law prohibiting U.S. financial institutions from processing payments to online gambling sites hasn’t stopped U.S. employees from visiting sports betting sites, according to cybersecurity vendor ScanSafe.
Attempted visits to online gambling Web sites by employees of ScanSafe’s U.S. customers were up 77 percent in the week between Jan. 23 and 31. The Super Bowl, the National Football League’s championship game, is Sunday.
ScanSafe provides a Web-blocking service to large businesses, and it examines 6 billion Web requests a month.
In October, President George Bush signed into law a measure prohibiting financial institutions from processing payments to gambling sites. The government has until mid-July to develop the processing regulations for financial institutions.
But some online gambling sites have begun telling U.S. customers that financial institutions are already distancing themselves. On Wednesday, PokerRoom.com told U.S. customers to cash out.
“The remaining companies that process cashouts from PokerRoom.com to our players in the United States have contacted us to say that in the near future they will no longer facilitate these transactions,” said a message on PokerRoom’s home page. “As such, we would advise all American players who have not cashed out already to do so immediately.”
The gambling provision, amended by Congress onto a ports security bill in late September, has had no impact on the number of people visiting gambling Web sites, said Dan Nadir, vice president for product strategy at ScanSafe. ScanSafe doesn’t track whether those people completed bets, he said.
“We suspected [the law] wouldn’t have much of an impact,” Nadir said. Some gambling sites will develop alternative payment mechanisms, he said.
ScanSafe didn’t provide the raw numbers of visits to gambling sites this past week, but gambling represented about 3.4 percent of the content it blocked for clients in 2006. By comparison, 15.1 percent of the blocked content was chat or instant messaging, 14.6 percent was advertising, 7.2 percent was Web mail, and 3.9 percent was pornography.
Visits to sports betting sites such as Bodog.com were common this past week, Nadir said. About 53 percent of the U.S. visits to gambling sites ScanSafe observed this past week were to sports betting sites as opposed to casino or lottery sites. Bodog didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail asking if its business has been hurt by the U.S. law.
About 84 percent of ScanSafe’s customers blocked employee access to gambling sites. Companies block employees from gambling sites for a couple of reasons: because they don’t trust that gambling sites are safe, and because they don’t want employees playing games on company time, Nadir said.
Source: Infoworld

New Jersey is home to plenty of slot machines, Roulette wheels, blackjack tables and poker hands, but its gambling mecca, Atlantic City, lacks one attraction rival Las Vegas can boast – legalized sports betting.
And with the Super Bowl as a backdrop, a state senator is renewing efforts to bring legalized sports betting to the Garden State.
However, odds may be slim that gamblers one day will be able to go to Atlantic City and lay money down on a Super Bowl or any professional sporting event.
Federal law restricts legalized sports betting to Delaware, Montana, Nevada and Oregon. But Sen. Raymond Lesniak said Friday that he was willing to gamble that sports betting will come to New Jersey sooner rather than later.
“With the biggest sporting event of the year taking place this weekend, it’s naive to think that sports betting isn’t taking place right now in the Garden State,” said Lesniak, D-Union County. “But because of an act of Congress, we’ve surrendered sports betting to organized crime, offshore casinos and Las Vegas. Why should millions of dollars go to Las Vegas, offshore casinos and the mob?”
Lesniak plans to introduce a bill that would ask New Jersey voters whether professional sports betting should be allowed in the Garden State and to call on Congress to rescind the federal law restricting sports betting.
He’s not the first New Jersey lawmaker to propose the move.
Assemblymen Lou Greenwald, D-Camden, and Jeff Van Drew, D-Cape May, have pushed similar legislation for years, but it’s never received a full Assembly vote. Bills also passed the Senate in 1992 and 1993 that would have paved the way for sports betting in New Jersey, but they never passed the Assembly.
“It’s not possible unless they change the federal law,” said Republican Sen. Bill Gormley, whose district includes Atlantic City. “Sure, I’d like to see it, but what I don’t like doing is offering people false hope.”
The NFL and NBA have rallied against talk of legalized sports betting in New Jersey.
NFL attorney Jay Moyer was not immediately available for comment Friday, but he previously told New Jersey officials that legal sports betting in the state would “create a pervasive climate of suspicion about any controversial play in a game.”
“It would send two very bad messages,” Moyer said. “One is that anything goes when it comes to raising revenues and, two, that gambling and sports are natural partners.”
Lesniak challenged such reasoning.
