ST. LOUIS- Long-time patrons of Over/Under Bar & Grill have their drink orders prepared when they walk in the door and served before they sit on a barstool.
The downtown sports bar has more than 14 TVs - most of which are working, nearly all tuned to sports channels. The menu offers toasted ravioli and other local culinary bar essentials. The day’s draft beer list is written, 1 through 10, in bold, multi-colored chalk next to hand-drawn logos of the St. Louis Cardinals and St. Louis Blues (“free shuttles to/from” says a line in white chalk above them). On a recent weekday afternoon, beer No. 6 was UCBC Urban Underdog Lager.
An incalculable number of sports bets have been placed at Over/Under and hundreds of bars like it throughout Missouri.
None have been placed legally.
Missouri voters can change that on this fall’s ballot. In the meantime, Mound City has had innumerable illegal options through unlicensed bookies and, more recently, offshore betting websites.
And, depending on your method of transportation, legal betting options are already a few minutes away.
Betting abounds across the river
Several dozen bettors were at the DraftKings at Casino Queen sportsbook in East St. Louis, Illinois, for the opening pitch of a recent Thursday afternoon Cardinals game. Dozens more trickled in and out before the ninth inning, placing wagers at the betting window or lining up at kiosks. Several stayed through the final pitch, sipping beers at the venue's bar.
In the casino parking lot, roughly 200 cars were outside on a humid mid-September afternoon. Most had Missouri license plates.
Before the Cardinals games, fans in jerseys streamed out of the casino before walking to the nearby East Riverfront Metrolink rail station and going to the game. Throughout the lot, cars parked with their engines running. Drivers would take out their phones and leave minutes later.
DraftKings at Casino Queen is a roughly four-and-a-half-minute drive from downtown St. Louis (closer to six if a driver hits a traffic light). It's about the same time to take the Metrolink from the Gateway Arch Visitors Center to East Riverfront station.
It takes about 20 minutes to walk across the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi River from Missouri to Illinois. It only takes 12 to cross the bridge's midpoint and reach a spot where regulated sportsbooks’ geolocation technology recognizes a customer is in Illinois and can legally place a bet.
If Missouri voters approve sports betting on this Fall's ballot, Horshoe Casino St. Louis will have plenty of options for a retail sportsbook, including this large, open area next to the poker room pic.twitter.com/slUDYOkz0G
— Ryan Butler (@ButlerBets) September 12, 2024
From this location, a pedestrian can see the Casino Queen in Illinois and turn 180 degrees to see the Gateway Arch and Horseshoe St. Louis in Missouri. Having recently undergone a rebrand and renovation by parent company Caesars, Horseshoe is far closer to its “destination-style” brand namesake in Las Vegas than a “regional” casino like Casino Queen.
But even though it's closer to the Cardinals’ Busch Stadium and downtown St. Louis, Horseshoe doesn’t have the same sports bettors eating and drinking (and gambling) during an afternoon baseball game as its competitor across the river.
Missouri sports betting’s winding journey
Missouri is one of 12 states without a legal sportsbook. For years, it appeared it would be one of the first.
In the 1990s, Missouri followed several neighboring states including Iowa and Illinois in legalizing modern casino riverboat gambling. By the 2000s it had more than a dozen licensed gambling establishments, one of the highest per capita rates of casinos to residents in the country.
When the Supreme Court struck down the federal wagering ban in 2018, allowing each state to approve sportsbooks within its borders, Missouri lawmakers crafted legislation to do so. Six years and several frustrating legislative battles later, seven of Missouri’s eight border states have legal betting. Missouri does not.
Not long after PAPSA was overturned, then-state Sen. Denny Hoskins led an effort to tie sportsbook legalization with the larger issue of unregulated video lottery terminal machines. The devices, which look and function like slot machines, are in thousands of convenience stores and truck stops statewide. Some have designated rooms just for the machines.
These devices are supported by the machine makers and the shops that house them. Unsurprisingly, the terminals are opposed by the casino industry, which pays tens of millions of dollars to Missouri in taxes and licensing fees and wants customers to play at its slot machines.
Despite bipartisan support for sports betting, Hoskins blocked the legislation in successive legislative sessions. In response, proponents led by the Cardinals, Blues, and other Missouri pro sports teams, circumvented the legislature and brought the issue to voters.
Possible Missouri sports betting future
The teams pushed for a ballot referendum to amend the state constitution and allow legal in-person sportsbooks at their respective stadiums and casinos, plus statewide through mobile apps. DraftKings and FanDuel, the nation’s largest digital sportsbooks by market share, also joined the effort.
Combined, the group secured the required number of verified signatures (and survived a last-second legal challenge) to place the measure before voters. The signature-gathering campaign was boosted by nearly $6 million in combined contributions from the two sportsbooks.
