Last week, the much-anticipated meeting of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission took place where the group, alongside industry stakeholders, discussed the practice of limiting bettors.

On the latest episode of iGaming Daily, SBC Americas’ Editor Jessica Welman was joined by Charlie Horner, SBC’s Media Manager, to look back at some of the highlights of the discussion.

BetMGM’s Deputy General Counsel Jeremy Kolman was one of the most prominent attendees at the meeting, and he outlined the four behaviours that the operator uses as measures to placing parameters on an account.

The behaviours mentioned were bettors that continually pounce on inaccurate lines, those that wager a lot on low liquidity/high volatility markets, those that wager inconsistent amounts and syndicate betting.

Jess described the reasons as “all fairly reasonable”, especially given that when bettors sign up to an operator, they usually have to agree to a set of terms and conditions that these practices violate.

Charlie added: “The operators said bettors are well within their rights to place bets on these lines where they might have an advantage or have more knowledge. 

“But at the same time, they are more than entitled to limit how much they can bet because at the end of the day, they are commercial entities and they’ve got to protect their bottom lines. That’s their argument and I must say to a certain extent, I kind of agree with you.”

Another issue that arose during the meeting was that of court-siding. This is a technique where bettors take advantage of the delay between an event happening live and it being updated on a sportsbook’s feed. 

Commissioner Eileen O’Brien was especially concerned about the limitation of court-siders and questioned if operators should be offering in-game markets if they cannot address the latency issue. 

Doing so would effectively prevent operators from offering in-game betting, and Jess explained that O’Brien’s views represent a “fundamental lack of understanding that there is no solution” for the issue of court-siding.

She said: “Television delays things for a few seconds, like the FCC mandates. So you have the fact that there will never be a direct overlap of what someone is seeing in person and what someone is seeing on television and the vast majority of people are going to watch on television, so you have to cater to that side of things.

“[Kenneth] Fuchs of Caesars Digital also pointed out that states like [Massachusetts] mandate that operators have to use official data feeds. So you can’t get mad at operators for using a feed that’s delayed when you mandate that if they want to offer a product, they have to use this.”

To end the episode, the duo considered what the practical outcomes of these discussions could be for operators and bettors in the state, and Jess explained that she believes that any regulation changes will regard the transparency of operators’ decisions rather than an outright ban on limiting players.

She said: “Based on the temperature of the meeting, I would say the regulation that seems to have the most likelihood of getting drafted and moving forward is some sort of process where bettors are notified about their account being limited.

“The bettors that spoke in the second half were like I don’t really know why I’m being limited, I don’t bet that much and I would like to have that opportunity to understand what’s happened.

“So to me, that’s probably the most likely end result of this is that [operators] have to notify you why you’re being limited. I think we’re a long way off from some sort of wide-sweeping regulations saying that you’re just not allowed to do this.”