“These sports organizations turn their backs on steroid scandals and thug behavior from players because it puts fans in the seats,” Lesniak said. “It’s hypocritical to say we need to ban sports betting to protect the integrity of the sport when the owners are tacitly endorsing so much worse.”
Lesniak, an attorney, also questioned whether federal law gives Las Vegas casinos an unfair advantage, making it vulnerable to a legal challenge through anti-monopoly laws.
Proponents of sports betting in New Jersey estimate the state might bring in up to $8 million in additional annual casino tax revenue through sports betting, plus boost the number of visitors to Atlantic City casinos.
Source: AP

Inveterate gamblers, rejoice.
If the Super Bowl wasn’t occasionally deadly dull, you probably wouldn’t be able to bet this week on which will be greater Sunday, the number of passes caught by Marvin Harrison against the Chicago Bears in Miami or the number of free throws made by LeBron James against the Detroit Pistons in Cleveland.
Or whether Bears Coach Lovie Smith or the Indianapolis Colts’ Tony Dungy will slam his headset, what color the sports drinks consumed by the players will be or whether Prince will split his pants open during the halftime show.
Side bets, known in casino parlance as “propositions” and encompassing just about anything under the sun, have grown so wildly popular that they rival more traditional wagers made on the Super Bowl, Las Vegas sports book operators say.
About $100 million is expected to be bet in Nevada on the Super Bowl this week, according to Las Vegas Sports Consultants.
Jay Kornegay, executive director of the race and sports book at the Las Vegas Hilton and the so-called king of propositions, estimated that 55% of the money wagered at the Hilton would be put down on “props.” Fifteen years ago, he said, that figure probably was closer to 15%.
“They’re a huge piece of the Super Bowl pie,” said Robert Walker, sports director at the MGM and nine other properties on the Las Vegas Strip, who guessed that props would account for about 30% of the bets placed at most sports books.
Brian Girard of Las Vegas will put money down on a few props this week, he said, including two he has bet every year since 1999: that the game will go into overtime and that a safety will be scored. (The Super Bowl has never gone into overtime, and none of the last 15 has produced a safety.)
“My millennium mutual fund, as I call it,” said Girard, who increases his wager on the two bets every year in the belief that they’ll pay off in his lifetime. “I started out with a little bit of money on them and I’m kind of doing the ultimate chase.”
The odds this week on an overtime game or a safety being scored are each about 7 to 1. That means, for example, if Girard bet $20 on each and both happened his profit would be about $280.
Girard said he had bet props for more than 20 years, recalling that he was a winner, at odds of 10 to 1, when lineman William “The Refrigerator” Perry scored a late touchdown for the Bears against the New England Patriots in 1986.
“That was probably the best one I did,” Girard said, but he has also bet on the Bud Bowl, a mock game matching animated bottles of Budweiser against Bud Light during Super Bowl commercials, and four years ago got 2,000-1 odds when he wagered that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers would score only four points against the Oakland Raiders.
The Buccaneers won, 48-21.
“I remember Tampa Bay had a terrible offense,” said Girard, still holding what would have been a $20,000 winning ticket, “but I was way off on that one.”
NO matter the score, props keep bettors engaged from the national anthem — wagers are being taken on how many seconds it will take Billy Joel to get through it Sunday — to the awards ceremony, when the correct most-valuable-player choice could send a gambler home a winner.
Which is why props have been so heartily embraced, of course.
The number of props offered has mushroomed, bookmakers said, because a string of lopsided Super Bowl results left bettors searching for something new.
“These games were so boring, always blowouts,” said Kornegay, who moved to the Hilton three years ago after spending 15 years at the Imperial Palace. “If you were to look through the sports book, maybe halfway or three-quarters of the way through the game, people had left because they were bored with the game.
“One way we decided to try to keep them in their seats was to make up different propositions that affected the third and fourth quarters, or wouldn’t be decided until the third and fourth quarters, so we expanded our prop menu in the early ’90s, and it really took off the year the 49ers played the Chargers,” in 1995.
The 49ers were favored by nearly three touchdowns.
“There was no doubt who was going to win that game,” Kornegay said, “so while most books had probably around 30 to 40 props, we put up about 100 to 120 for that game. That was the year we realized we really had something.”
This year, Las Vegas sports books are offering as many as 300 props, many of which are shunned by professional gamblers and dismissed as “sucker bets,” and offshore betting sites are offering more than 1,000 over the Internet.
