There is a bay shift occurring in the nature of sports betting, as players desert land sports books for online casinos.

Sports books at land-based casinos in Las Vegas are suffering for a number of reasons. The recession has caused declines in gambling dollars bet overall, and predictability in the NFL has given players a chance to beat the books, but the long-term issue may be the flight of patrons to online casinos.

Vegas casinos are having a hard time competing with Internet gambling sites that are able to offer significantly more exotic and specialty bets, while offering standard sports bets at a lower vigorish. While land casinos' pools are constrained to the number of physical visitors, the international masses from which online casinos can draw gives these operations the chance to cut customer costs and introduce entertaining plays not available on the Strip.

Sports books have been hurt by the unusual disparity in this season's NFL, which features a high number of simply horrible teams, incapable of covering spreads that would have been ridiculous in past years. But such trends are always short-lived, and bookies report money flowing back into their pockets the last several weeks.

However, the trend to place action at online gambling operations, rather than finding a friend to lay the bet in Las Vegas, may be a more permanent and troubling one for sports books. The ability to adjust plays at the last second, without a Vegas trip, has led many former customers of barroom books to online betting.

And the increased interest lets online sports books enjoy the benefits of larger pools, meaning profits are still secure at 5 percent additions to losing bets, rather than the Las Vegas standard of 10 percent. Also, proposition bets, which find almost no action in Vegas and leave books exposed, are a growing industry online.

While Las Vegas has often treated sports betting as a barely tolerated cousin, used mainly to draw players to the tables and especially slots which enrich gambling resorts, online gaming sites exploit low overheads to customize play for sports betting. And now, Vegas has to worry that if sports betting goes the way of the Internet, how far behind can slots and blackjack be?

Published on November 22, 2009 by MattMiller

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