Holy Toledo! The Vegas Sportsbooks Actually Get Some Favorable Press

Tamara Audi and Adam Thompson write in the Wall Street Journal about how the Las Vegas casinos helped authorities catch point-shaving football players at the University of Toledo.

It is no surprise that the sportsbooks take an active role in this endeavor: when cheating happens, the sportsbook is the party from which money gets stolen. (If the bookies balanced the action so that money came evenly on both sides, this wouldn’t be the case; but they don’t). In contrast, online poker Web sites have been criticized for not doing enough to catch cheaters. Their reticence is not a complete surprise: the other players, not the poker site itself, are the ones victimized by online poker cheating.

The NCAA, NFL, and other sports leagues complain about sports betting and publicly attempt to distance themselves from it — but I’m sure that, behind closed doors, they thank God on a regular basis for the existence of gambling. The share of folks who watch sports because they have something riding on it (if nothing more than a fantasy team) must be enormous. It is nice that this type of story lets them share the love openly.