Kornegay said that he and his staff hunkered down for 26 hours over two days last week dreaming up props and calculating what odds to assign them.
“A lot of it is number crunching, but the other half of it is just booking experience and what we’ve experienced in past years in terms of how the general public normally bets certain props,” Kornegay said. The props range from the traditional — Which team will win the coin toss? Will the game go into overtime? Will the first player to score be wearing an odd- or even-numbered jersey? — to the more exotic.
An example of the latter: Which will be greater Sunday, the number of passing yards racked up by Colts quarterback Peyton Manning or the number of combined points scored by the four Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference college basketball teams — Canisius, St. Peter’s, Niagara and Siena — playing that day? Or, which team will lead by the widest margin Sunday: the Colts, Bears, Clippers or Toronto Raptors? The Clippers play the Raptors in an NBA game Sunday morning at Toronto.
“We get a fair amount of people
who are interested in more than the over/under” — the total number of points scored by both teams — “and the point spread,” said Reed Richards, a spokesman for the gambling website, http://www.betus.com . “They’re interested in a variety of different things, from who will be the first team to score to how many times Peyton Manning will be sacked.”
PROPS are not limited to the game. The halftime show also is in play. Through http://www.betus.com , bettors can wager whether Prince will suffer a wardrobe malfunction, make an obscene gesture or announce plans to run for president.
Just about anything and everything, it seems, is fair game.
Two years ago, for instance, a gambler would have been a winner, at 80-1 odds, if Sam Rayburn of the Philadelphia Eagles had recorded the first sack against the New England Patriots and “Ray” had won the Academy Award for best picture.
“The over/under and the spread are for the real hard-core gamblers, the real stats junkies,” Richards said. “But I think the people who really appreciate the game, really appreciate the drama and the characters, they become less interested in the score than in the people and the strategies that affect the outcome.”
Or, they just want to see if Prince will split open his pants.
“I bet more on the fun ones than on the actual, ‘Who’s going to win the game?’ ” said Brad Randolph, a 26-year-old graphic design artist from Austin, Texas, who correctly wagered last year that the Rolling Stones would open their halftime performance with “Start Me Up” and this year is betting on a Prince wardrobe malfunction.
“It just makes the game more interesting — all aspects of it. If it’s 28-0 at halftime, normally I wouldn’t watch the rest of the game, but if I’m wagering on touchdown celebrations, I’ve got to stay tuned,” he said.
So-called crossover props tend to draw the most media attention but are not the most appealing to bettors. One example: Which will be greater, the number of points scored by the Bears in the first quarter or the number of birdies carded by Tiger Woods in the fourth round of the Dubai Desert Classic?
“The most popular prop is the first player to score,” Walker said. “It might be the most boring prop, but the first player to score is always paramount. I think everybody puts $5 to $10 down on that one.”
BECAUSE of the popularity of such props, Walker added, “the first eight to 10 minutes of the game in a sports book is like the Kentucky Derby because it’s so loud in here, the roar of the crowd. After the first pass completion, the first rushing first down, etcetera, it quiets down and people settle into the game.”
Not that it’s ever quiet.
“Props make the game a lot more enjoyable,” Walker said.
But the popularity of some props, Walker said, defies logic.
“Every year people bet that the final score will be 4-2,” he said. “Sure, you can great odds on that, but I marvel at that because, is that a game you’d really want to see? Is that a game you would even want to watch?”
Odds are, probably not — unless you factor in the props.
Source: LA Times

Chicago is a seven-point underdog in the Super Bowl, but the city is an overwhelming favorite with bookmakers, who think Bears fans will help push betting on the big game to record levels.
Nevada casinos and Internet wagering sites are counting on a combination of a nationwide fan base, an intriguing match-up between the Bears’ stout defense and the Colts’ jet-powered offense and the fervor that comes from a big city starved for a football championship.
Super Bowl betting, though, isn’t just a matter of whether the Bears will win or lose: People can gamble on everything from how many rushing yards Thomas Jones will gain to how long it will take Billy Joel to sing the national anthem.
Still, most money goes toward the outcome of the game, and high rollers already have begun to put down six-figure bets.
Though the majority of the wagers won’t come until the weekend, the heaviest cash so far is on the Bears’ side of the ledger, said Robert Walker, sports book director for the MGM Mirage casinos.
“Chicago is a very popular team, a huge city, with a storied program,” he said. “They’re just one of those franchises that when they get to the big game, they’re going to enhance it.”