If approved by a simple majority of voters this fall, mobile sportsbooks will go live and retail books will open their doors sometime next year. But that doesn't mean Missouri sports wagering is a sure bet.
Although seemingly a logical beneficiary of sports betting, the state's casino industry hasn't supported this initiative. Earlier this month, Caesars donated several million dollars to the political action committee looking to stop the ballot measure.
The amendment’s structure would give two sports betting operators “untethered” access to licenses, meaning they wouldn’t have to partner with (and pay an accompanying fee to) an existing casino operator, a practice common in most other states. The requirements for these two licenses would seem to favor both DraftKings and FanDuel over their less profitable rivals.
And unlike most other sports betting jurisdictions, licenses would be granted to casino operators, not each casino individually.
The Missouri sports betting ballot measure would allow up to 14 statewide mobile licenses;
— Ryan Butler (@ButlerBets) September 11, 2024
- 6 via casino operators
- 6 via pro sports teams
- 2 awarded directly by regulators
It appear DraftKings, FanDuel, Caesars, BetMGM, ESPN BET and Bally Bet would have the clearest path
For Caesars, which operates Horseshoe as well as Isle of Capri in Boonville and Harrah’s in Kansas City, this means one potential sportsbook instead of three. Penn Entertainment, Boyd Gaming, Affinity, and Century Casinos, all of which operate two Missouri casinos, would likewise be limited to one license apiece.
The most recent high-level polling before Caesars funded the opposition campaign showed 50% support with 20% undecided and only 30% opposed. Should the “yes” camp maintain the support level and split the undecided votes, the measure would pass easily.
Should a targeted campaign look to dissuade voters, especially if supporters are unwilling to match funds for the support campaign, the vote could get much tighter.
The sportsbooks and pro teams’ campaign is called Winning for Missouri Education. Instead of focusing on legal sports betting, the first advertisement focuses on the tax revenues legal sportsbooks will generate for public education. The Caesars-funded opposition group is targeting what it considers misleading messaging through its political action committee, Missourians Against the Deceptive Online Gambling Amendment.
Fun Fact: BetMGM is not allowed in this stadium; Missouri voters can approve mobile betting on this year's ballot; Arrowhead Stadium could also open an on-property retail sportsbook; BetMGM has retail books adjacent to the Arizona Cardinals and Washington Nationalz home stadiums pic.twitter.com/OXwmLeCwsx
— Ryan Butler (@ButlerBets) September 15, 2024
With less than two months until Election Day, there’s been little public campaigning for either side outside the teacher-focused ad. The Cardinals only have a few more home games this season and no gambling-related signage. A recent Kansas City Chiefs home game at Arrowhead Stadium featured ads from BetMGM and DraftKings, but those were pre-arranged sponsorships designed to attract bettors in Kansas, not push Missouri voters to approve betting in their state.
Missouri’s first absentee ballots will be mailed later this month. Election Day is Nov. 5.
Missouri’s real sports betting question is legality
The ballot measure won't determine if Missourians place sports bets; it will only give them a chance to do so legally.
Missouri bettors are estimated to wager several billion dollars annually with bookies or offshore sites. Many bettors have no aversion to doing so – or even realize it's illegal. Due to convenience or comfort, the underground industry will continue even if betting is legalized.
But Missouri gives an unusual case study in opportunities for legal betting.
It's the only state with two major defined metro areas that both border states with legal betting. In urban Kansas City, Missouri, bettors can walk down the street to Kansas City, Kansas and place bets. In St. Louis, bettors can walk, drive, or take mass transit to place bets in Illinois.
For bettors at Over/Under Bar & Grill, the free shuttles could take them to in-stadium sportsbooks before next year’s Cardinals or Blues games. They could also walk a few hundred yards to the Horseshoe. Even though Caesars is opposing the measure, they would surely open an in-person sportsbook if voters allow them to do so.
More significantly, it means Over/Under patrons could place legal bets from their phones as they get their drinks and watch the working TVs. Like other states, more than 90% of all bets placed would be online, even with the casino and stadium in-person betting options.
It would also mean tens of millions in new taxes: a rounding error in the state’s more-than $50 billion annual budget but significantly more than the $0 the state has ever received from an illegal sports bet. As its proponents argue, it also takes those taxes from legal bets placed in the seven neighboring states with legal betting and keeps them in Missouri.
Having the chance to bet legally wouldn't revive the scores of downtown St. Louis sports bars with shuttered windows and locked doors surrounding Over/Under. But it would give Missouri bettors the chance to gamble legally, with the ensuing customer protections and benefits.
Or at least save them the trip to Illinois.
