Brent Batten: Sports book to dog track's rescue? Don't bet on it

If you want to muck up a good game of poker, throw in a wild card.

The federal government is shuffling the deck, potentially throwing another factor into the gambling equation that has so confounded Florida legislators for the past two years.

A bill in draft form in Washington, D.C., would remove the federal ban on sports betting, allowing states to legalize it, regulate it and pull in revenue from it.

The bill is recognition of the fact that sports betting is already widespread and largely out of the reach of government.

The friendly neighborhood bookie has been surpassed by Internet betting sites that operate with little regard for state and national boundaries.

Should the bill, the Gaming Accountability and Modernization Enhancement (GAME) Act, pass, it would give state legislators one more thing to consider as they try to strike a balance in Florida among Seminole casinos, racetracks and the state lottery.

Since 2015, when a key portion of a compact with the Seminole Tribe expired, the state has been unable to agree on a new set of rules.

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The tribe continues to demand exclusivity on banked card games, such as blackjack, where the gambler plays against the house, and on slot machines outside three east coast counties that already have them.

Track owners say they need slot machines to keep operating. Dog racing is decreasing in popularity and the state is requiring tracks to run too many races in order to offer poker, which has become their main draw.

The 2017 legislative session closed with the state House and Senate unable to agree on the right balance.

The Senate was willing to allow slots at tracks in a handful of counties — Lee being one of them — where voters have already approved the machines. The House wasn’t, resulting in the stalemate.

A May decision by the Florida Supreme Court in a case in Gadsden County says the Legislature, not voters, must approve slots in a community. The track owners had hoped for the opposite decision.

Until leaving office last year, former state Sen. Garrett Richter of Naples was one of the legislative leaders on gambling.

Sports betting didn’t factor into the discussions, he said, because the federal law put it off limits.

Still, there was a recognition that it’s widespread.

“It was determined it was really, really difficult to ban,” Richter said.

The federal law against it is widely ignored, he said.

“It’s kind of like a speed limit sign.”

Since Revolutionary times, states have relied on gambling, mostly in the form of lotteries, to raise money.

In 1991, Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which outlawed sports betting in most places outside Nevada. At the time, commissioners of the major sports leagues urged its passage, fearful that betting would lead to attempts to rig games.

In 2014, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver called for legalization of sports betting, saying it would allow leagues to monitor betting activity that would suggest attempts to manipulate results.

The GAME Act presently in draft form would repeal many of the 1991 law’s prohibitions.

Estimates of the amount wagered illegally on sports in the U.S. range from around $80 billion a year to as high as $380 billion a year, a figure that seems high considering it would amount to more than $1,000 for every man, woman and child in America.

But even at the lower figure, states that allow and tax sports betting would stand to gain a windfall.

Izzy Havenick, vice president of Naples-Fort Myers Greyhound Racing & Poker in Bonita Springs, said discussions he has heard about legalizing sports betting have centered on Internet sites that offer bets online.

That wouldn’t necessarily help the track, which struggles to compete against the Seminole Casino in Immokalee and the Florida Lottery for gambling dollars.

The GAME Act specifically includes racetracks in the list of “gaming facilities,” physical locations where bets could be placed.

Still, Havenick isn’t pinning his hopes on the addition of sports betting in Florida.

“I don’t see it happening anytime soon. It would complicate things,” he said.

More helpful to the track would be a reduction in the number of races tracks are required to run in order to offer card games.

That issue, decoupling the number of races from the card games, has stalled in the Legislature several times during the past decade.

Havenick concedes that the widespread acceptance of illegal sports gambling suggests it will eventually become legal.

And there’s one more factor at work, he noted.

“We do have a president who’s a casino owner,” Havenick said.

Connect with Brent Batten at brent.batten@naplesnews.com, on Twitter@NDN_BrentBatten and at facebook.com/ndnbrentbatten.