KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County. Share your story idea with Tod.
For the fifth time in six seasons, the Kansas City Chiefs are playing in the Super Bowl.
While fans in the Chiefs’ home state still can’t legally bet on the Super Bowl without leaving the Show-Me State, the Missouri Gaming Commission has made significant strides toward rolling out its program statewide.
When Super Bowl LIX kicks off Feb. 9 in New Orleans, it will have been more than three months since Missouri voters narrowly legalized sports gambling in November, becoming the 39th state to do so.
The Missouri Gaming Commission plans to launch sports gambling in Missouri by the middle of the year.
“The Super Bowl is freaking a couple weeks away,” Brandon Stanford, who was hanging out Wednesday with some friends at Johnny’s Tavern in the Power & Light District, said. “We’ll be at the Super Bowl, but we’ve got to go somewhere else to bet it, so it’s not as fun. it’s killing some of our enthusiasm.”
Such despair won't last much longer and sports gambling remains legal across the state line in Kansas, where it’s been legal since September 2022.
“I don’t want to go to Kansas to do it,” Kenneth Love, another Johnny’s Tavern patron, said. “I’m from Missouri. I like to stay over here.”
Stanford added: “We’re getting tired of having to drive across the water.”
Fortunately, it won’t be long now.
Missouri Gaming Commission Chair Jan Zimmerman said Wednesday that the state remains on track to begin issuing licenses “by the end of June,” which is in line with what she announced shortly after the Nov. 5 vote.
Zimmerman also said Missouri’s rollout hit a major milestone this week when it forwarded a draft copy of its proposed rules and regulations to Gov. Mike Kehoe’s office for review.
“Part of our timeline that has been created by the staff, that was discussed with the Commission at our last meeting, was to get those preliminary rules to the governor's office,” Zimmerman said. “We've met that date, on the 27th (Monday, Jan. 27), those rules went to the governor's office.”
She understands that many Missourians are itching for the chance to play a wager from their couch, but noted that the initiative petition gives the Missouri Gaming Commission until Dec. 1, 2025, to launch.
“We got a gasp from the staff when we said we wanted to be (live by) mid- to late summer, because it is so involved,” Zimmerman said. “That whole application process is really intensive and really takes a lot of work by the background investigators. It takes a lot of work by the people who are trying to be licensed, because they have to get us all this paperwork about their financial backgrounds and all that. We knew that even June was going to be really aggressive. The staff, they've been working nights and weekends and holidays to try and make sure that we can get it out there.”
All 13 brick-and-mortar casinos currently operating in Missouri will have a chance to apply for a license to offer sports gambling in-person and online, which includes mobile gambling apps.
The new law also creates sports-gambling districts around the home stadiums of Missouri’s six professional sports teams — the Chiefs, Royals and Current in Kansas City and Blues, Cardinals and St. Louis City SC in St. Louis.
Finally, the new constitutional amendment also allows for two licenses unaffiliated with casinos, but Zimmerman said that doesn’t mean they’ll automatically go to FanDuel and DraftKings, which are the largest sports gambling apps in the U.S.
“It's not just FanDuel and DraftKings,” Zimmerman said. “We're going to have a process, a selection process, to determine those, whether it's a point system or something like that. The untethered licenses, obviously, are an important component. But we didn't have any control over the number, because that’s what’s in the initiative.”
It will be difficult to adjust sports gambling in Missouri — including the 10% tax rate and a prohibition on casinos and apps offering player prop bets involving in-state schools — moving forward. Since it passed via the initiative petition/constitutional amendment process, it would take another statewide vote to make any changes.
But it’s coming — even if Missourians have to endure one more Super Bowl when it’s legal to bet on the Chiefs in the comfort of your own home in Kansas but not east of the state line.
“I’m just a little jealous,” Stanford said, “but we’ve got stuff over here that they can’t do, so it’s all good.”
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