Howard Cannon spearheaded an effort to reduce the onerous excise tax, prompting casinos to enter the sportsbook business. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that Nevada’s U.S. Because of a high tax rate on sports bets, the large casinos of early Vegas ignored sports wagering, allowing smaller operators known as turf clubs to dominate the industry. Sportsbooks weren’t always synonymous with Las Vegas. And those rules, like a disgruntled online commenter, have one overriding philosophy: stick to sports. But in the real American West of Nevada, the books are driven by something else: restrictive, conservative regulation. Online and in the U.K., there’s a wild west of betting options. Nor can you bet on events such as the Oscars or Brexit, despite the ubiquity of odds on those events quoted in the news and on social media. Las Vegas doesn’t offer odds on the presidential election. You get to a casino, march up to a sports book window and try to put down your bet. Say you’re sitting in an airport on the way to Las Vegas reading about the presidential race, and you’re so sure that Donald Trump will pull an upset that you want to put some money on it.
