After months of waiting, the residents of Maine are finally set to be able to start placing wagers on sports by the end of the week.
Earlier this week, the state’s Department of Public Safety announced that the local lawmakers have officially adopted the rules for sports betting and the new form of gambling is scheduled to go live at 9:00 AM on November 3rd. Starting today, suppliers and providers of management services will be able to start pre-launch advertising to accept registrations ahead of Friday’s launch.
Approximately 15 months will have passed from the moment when Maine lawmakers made sports betting legal to the moment the new form of gambling goes live on Friday.
On May 2nd last year, Governor Janet Mills signed a bill into law that officially allowed legal sports betting, a move that provides the state’s Indigenous tribes with exclusive rights to the lucrative online betting market. It took only 90 days for sports betting to become law in Maine.
Then, in January 2023, the state’s gambling and betting regulator – the Maine Gambling Control Unit – published detailed rules for operating sports betting services. The public was given the chance to provide feedback on those rules, which were then revised by the regulator and sent to the office of the state Attorney General for review in July 2023.
Maine to Join More than 30 US States Offering Legal Sports Betting Services
Now, with sports betting set to go live in Maine, Vermont will become the only New England state where legal sports betting services are not available.
The launch of the new form of gambling has been an eagerly anticipated event by Maine residents who have been forced to travel elsewhere to place wagers. According to market experts, such as Oklahoma State University professor John Holden, the lengthy wait helped ensure that the state would have a smooth operation of sports betting at a later stage. Professor Holden shared that Maine followed a more cautious approach to the implementation of sports betting and that helped it not take pressure from the industry or follow other states’ suit on how to move forward with the process.
On November 3rd, Maine is set to join more than 30 US states that have already made sports betting legal and launched the new form of gambling since the 2018 US Supreme Court ruling that forever changed the country’s gambling market.
Last year, the executive director of Maine’s Gambling Control Unit, Milt Champion, estimated the sports betting’s overall revenue is set to bring between $3.6 million and $6 million every year in taxes to the state but also noted that the economic boost associated with the implementation of the new form of gambling in Maine could be smaller. He shared that it would probably be less than the gambling industry would like many people to believe and reminded that sports betting is traditionally a low-margin product.
