Circa Casino in downtown Las Vegas, home to the world’s largest sportsbook, features a 120-by-40-foot television screen, three floors of stadium-style seating, and a pool area with an even larger space. screen where you can rent a cabin for five hundred dollars a day. The high-priced places in Las Vegas tend to be home to sweaty men in designer T-shirts who want to attract women to the V.I.P. club sections, but when I visited Circa last Sunday for eight hours of maniacal football betting, the clientele consisted mostly of young men, also sweaty, in ill-fitting football shirts, soft shorts that could have shop on instagram and baseball caps worn backwards.
The Circa opened its doors two years ago and was, according to the Nevada Independent, “the first hotel-casino downtown in nearly four decades.” (Downtown is home to some of the oldest casinos, such as the Golden Nugget and Binion’s; the Strip is where you’ll find luxury mega-resorts like the Bellagio and the Venetian.) The idea of a casino built around ‘sports betting may seem like a terrible one for many reasons: In 2021, sports betting accounted for less than 1.5 percent of total gambling revenue at a typical Las Vegas Strip casino, while the slots accounted for almost sixty percent. When you consider that every square foot of a casino floor is designed to make money, building giant halls where guys watch the N.F.L. for hours just to, perhaps, sweat a single twenty-dollar bet seems a lot less pragmatic than sticking with the slots, which make punters cash in at a much faster rate and usually at much worse odds.
Circa opened at a time when online sports betting, now legal in more than twenty states and the District of Columbia, was in full swing across the United States. That meant Circa was not only facing stiff competition from well-funded competitors like DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesars, but also trying to sell an in-person experience that might be well out of date. For four of my friends and myself, renting one of Circa’s “Millionaire’s Row” football viewing booths at an N.F.L. Sunday required a minimum of twenty-five hundred dollars for drinks and food, with a mandatory tip of five hundred dollars. Instead of just betting on our phones in front of our own TVs, on our own couches, we had to queue up to bet at a window. Some of the modern innovations in sports betting, including live betting, where you can bet in the middle of a game, and elaborate parlays, where you can bundle multiple exotic bets together for a giant payday, are harder to find in a brick casino and mortar like the Circa. In one app, you can also bet on everything from South American soccer leagues and world cricket matches to political races, most of which weren’t offered at Circa Sportsbook and probably not at bookies. smaller bets in las vegas.
In interviews and in the press, Derek Stevens, the owner of Circa, has been somewhat coy about why he built this place. But here’s my theory: Stevens senses, perhaps correctly, that the widespread legalization of sports gambling will fully publicize what was once an almost underground culture. Betting apps, then, aren’t really their competition, but rather customer service vehicles that could help draw people to their casinos, especially for big events like March Madness and the Super Bowl. It has essentially created the Disney World of sports gambling: a place where large groups of people go a few times in their lives and indulge in everything from gambling to cabanas to spa packages. All it takes for the vision to work is a nation of sports bettors willing to open their wallets.
The creation of a nation of sports bettors would presumably require the participation of the nation’s most populous state. (Thirty percent of visitors to Las Vegas last year came from California.) The state has two measures legalizing sports betting on the ballot this November. Proposition 26 would allow sports gambling, but only at brick-and-mortar tribal casinos and racetracks. Proposition 27 would legalize online sports betting and, if passed, could lead to something like the highly marketed app-based gambling blitzes we’ve seen in New York and New Jersey.
Supporters and opponents of both proposals have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to flood Californians with ads; this has caused a lot of confusion among voters. No one seems to know which proposal does what, which ones are supported by tribes — a major political concern, especially within the progressive nonprofit space — or even what the bills will actually do. The YESon27 website, for example, mentions very little about sports betting. Instead, it focuses almost exclusively on the money the bill would raise to alleviate homelessness through a ten percent monthly state tax on sports betting — the funds would first be used to cover costs regulators, but then eighty-five percent of that money would go toward dealing with the homeless, and the remaining fifteen percent would be distributed to Native American tribes that don’t participate in sports betting.
Most of the money to stop Prop 27 has been raised by gambling tribes that operate casinos who, along with a broad coalition that includes California’s Democratic and Republican parties, have raised everything from the addictive properties of phone gambling to to tribal sovereignty. questions Their argument is based on the premise that playing online is far worse than going to a casino in person, which of course is totally fine. In fact, the big gaming tribes seem to be saying that in-person betting is so good that everyone should support Prop 26 and allow sports betting, but only at racetracks and of course in their casinos .
It’s all a bit silly and fake. One side is using the homelessness crisis as cover to legalize sports betting apps; the other claims that they alone can provide a safe gaming experience. Neither proposal is well polled: a recent U.C. The Berkeley poll showed that only twenty-seven percent of voters support Proposition 27, a response that is doing only slightly worse than Proposition 26, which is seeing support from just one thirty-one percent of likely voters. The stark lack of support has pushed Prop 27 backers, which include major app companies like FanDuel and DraftKings, to mostly give up and wait until 2024 to try again.
None of this means online sports betting is dead in California; in fact, all that really stands out is that many powerful interests seem to be cornering what they believe will be a lucrative market. The amount of money at stake and the rest of the states that have already bought in may mean some kind of compromise between the tribes and app-based gaming companies. Tribes could also spend the next few years trying to build their own apps and try to control the market themselves.
Online sports betting, as I wrote last year, seems to be in line with Robinhood, stock trading apps and cryptocurrency trading to get users, usually young and impressionable men, hooked on losing their money It took New York state about a month after legalization to become, for a time, the largest sports betting market in the country; thanks to aggressive customer acquisition campaigns that included incessant advertising and bonuses and free bets, players in the state wagered $2.8 billion in the first seven weeks. Some studies have shown that sports betting is five times more likely to lead to problem gambling than other types of gambling. Other studies say that online gambling is more addictive than analog casino gambling. (Although it should be noted that, at least in California, casinos are helping to drive that narrative.) Because big online gambling companies can roll out their services almost immediately after legalization and have a ton of money seemingly unlimited by promotions, they will likely outpace any support infrastructure that can be built to help addicted punters.
I’ve spent too much of my adult life in casinos, card rooms, and sportsbooks, where I’ve met more than my fair share of problem gamblers. I’m still not sure if app-based sports betting is much worse than betting on Circa Sportsbook, where a few steps in any direction lead you straight to a slot machine. The idea that it’s somehow healthier to place your bets at a racetrack than on your phone doesn’t really happen. Gambling addiction is based, in many ways, on sensory compulsions: the smell of grass on the court, the sound of a roulette ball bouncing off the face of the wheel, the sharp edges of dice digging into fingers. Whether apps can match the sensations of physical spaces that are designed to take money out of your pockets is still an open question.
There is a well-worn maxim in gambling that you should assume that everyone is lying to you at all times. This rule seems to have carried over into online sports betting discussions as well, where the only thing you can rely on is that every press release and every ad is specifically aimed at cutting someone in on the action or eliminating someone else . Instead of trying to gloss over the issue with more palatable talking points like tax revenue and funding for the homeless, politicians, lobbyists and corporations who want FanDuel and DraftKings in their state could do better ask the question in a more direct way. . Because Americans in general seem to want to become a nation of sports bettors: Maine, Kansas, Minnesota and Massachusetts passed sports betting legislation this year. The will of guys in Instagram shorts with a few spare bucks to put into a game will be served. ♦
Share your thoughts and questions about this column by emailing the author at jaykangnewsletter@newyorker.com.
