How big a problem are sportsbooks that limit the action of successful players? According to a recent report by the Wyoming Gaming Commission, this isn’t really a problem at all. That’s the conclusion the Commission came to after conducting a study on how many players are actually throttled by Wyoming’s five licensed operators.
In face, according to Michael Steinberg, deputy director, special agent supervisor of gaming compliance for the Wyoming Gaming Commission, the number of throttled players in Wyoming is likely even less than one percent. “It would be hard for me to give you a better number than ‘less than 1%’ of Wyoming patrons being limited because of the cross referencing required for each operator to see if someone is limited across multiple platforms. What I can say for certain is that each operator’s data showed less than 1% of their total Wyoming customers had been limited and the number was generally closer to 0.01%. Since they varied a little, but were all well below 1%, that’s what I used,” he said in comments reported on by SCCGManagement.com.
Steinberg went on to say that the vast majority of players who had been throttled in Wyoming weren’t winning, so much as they were cheating. That group included players working schemes such as court siding, group betting, and bearding.
Wyoming’s query into throttling came after the American Bettors’ Voice, an advocacy group headed by Gadoon “Spanky” Kyrollos presented on the topic to the Commission last fall. But after the investigation, Steinberg wasn’t especially convinced that the group had a valid point. “Spanky, and the bettors association, would like you to believe that the operators are only limiting the bettors who are doing well and winning consistently. This is not the case,” Steinberg concluded.
Wyoming’s sharpest bettors are going to have to live with their limited action until such time as Steinberg and the rest of the Commission can be convinced that they are really being treated unfairly. That said, Wyoming is America’s least populated state (less than 550,000 residents) so it’s a very small group impacted by throttling in any event.