00:00Right now, if Alaska is on the board, we shouldn't laugh about it because I am laughing because literally if no other states legalized sports, we could go a whole year with with no one new going online.
00:13And I think that for the first time since the PASPA was repealed, we may actually have a year of no new legal states.
00:21Yeah, context is everything here. If I was on this show a couple of years ago with you, Craig, talking about Alaska's major news to legalize sports betting, that wouldn't have made one of the stories we talk about.
00:33It would have been a drop in the bucket. It's a small state. There's no major sports teams there even.
00:38But what you're mentioning, Craig, is that we have 39 states where sports betting has been legalized and launched.
00:44We're now running out of states. We certainly have a number like Utah, which will probably never legalize sports betting.
00:51Whether we get to a point where everything is just on prediction markets anyway, so it doesn't even matter if states legalize, maybe that could finally get those holdouts.
00:59But this week, lawmakers in Juneau coming back with a bill they actually had last year that would have legalized sports betting in the last frontier state.
01:07It would allow up to 10 different sports betting apps in the state, which is really important when you talk about a free market with competitive odds and different offerings out there, especially with promos as well, which we'll get into a little bit with Missouri.
01:23And it would also require that these operators are licensed in at least three other states or partnered with somebody else who is.
01:30So you wouldn't be seeing any brand new entrants in Alaska, even though I think we're pretty late and we're in a later stage now where we would not be seeing a new entrant anyway, just because it's so hard to make money.
01:41So I would I would suspect all the usual names, the Fan Duels, the Draft Kings, the Bet365s of the world would be a 20 percent tax.
01:49And really important to something that when we talk about, you know, what was going on in Chicago earlier this year with them trying to have their own city sports betting tax, this bill would also prevent any city or municipality within Alaska from adding their own sports betting tax onto that.
02:05And I think that language obviously comes from the industry itself, which said, hey, we want to make sure this doesn't happen in any other states.
02:12So we'll see what happens. The legislature has until May 20th to get this done.
02:16We'll see if, you know, the rise of prediction markets has spurred them to want to get that tax revenue or if it's something they, you know, just really don't care about that much.
02:24And we'll get to it eventually.
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