Though experts estimate that the NCAA men’s basketball tournament has become the nation’s biggest overall gambling event, the Super Bowl remains by far the largest single game for wagering.
Casinos in Nevada – one of the few states in which sports betting is legal – took in $94 million last Super Bowl, and expect to top $100 million this year.
Frank Streshley, senior analyst for the Nevada Gaming Control Board, said the strengthening economy of the last few years has been chiefly responsible for the increased wagering, but that the teams playing also makes a difference.
“The Colts and the Bears have a large base of fans – especially Chicago,” he said.
Chuck Esposito, a native of the northwest Chicago suburbs who helps run the sports book at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, said Chicago fans seem more willing than others to put their money where their hearts are.
Before the football season begins each year, he said, more people pick the Bears to win the championship than any other team, regardless of how the squad is shaping up (the same is true with the Cubs). They were at 12-to-1 odds for this season, so an optimistic fan who put down $100 a year ago would collect $1,200 with a victory Sunday.
Esposito said most of his colleagues rooted for the Bears and the Colts during the playoffs, figuring that matchup would spur the most action.
“You have offense against defense, two of the most popular players with (Colts quarterback) Peyton Manning and (Bears linebacker) Brian Urlacher,” he said. “It’s just a dream matchup for the viewing public – a dream matchup for the betting public, too.”
Some Internet-based casinos also foresee a big day. Calvin Ayre of Antigua-based Bodog.com, which takes wagers from all over the globe, said through a spokesman that betting on the Super Bowl probably would be second only to last year’s World Cup soccer championship.
Internet gambling is not legal in the United States – credit-card companies and banks are prohibited from processing online wagering transactions – and Ayre said his company no longer markets to the country. But BetUS.com, a site based in Costa Rica, still accepts American wagers.
Spokesman Reed Richards wouldn’t comment on how American gamblers are placing their bets. Richards did say, though, that bets coming from Chicago and Indianapolis are split almost 50-50, reflecting an enthusiasm that he believed would drive the 10-year-old site to a record day.
“You’re seeing two teams that haven’t made an appearance in quite some time,” he said. “There’s a little bit classic Americana being played there. It’s nice to see a break from teams like the Patriots.”
Chicago area bookies might be in for a windfall of their own, even though they tend to set firm limits on what their customers can bet, said FBI spokesman Ross Rice.
“They don’t want them to get down too far (so they) won’t be able to pay,” he said.
“A new player, someone who bets (only) for the Super Bowl, will have a small limit.”
Jay Kornegay, executive director of race and sports at the Las Vegas Hilton, said half of his business will come from proposition bets, side wagers on everything from the total number of punts in the game, to who wins the coin toss, to whether Rex Grossman will throw a touchdown or an interception first. (Oddsmakers say a pick is more likely.)
“Even though it might seem like a routine play, we know you can hear little groans or applause because some player just went over seven yards,” he said.
Alan Palmer, who trades grains and metals at the Chicago Board of Trade, said some of his colleagues are going wild over the game, putting down as much as $10,000.
And even though he rarely bets on sports, he said a small win on Sunday would be far sweeter than any big victory in the trading pits.
“I’m taking the Bears at seven (points), come on!” he said.
Source: Daily Press

On Sunday, a 28-year-old Hollywood assistant named Seth plans to enjoy the Super Bowl in the same way millions of other football fans will: He’ll bet on it.
How, exactly, will he wager that $100 burning a hole in his pocket? One thing he knows for sure is that he won’t do it legally. Trekking to Vegas for the weekend is out of the question. And he won’t do it using one of the publicly traded online services based abroad that have been taking sports bets from Americans over the past few years. They have mostly stopped taking action from U.S. residents in the wake of an aggressive government crackdown on Internet wagering.
But that doesn’t mean he and other gamblers will be shut out. In fact, the government’s war against illegal online wagering may be driving gamblers back to where they started: their local bookie. And in an ironic twist, there’s a good chance the bookmaker is taking bets over the Internet, too.
“Even my bookie is online these days,” says Seth. He would be logging in to place his bet but misplaced the username and password the bookmaker gave him. “I guess I’ll just have to call him and get him to resend me the instructions, sort of a tech support for the sports bettor,” he says.
The government’s crackdown has, in recent months, targeted executives at offshore Internet-gambling outfits and the foreign credit-card-processing companies that facilitate the transactions with U.S. bettors. But while it may have dented the $12-billion-a-year online-gambling industry, it didn’t break it.
