Las Vegas Not Concerned with Sports Betting Reform

vegasYou can’t miss the world’s largest sports-betting parlor, just past the bronze Elvis statue at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort and Casino. It’s a glitzy temple to the big business of laying odds on college and pro games, with 400 cushy leather seats and a massive wall of video screens.

Westgate spent $18 million building it two years ago. And now that the U.S. Supreme Court has put an end to Nevada’s near-monopoly on sports wagering? To hear Westgate executives tell it, no problem.

“We look at it as an opportunity,” said Jay Kornegay, vice president of race and sports operations. “To duplicate what Las Vegas does is very hard to do.”

There’s no doubt that the high court decision, which struck down a 1992 law confining sports betting to just four states, will bring a seismic shift to the gambling industry. In the not-too-distant future, fans from Albany to San Jose may well be able to simply fire up their mobile phones to make their picks.

There will be no need to catch a flight and pay for a room to get action on, say, the first team to score 20 points in an NBA game.

More at Bloomberg