Arkansas this week became the 9th US State since the end of the betting ban to start taking sports bets.
The Resort’s General Manager Wayne Smith placed the first bet. He wagered $5 on the Dallas Cowboys beating New York Giants on Sept. 8 when the new NFL season begins.
Together with Oaklawn, which opened its racetrack in 1904, three other Casinos have been sanctioned by the Arkansas gambling authority.
One of these is Southland Casino Racing in West Memphis. Casinos three and four are set to be opened at Pine Bluff 50 miles south of Little Rock and at Russellville, 75 miles northwest of the capital.
Right now, however, only Oaklawn has been licensed to operate a sportsbook – or to be specific, we should say an in-house Casino sportsbook.
Online betting not yet legal in Arkansas, but hopes are high
Online and mobile betting via an app is still some way off in Arkansas. Oaklawn is hopeful, however, of offering some form of it in the future.
Said the Resorts media manager Jennifer Hoyt: “We hope to soon offer a mobile application that can be used on the premises. “State regulations do not permit off-premise wagering.”
What she didn’t say is that in-house mobile betting could merely be the start of nationwide out-of-house online betting in the future. The staggering success of mobile betting in New Jersey, the US pathfinder of sports wagering, could see to that.
The Garden State’s 14 online sportsbooks pulled in as much as $3 billion in its first year in the sports betting business. Of that, more than 80% of it came in online, much of it on smartphones.
For the time being, however, Oaklawn is taking bets using tellers and self-service kiosks. They are part of a $100m upgrade of the resort.
Like most New Jersey and Nevada sportsbooks, Oaklawn will offer all the major American sporting codes. They’ll including NFL and college football, NBA and College basketball, MLB baseball, NHL ice hockey, and MLS soccer.
Oaklawn is using a BetAmerica betting software platform already in use by some casinos in New Jersey. SBTech is providing its risk management solutions.
