Most prospective Major League Baseball bettors in America believe that legal MLB betting is only available in Nevada. After all, Las Vegas is the US home for sports betting of all types, and it is the only place in the country where you can physically wager on professional and amateur athletics.
This is largely thanks (or, rather, no thanks!) to the Wire Act of 1961, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, and the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, all of which seek to strengthen Nevada’s stranglehold (a.k.a. monopoly) on the US sports betting market.
In 1961, a group of corrupt politicians (is there any other kind?) got around to “fighting” the New York mafia’s alleged multi-state sports betting schemes. To do this, instead of going after the mafia families themselves, the federal government decided to ban interstate sports betting entirely.
Senate Bill 1656, now known as the Interstate Wire Act of 1961 (a.k.a. the Federal Wire Act), was introduced by US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (D) and signed into law by his brother, President John F. Kennedy (D).
The Wire Act has been federal law since September 13, 1961, and it has since been reaffirmed as recently as September 2011. It is important to note that the mafia never stopped running interstate gambling rackets, and sports betting has grown in popularity consistently and exponentially since the law went into effect.
If it wasn’t so infuriating, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) might be the funniest, most idiotic piece of backfiring legislation in US history. Devised as a gambit to secure Atlantic City, New Jersey, an east coast monopoly on sports betting, NJ Senator Bill Bradley (D) created and endorsed the bill among his colleagues. He was able to successfully convince various professional and amateur sports leagues (most notably the NCAA and NBA) to support this bill, predicating its worth on the idea that legal sports betting would cause lots of match-fixing and so forth. It was for the integrity of the game!
Of course, Bradley said, established casinos that had handled sports betting with integrity should be exempt, so Nevada was protected. Interestingly, the exemption also included provisions for other states that met the casino gambling standard to enact sports betting within one year of the law’s January 1, 1993, implementation as signed by George H.W. Bush (R). Naturally, the only state that qualified under the strict terms of the extension was New Jersey.
Hilariously, New Jersey failed to enact its own sports betting laws in the one-year window provided specifically for them, and Atlantic City has been fighting bankruptcy ever since. Currently, the legality of PASPA (hint: it is illegal) is being challenged in the US Supreme Court by – who else? – New Jersey, and hearings are taking place in early 2018, where the judges are expected to overturn PASPA in part or in toto. Many states are currently preparing for this contingency by passing sports betting regulatory statutes in anticipation.
In the early 2000s, online poker rooms and Internet-based casinos were enjoying a huge boom in national popularity. However, because these gambling sites – which also offered sports betting – fell into a grey area re enforcement of existing anti-gambling laws, a new law was crafted to address this “problem.”
The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA) was surreptitiously added to the unrelated SAFE Port Act without any representative actually reading the rider’s language, and it suddenly became illegal for banks to knowingly process deposits to or payouts from any Internet gambling or sports betting entity.
If PASPA is overturned or legislatively repealed, the UIGEA will be rendered effectively (and perhaps explicitly) null. In the meantime, however, all the UIGEA actually managed to do was move 97% of US sports betting action overseas, causing the country to miss out on a significant, formerly taxable chunk of an estimated $400 billion industry. Oops.
Fortunately, none of the above laws actually stopped people from spending their own money as they see fit, as offshore betting shops are perfectly safe and legal for US residents to use. Some politicians (a.k.a. petty tyrants and criminals) believe that the offshore sports betting “loophole” takes advantage of poor language written into the laws, and perhaps it does. That said, offshore online sportsbooks follow American law to the letter, and it remains 100% within that law to use them as you wish.
Here’s why: The Wire Act and PASPA both made it illegal to accept wagers in a commercial or for-profit capacity (excepting Nevada bookmakers), and the UIGEA went after banks that knowingly processed such transactions. Since these laws never made it illegal for a US resident to actually place a bet or penalized banks for unknowingly processing betting transactions, the only entities actually affected were non-Nevada-based US bookies themselves. These bookies simply left the country, got licensed elsewhere, and continued their operations.
All of the above leads us here: offshore sportsbooks. If you have an Internet connection and an account at any of the top legal online sportsbooks for MLB betting, you can wager on the Majors any time you please, and you’ll be breaking no laws to do it. An estimated 97% of US sports bettors go this route, as Sin City – while a popular tourist destination – is still too far away for the dramatic majority of Americans who wish to bet on sports. Imagine having to fly or drive to Vegas every time you wanted to bet on a Major League Baseball game – you’d go broke two weeks into the season!
Legal online sportsbooks like Bovada, SportsBetting, BetOnline, 5Dimes, BetDSI, and BookMaker all make it fast and easy for new members to sign up and get betting on MLB baseball, and they’ve each got a reputation for sticking to the law so you can enjoy a smooth, hassle-free, payout-guaranteed, legal MLB betting experience. For the meddlesome feds, when it comes to the Wire Act, PASPA, and the UIGEA, it’s three strikes and you’re out. Maybe Uncle Sam can get a hit in his next at-bat.