Missouri sports fans have given State Senator Caleb Rowden a piece of their collective minds over sports betting. To be accurate, the issue is a lack of sports betting in the Show Me State.
“I hear about it literally almost as much as any issue with at least my circle of friends,” Rowden said in an interview with FOX4, “many of whom are Republicans, many of whom are Democrats, many of whom couldn’t care less about politics in general. So you don’t see very many issues that bring all of those sides together quite like this one.”
Kansas launched sports betting September 1. GeoComply, which evaluates whether mobile bettors are within the borders of the state, said 16,000 were blocked from betting because they were not in Kansas. Of those, 60 percent were in Kansas City, Missouri.
The sticking point for Rowden was that Kansas legalized sports betting this year; Missouri did not.
“To see them do something better than us, I don’t love,” Rowden said.
Alex Gold, who hosts a new sports betting show on 610 Sports, said he’s “cautiously optimistic” sports betting will get passed in Missouri next year.
“For those that are looking at, ‘Well Kansas just has it now, that must mean Missouri’s got to pass it,’ I get that logic, but at the same time, there’s already been four other states that were bordering Missouri that have had it legalized prior to Kansas,” Gold told FOX4.
“People in St. Louis have been going over to Illinois. People in the Kansas City area on the Missouri side have been going up to Iowa if that was something that they wanted to do.
“So yes, it’s a big deal because we know you’re a 10-minute drive perhaps from Missouri to Kansas if you’re near the state line, but it’s not as if this is the first state to border Missouri to legalize it, and that, ‘Wow we gotta act.’ I do think there’s more pressure than ever, but it’s not an automatic that Missouri gets this done in 2023.”
