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00:00All right, Pat, well, I read your column over at Legal Sports Report last week.
00:06What is going on here in Missouri?
00:07I mean, this is like, it feels like we get closer, we get further away from them legalizing
00:12sports betting here.
00:13But, and we know that there are some people that do not want sports betting there, but
00:17it does feel like the push continues.
00:19But there is a lawsuit that is currently in the way of some of this.
00:23Tell us more about it.
00:24I don't want to ruin the story before.
00:25Yeah, of course.
00:26I mean, to set the tone of it, I mean, we have to remember that the last three years
00:30there's been legislative pushes to get sports betting over the, you know, finish line and
00:35legalized in Missouri.
00:36And it just hasn't happened, largely because of one senator, Denny Hoskins, who's wanted
00:41to tie video lottery terminals to the legislation and nobody else wanted to do that.
00:46So that it fell short.
00:47Well, Bill DeWitt, the third from the St. Louis Cardinals, was like, we got to do it
00:51a different way.
00:52And he started with all the other professional sports teams in the state, a giant ballot
00:56petition to get it on the ballot less than two months away.
01:00Well, here we are two months away again, and as I just said, and we're, we've got a lawsuit
01:05challenging the certification process of that ballot petition.
01:10And it's kind of a mystery of who's behind this.
01:13We know there's two Democratic consultants who are the plaintiffs in this case, but they're
01:19backed and led by a Republican attorney.
01:23He's the chair of the Republican Lawyers Association, National Lawyers Association.
01:29So that's a strange bedfellows.
01:32He's done a lot with the Missouri Gaming Association, which represents the casinos in the state,
01:37which has been kind of quiet in terms of this whole ballot petition.
01:41And now this lawsuit, it has not issued a statement around either of them.
01:46And so this, this is just a kind of a big question of who's actually behind this, because
01:51there's some kind of interesting bedfellows here.
01:54The hearing is tomorrow, the first hearing, at least.
01:57Maybe there could be more, or it could be settled tomorrow, we'll find out.
02:02And we'll go from there.
02:03I mean, there has been industry talk before the lawsuit, you know, multiple sources had
02:08told me that Caesars and Penn Entertainment weren't very happy with how the ballot language
02:14was set up, because rather than how it was in the legislation, where each casino gets
02:19a couple skins, now only the casino operator gets one skin.
02:25And that's interesting, because Penn and Caesars both have three casinos in the state.
02:30And then you look at, there's two standalone licenses, which you have to assume would probably
02:34go to DraftKings and FanDuel.
02:35So you're taking away the tethering, and that's a whole thing.
02:38But there's no connection between them and the lawsuit, at least as of yet, that's, it
02:43would be completely unfair to them to say they are at this point.
02:47So anyway, it's going to be a very interesting day tomorrow and potentially the next two
02:51months as we get to see who's going to vote, or if Missourians will get to vote at all,
02:56because if they don't win it, then it'll go off the ballot.