It wasn’t so long ago that the only places you could wager on sport was in Nevada or with your dodgy mate running the office pool.
But ever since the Supreme Court in it’s infinite wisdom declared the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) unconstitutional in the case of Murphy v NCAA 584 U.S. 453 (2018), you can’t turn on the game without being bombarded by many online sportsbooks and the odds for various wagering opportunities.
That started the stampede of states moving heaven and earth to legalise betting on sports within their borders and the proliferation of online bookies just waiting for the customers to start blasting money into their bank accounts with a proverbial fire hose.
North Carolina was relatively late to the party in that it took another five years before the General Assembly could see that the winds that finally forced them to implement their own lottery to capture revenue that was escaping to our neighbours all round us were also blowing in the direction of throwing us to the sports bookies as well.
There were the usual howls of protest about gambling and the inevitable decay in morality that comes of it but at the end of the day, money talks and a certain other smelly substance walks and that started the deluge of betting line information in pretty much every broadcast or online recap/box score.
It’s gotten bad enough that when you click on the link to the recap of the game or even the live reporting on it such as a game cast, the default screen you see is all of the betting lines.
It’s kind of annoying to those of us who understand how math works in practise and the fact that the house has rigged the odds so that it always wins but there’s no stuffing that genie back into the bottle.
If you want to bet on sport, then by all means do as you wish.
It’s not the best idea in North Carolina from a tax standpoint as North Carolina has a unique decoupling from Federal tax law where gambling losses cannot be deducted as a state itemised deduction which means you’re going to pay tax on every winning bet no matter how many losing bets you were hoping to offset against those winnings.
The General Assembly might well change that provision to tax gambling as a profit-seeking venture like businesses are but the increased tax collections (and opportunities to prosecute those who try to evade tax on gambling!) will probably encourage them to keep legislating solutions in desperate search of problems as opposed to actually solving real problems faced by the citizens of this state.
But I had to laugh when I was checking in on the Columbus Blue Jackets game versus the Hurricanes and saw the moneyline odds on the expected winner being offered by Fanduel late in the third period when there really was no doubt as to the outcome of the game.
-100000?!?
Have the bookies truly lost their flipping minds?
So on a hypothetical bet of $100 in favour of the Hurricanes at those odds, the payout would be a whopping $100.10.
A flipping dime!
It’d be interesting to know how many people go for absurd bets like that versus how many times the bet was actually lost.
I’m betting it’s likely just as stark a divide…