No one thinks that American gamblers’ appetites have waned either. Last year, about $94.5 million was legally wagered on the Super Bowl in Nevada casinos, the only place in the land where it’s lawful to bet on sports. Illegally, the American Gaming Association – a casino-industry trade group – figures that Americans bet between $5 billion and $6 billion each year on football’s marquee event.
“The likely impact is that people who previously wagered on legal, regulated sites… will now call a local bookie or bet on an unregulated site,” says Alan Feldman, a spokesman for casino giant MGM Mirage.
It’s true that many of the publicly traded online-gambling sites have pulled out of the U.S. market since last summer. Some have folded entirely. And the Justice Department served subpoenas to a number of investment banks that allegedly helped underwrite foreign public-stock offerings for some of the companies.
But as the kickoff at Super Bowl XLI in Miami gets nearer, the overall picture of Internet gambling has only gotten muddier. It’s not just that local bookies are taking bets over the Internet. For every established Internet-gambling company that has stopped accepting bets from the U.S., others have cropped up to fill the void.
“The online-gambling ban should be renamed the Sopranos Support Bill,” says Wayne Allyn Root, an outspoken professional sports handicapper in Las Vegas. “All of this money has moved to brand-new, privately held companies [that] opened overnight and [are] run by criminals engaging in fraud and organized crime.”
“The crackdown has taken the online bets out of a fairly transparent set of companies and put them into companies that aren’t transparent at all,” adds Sue Schneider, president and CEO of River City Group, a St. Charles, Mo., Internet-gambling consultancy. “Players could be more at risk.”
To eliminate paper trails and take advantage of technology, some bookmakers have apparently joined forces with offshore-betting sites and now issue their clients account numbers. Bettors log on to the Web sites like ordinary gamblers and enter their account numbers. But instead of sending credit-card data, they simply make their bets, which are linked electronically to their bookie’s name. The bookie keeps track of his clients online but still collects debts and pays winnings the old-fashioned way: in person. He likely pays a cut to the Web-site operators.
Nelson Rose, a law professor and expert in gambling law, has fielded dozens of phone calls from casual gamblers since the U.S. government went on the offensive. The No. 1 question: “Will I get arrested for betting on sports?” His response: “About as likely as the chances of their winning the World Series of Poker.” In other words: not likely.
But even before the government’s sudden interest in chasing down online-gambling companies, some sports bettors found the online experience frustrating. Most online-gambling sites required U.S. bettors to open an online account and deposit a certain sum via credit card. Betting losses would be deducted from the account and wins credited.
Seth once had an account like this, but after a few months of losses, he decided it was too laborious and resumed using his local bookmaker. Months later, he says, he still receives annoying telemarketing calls from the site.
For the Super Bowl, Seth says that if logging onto his bookie’s site is too complicated, he may just skip the bet altogether. “I don’t think I’d work that hard just to lose $100,” he adds.
Source: Sun News

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has ruled against the US in an online gambling dispute with the Caribbean island of Antigua and Barbuda. The US is breaking international trade rules, it is expected to say.
Though the ruling is still private, Reuters has reported that the WTO has found the US guilty of not complying with a 2005 order in the case.
Antigua and Barbuda has built up a significant internet gambling industry to replace falling tourist revenue and took the US to the WTO over entry to the US gaming market.
Laws passed previously banned non-US companies from operating in the US gaming market. Antigua argued that this was an illegal trade restriction and broke a free trade pact that the US had signed.
A WTO dispute resolution panel found in Antigua’s favour in 2003. The US appealed but the Appeals Board found largely for Antigua in 2005. The WTO has now found that the US has not tried hard enough to stick to that decision.
Antigua had taken a case relating to a ban on all bets placed across state lines. The WTO, though, only ruled in its favour in relation to the narrower issue of horse race betting across state lines. It found that foreign bookmakers seemed to suffer discrimination.
The WTO has provided both sides with a preliminary report on its findings. Both parties can submit further comments to it before a final report is published in March.
A spokesperson for the US Trade Representative told Reuters that the ruling was only a minor issue. “[We] did not agree with the United States that we had taken the necessary steps to comply with that ruling,” she said. “The panel’s findings issued today involve a narrow issue of federal law.”
Since the disputed laws were passed in the US further, more stringent anti-online gambling legislation has been passed. Last autumn, the US passed laws which made almost all internet gambling illegal in the US and several online gambling executives have been held by US authorities.
The US has the opportunity to appeal the latest ruling after it is published in March.
Source: The Register