The Golden Moon Hotel & Casino at Pearl River Resort could be one of the first venues in Mississippi to open a sportsbook.
Mississippi sports betting legalization passed its final regulatory test when the Mississippi Gaming Commission unanimously approved the state’s sports betting laws on Friday. Under a plan passed in the Mississippi state legislature last week, the sports betting regulations will not come into effect for 30 days.
That means some of Mississippi’s 28 land-based casinos could open sportsbooks in July. Though some testing and refinement of the new procedures will be needed, most Mississippi casinos have been developing plans to open sportsbooks since the US Supreme Court struck down a 46-state federal ban on sports betting on May 14.
Online sports betting inside Mississippi will not be allowed. To place a bet in Mississippi, bettors will have to enter the gaming venue itself. The 2017 Fantasy Contest Act struck out a clause from the the Gaming Control Act of 1972 which had banned sports betting.
Without the clause, gaming experts speculated that sports betting would be legal inside casinos, but not outside those facilities. The language in the 2017 law never mentioned the term “sports betting”, but it has been interpreted to mean casino-based sports bets.
Where to Bet on Sports in Mississippi
With casinos located in Gulfport and Biloxi in the southern end of the state and Tunica County in the northwest part of Mississippi, gamblers from Alabama, Arkansas, and southwestern Tennessee will have the ability to make sports bets with relatively little trouble. None of those states currently allow sports gambling.
Sports bettors must be 21 or older to place a legal bet in Mississippi. It is unknown whether mobile sports betting will be allowed inside Mississippi casinos. Early indications are that mobile sports betting should be available, but only inside a legal gaming facility.
Bok Homa Casino – Pearl River Resort
Mississippi tribal casinos likely will be the first venues to offer sports betting. If one were to wager, either the Pearl River Resort in Philadelphia or Bok Homa Casino in Heidelberg will be the first to accept sports bets.
Both casinos are owned by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who have a special exemption for sports betting in their tribal gaming compact with the state of Mississippi. For that reason, neither Bok Homa nor Pearl River Resort will face the same regulations or limitations that commercial casinos in Mississippi will face.
MGM Resorts Teases July 21 Opening
MGM Resorts has teased that its casino operations in Mississippi will open sportsbooks on July 21. MGM Resorts has an advantage because it is familiar in general with how sports betting works, because it has operated sportsbooks at various of its Las Vegas Strip casinos in the past few decades.
MGM Resorts also owns Borgata, which was the first Atlantic City casino to roll out sports betting. Borgata began accepting bets at 11am on June 14, only 30 minutes after Monmouth Park became the first New Jersey gaming venue to accept legal sports betting. Both opened on the first day of the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
In Time for NFL Football Betting
If Mississippi sportsbooks plan to open in late July 2018, it means they will be ready in time for NFL preseason games. That should give Mississippi casino operators four weeks of training camp football to tweak their rules in time for the heaviest betting of the year.
The NFL typically draws more betting interest than other sports leagues, though NFL football has far fewer games per year than other major sports in the United States. In Las Vegas, NCAA football betting is also a major revenue source. Whether Mississippi allows unfettered sports betting on NCAA games is unknown, though SEC football games receive a lot of interest from southern sports bettors in the illegal sports betting market.
In New Jersey, sports bettors cannot wager on Rutgers football games. If Mississippi follows the same pattern, then Ole Miss and Southern Mississippi football games might be off-limits to Mississippi sports bettors.
Mississippi Sports Betting Laws 2017
In 2017, Mississippi legalized daily fantasy sports sites like DraftKings and FanDuel in the Fantasy Contest Act, also known as House Bill 967. At the same time, state lawmakers legalized sports betting, though the regulations and specific policies were left to future debate.
Since the Supreme Court ruling, some state lawmakers who voted for the original bill balked at the notion sportsbooks were legalized, because they said details needed to be provided. The Mississippi Gaming Commission also said they had the authority to set regulations and policies.
That seems to be the case in practice. Over the next month, MGC Chairman Jay McDaniel and his fellow commission members appear ready to introduce the official sports betting laws of Mississippi. Only a few specific policies are known at the moment.
