Since 2007, it's been a near-annual tradition of mine to fly to a city that's both America's playground and one of the world's great tourist destinations. If you know me, then Las Vegas has become my favorite place to travel to... and just seeing the nearly 200 #DCVegas videos I've posted on my YouTube channel very much explains my love affair with Sin City. And when I next go there, I am looking at the chance to do something that I've never been able to do before, but one that's become a red-hot item.
Even though I've enjoyed each of my ten Vegas trips and with #11 likely to come this fall, something I've not done yet is take even one bet on a sports event at the many race & sports books in town... and I'll be down to bet on a horse race or a football game for the fun of it, just like so many others. The allure of betting on sports events have become a hot commodity lately as laws that barred this activity outside Nevada were struck down, and interest has boomed to go along with it as the U.S. now follows other countries in making sports betting a greater part of the sporting landscape here.
Up until recently, the major pro sports leagues long frowned upon Vegas as a city to not place a team in despite a 4-hour drive from Los Angeles and within a flight of that length from everywhere else in the country, but for one obvious reason. Of course, that would be Nevada's stance on legalized betting and long being the only state where full sports betting is legally accepted. And because most every hotel has a race & sportsbook in its casinos, except for exhibition games and the occasional "home" game hosted by a team from next door Las Vegas was off limits for major professional team sports.
But times have changed: the rapid growth of a market that's among the fastest-growing in the country, the millions who travel here each year that makes it among the world's most-popular attractions, and the changing stance in most of the country on gambling have seen a total 180 in Las Vegas' sporting fortunes. In the span of a few years, the NHL has become a smash hit thanks to the rapid success of the Golden Knights, followed by the Raiders moving from California to Southern Nevada... and there may be more to come to join big fights, golf, NASCAR, UNLV, rodeo and more on the Vegas sports slate.
Plus, there's those sports books which probably take the cake for becoming the best place anywhere in America to watch the big games, with a strong communal experience of watching ports with strangers that existed for a long time before the emergence of twitter brought that to social media. And if you happen to follow on Instagram boxing's 50-0 man, Floyd Mayweather sometimes took snaps of the bets the money man makes on a number of games when he wagers at the sports book.
So, what exactly is sports betting? It's the subject of the first installment of this 2021 Summer of Sports, as DCBLOG temporarily turns our attention from covering MTV Reality shows and the upcoming 37th season of the fifth major pro sport of The Challenge, to focus on matters in the sports world -- which has long been a strong passion of mine, and where this intersects with another in the Las Vegas culture.
