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The State Senate of Louisiana has passed the sports betting bill as the Bayou State seeks to introduce New Jersey-style online sports betting before year’s end. If the bill is finally accepted into State law, it will allow for horse tracks, riverboat casinos and land-based casinos in New Orleans to open bricks-and-mortar sportsbooks.

The Volunteer State of Tennessee has leapt out of the blocks since launching on November 1 2020, and recently became the fastest ever state to reach a total of $1 billion in sports betting handle. Almost unbelievably, that is faster than traditional sports betting powerhouses like Nevada and Pennsylvania, and even more incredibly, even faster than the grand-daddy of online sports betting powerhouses, the Garden State of New Jersey. New Jersey held the previous record, passing $1 billion in handle its seventh full month of operation, while Tennessee broke the barrier in only six full months of operation.

Expected to open for business on U.S. shores in the next few months, Malta-based global online sportsbook operator, Betway, has pulled off a successful marketing coup by becoming a fully-fledged ‘Official Sports Betting Partner’ of the National Hockey League (NHL).

Two former players for the NBA franchise, the Charlotte Hornets, Dell Curry and Muggsy Bogues, recently joined the Team’s President Fred Whitfield in approaching the state’s lawmakers one-by-one to lobby for the introduction of legal online sports wagering in North Carolina.

As the rapidly growing online sportsbook and casino industry spreads its wings from coast-to-coast driven by new technologies that were unimaginable in the 1950’s, gaming industry leaders have made it known that they consider the Federal Gaming Tax to be outdated and harmful to the cause in the battle with unlicensed illegal sportsbooks.

Before Ohio State legislators get their collective acts together, and pass the latest sports betting bill to offered to them, one online sportsbook has led the race to sign a partnership agreement with one of the state’s professional sporting franchises.

While not quite recording a record sports betting handle in March, the Volunteer State of Tennessee bounced back to reach $205.9 million in wagers for the month. The number represents the second-highest monthly total for Tennessee since it launched online sports betting on November 1 2020

Sports bettors in Virginia wagered more than $300 million in the month of March 2021. The result was an excellent one for the Old Dominion State, in only its second full month of legal online sports betting, and driven by the March Madness college basketball tournament, which represented 27.5% of all bets ($83.6 million) placed in the month.

The Connecticut Lottery Corporation (CLC) has received 15 responses to its request for sports betting qualifications. The state gaming regulator had sent out a Request for Qualifications package on April 12 with a deadline of April 23. The request was calling for "qualified and experienced sports betting solution providers for online and retail sports wagering systems and services."

Virginia is set to welcome the latest operator to its online sportsbook line-up, with the Kindred Group’s Unibet Online Sportsbook being approved for a state online sports wagering license by the gaming regulator, the Virginia Lottery.