How do sportsbooks decide who to impose betting limits and why? That’s a question that the Massachusetts Gaming Commission (MGC) is asking and Massachusetts-facing operators may not like the answers that the commissioners come up.
The issue came up during a recent public comment session and has been picking up steam with commissioners ever since. Specifically, the commissioners are asking two questions that operators are likely going to be uncomfortable answering. For starters, the MGC is starting to ask if operators apply as much scrutiny to losing bettors as they do to winners? It’s long been a practice of sportsbooks of all kinds to throttle really successful sports bettors with betting limits or total bans as means of protecting their businesses.
But in a recent comment reported on by Legal Sports Report, interim MGC chair Jordan Maynard questioned that idea saying, “What’s the fairness to the patron in the notification? And if you’re turning off a winning wagerer, are you turning off a losing wagerer?”
MGC Commissioner Eileen O’Brien raised similar concerns adding, “It seems to me that the regulation and house rules put a tremendous amount of discretion in their [operators] hands but there’s a deeper issue here in terms of individual patrons. How and why are they making these determinations because that’s critical to whether we need to amend this regulation?”
All the commissioners questioned whether operators were putting as much effort into throttling the play of losing customers as they put into throttling the play of successful ones. Though the MGC is still very far from making actual policy changes, operators should be preparing for the day when they have to reveal exactly how a winning player’s action gets throttled or banned entirely.