SOURCE: www.lasvegassun.com

As Steve Budin sees it, the legal sports betting industry in the U.S. is almost hopelessly behind the times.

Not for long, though.

Within a few years, Budin projects, Nevada's big gaming companies will begin taking sports bets from gamblers online via a legal, regulated Internet-based national sports book.

"They need to go mainstream with sports betting," said Budin, a former Miami street bookmaker who became an offshore sports betting pioneer when he set up shop in Central America for several years in the 1990s.

"The way that it makes sense is not the traditional brick-and-mortar setup, where it takes eight guys to work a room that's 2,000 square feet."

"The way to handle it is on the Internet, to the masses, where people can bet $10 or $15 from their home, and it doesn't matter whether one person is playing or 1,000 people are playing. It costs the same amount of money to take the bets."

"To think that Las Vegas is not going to offer that in the next three years is a little shortsighted."

The time frame in Budin's prediction might be overly optimistic, but the rest of his analysis - and criticism - of the legal sports betting scene makes sense.

Maybe too much sense, given the track record of U.S. government officials on sports gambling issues, which Budin says is marked by a toxic daily double of ineptitude and hypocrisy.

Rather than taking a creative approach in dealing with offshore gambling, an estimated $10 billion to $12 billion a year industry, Budin said the government has resorted to grandstanding tactics such as arresting offshore bookies when their flights land in the United States.

"They're saying they want to know when the next CEO (of an offshore betting operation) lands at LaGuardia, like he's the next shoe bomber," Budin said from his office in Miami, where he runs a sports handicapping service.

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