weeks, with a further hearing for MGM Springfield to come.