The Olympic Games which are scheduled to start in August 2015 in Rio de Janerio, Brazil has now joined the rank of regular sports as far sports betting goes in Nevada. Sportsbooks in Nevada will now be offering betting for Olympic events after it was made legal by the Nevada Gaming Control Board.
Seen as the epitome of sporting excellence, the Olympics have always been treated as something special. The decision to open up Olympics to gambling has resulted in many believing that the games have now lost its purity as a sporting event.
These views are not shared by everyone, especially the sportsbook companies. Jay Kornegay, head of Las Vegas’ top sports bookkeeper Westgate Superbook believes that there is nothing wrong with betting on Olympics events. He said that very few amateurs were left in the game to be manipulated and Nevada sportsbooks would not be targeting only popular games.
In a statement, Stephen Mosher, a sports ethics and character development professor at Ithaca College in New York said,
The purity of the Olympic movement was lost years ago when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) removed any distinction between amateurism and professionalism. Only in the U.S. does a portion of the population actually believe in what even the IOC calls this ‘magic dust‘.
According to experts, betting tickets on Olympic events will net around $20 million to $30 million in Nevada sportsbooks. Jay Rood, director of the race and sports book for MGM Resorts has predicted that almost 70 percent of the bets will be on men’s basketball event.
Kornegay has stated that the size of the betting will not exceed the levels seen in a low-tier college games in U.S. In his opinion, even a basketball final game featuring U.S. team would draw around 10 percent less betting than an average game in the NBA finals.
Nevada Gaming Control Board had earlier stopped gambling on the Olympics after Sen. John McCain’s campaign against betting in college games. Although gambling continued in college games, the Board decided to stop betting for the Olympics.
This changed after London bookkeepers kept bets in the last Summer Games held in England in 2012, which resulted in Nevada’s sports bookkeepers seeking removal of the restriction.
Rood said although all the events in Olympics were open for bets, he and his peers would be restricting the books to popular games such as volleyball, boxing, swimming and basketball. With the limits of the bets not expected to exceed $2,000 per bet, there are minimal chances of fixing games.
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