New York Rep. J. Gary Pretlow, December 13 sponsored a bill to allow professional sports stadiums and off-track betting (OTB) to have mobile betting kiosks. A8538 would also add fixed-odds horse betting to mobile wagering options.
The bill is nearly identical to Senate Bill S.7536 authored by Senator Joseph P. Addabbo Jr. last month. The two legislators sit on committees that oversee racing and wagering in New York.
The Empire State will launch mobile wagering early in 2022, in time for the Super Bowl. Operators must pay a $25 million fee for a 10-year license and the maximum tax for gross revenue is 51 percent.
While many stakeholders in New York had hoped to launch online and mobile sports betting before the end of the year, state Senator Joseph P. Addabbo, Jr. commented in an interview with Elite Sports New York that the more realistic projection is for online sports bets to initiate in January 2022.
New York sports bettors have anxiously been awaiting for word of the state’s sports betting launch since nine operators and eight platform providers were awarded online sports betting licenses in November.
“If the uniform start date is before the end of the year, I’d be ecstatic at that point. I’m an optimistic person, but I’m trying to be realistically optimistic and say sometime in January,” Addabbo told ESNY.
Stakeholders hope to work out any potential glitches well before Super Boal LVI on February 13, 2022. “That, to me, is the benchmark—ow we perform during the Super Bowl,” Addabbo said.
Addabbo had suggested a uniform start date for all nine operators to launch sports betting by Christmas, but he stressed to ESNY that all sportsbooks should launch at the same time, rather than what he called a “haphazard” staggered launch.
“There should be a standard or uniform start date for mobile sports betting in New York, not a haphazard launch where one entity starts at one date and another entity starts at another,” he said. “I like uniformity; I think the residents of New York benefit from that, and we’re hopeful that all providers and operators can be on the same page and start on the same date.”
FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Bally Bet, Caesars, Wynn Interactive, PointsBet, Rush Street Interactive and Resorts World were approved by the New York Gaming Commission as the state’s online sports betting operators.
