If you're itching to bet a few hundred on the Super Bowl using the Internet, better do it now. It's better than even money that the St. Louis Rams will be in the Super Bowl before you get another chance. The smart money says that Congress will ban Net gambling sometime this year.
Full-scale sports betting in the United States is legal only in Nevada, but anyone with an Internet service provider can choose from over 200 offshore Web sites offering sports betting and casino games.
They range from well-established outfits like British-based Bowmans International to fly-by-nights on flyspeck Caribbean islands.
Online gambling is exploding. The first serious sites opened in early 1996, but by last year, Net-betting revenues reached an estimated US$651 million -- half of it on sports, according to Sebastian Sinclair, a gaming analyst with Christiansen/Cummings management consultants. Nevada still dwarfs that, of course. Last year, punters plunked down almost $2.3 billion at Nevada sports books, including $77 million on the Super Bowl, the biggest single sports wagering event.
Net-betting offers admirable ease, no taxes, and relative safety. After 20 years of betting on football games with his local illegal bookies, Gary Collard, a 37-year-old software developer in Irving, Texas, has switched to Sports Interaction, which operates out of the Dominican Republic.
"It's better than calling someone who might be part of a sting operation," says Collard, who expects to lay a few hundred on the Denver Broncos this year.
Many online sports books will open an account within minutes of receiving your credit-card information or cash wire transfer. Then you just click around to pick your teams and point spread, and -- hopefully -- collect your winnings by mail.
Of course, there are horror stories aplenty about sports-betting sites that appear just long enough to collect bettors' money, then vanish.
