Many Georgia sports betting bills have come and gone, but the most recently introduced law offers an easier path to legalized sports betting in the Peach State.

Unlike previously floated pieces of Georgia sports betting legislation, the current bill introduced by 11 senators does not seek an amendment to the state’s constitution. This means it can purely be enacted through legislative action and does not depend on approval from Georgia voters in a general election.

If approved by the Georgia general assembly, retail and online sports betting will be legalized in the state.

Can Georgia sports betting be approved without an amendment?

But why is this an option now? Several other Georgia sports betting bills have been introduced, all of which included a constitutional amendment, and all have failed. It has obviously been the opinion of Georgia lawmakers that the state’s constitution prohibits all forms of gambling and betting, with an exception for the state’s lottery and non-profit bingos.

Daniel Wallach, a gaming law attorney, Founder of Wallach Legal and UNHLaw Sports Wagering, told Saturday Down South that previous bills seeking state constitutional amendments was likely due to advice from Georgia’s legislative counsel.

It’s the path of least resistance, Wallach said, and a strategy for Georgia to avoid any potential lawsuits.

“Bu that’s not really advice, that’s just being overly cautious, and the legislative counsel did not definitively take the position that the prohibition against casino gambling was directed at sports betting. His view, and he took a fairly simplistic view of it, was that by virtue of the fact that there are sportsbooks inside of casinos in some states, that this makes it casino gambling,” he said.

Wallach told Saturday Down South that it is his belief, and the belief of several state attorney generals, that the Georgia constitution does not prohibit sports betting.

The state’s constitution is clear, Wallach said, in that it only prohibits three categories of gambling; casino gambling, pari-mutuel betting on horse races, and privately-operated lotteries (with an exception for the state-operated lottery).

Sports betting does not fall within these three categories.

“The authorities that have been issued by state attorney generals all over the country have constituted a national consensus, that sports betting is distinct from a lottery due to the predominance of skill inherent to the activity of wagering on sporting events. You’re not just picking a number, you’re making an informed decision based on research, statistic, matchups, a panoply of data to help you make an informed decision on which outcome is more than likely to happen,” he said.

Lottery is a scratch off ticket, a draw game, it’s a game where luck decides who wins an outcome, Wallach said.

Attorney generals in Colorado, Michigan, and West Virginia have all arrived at the same conclusion that lottery is a game of chance and sports betting involves substantial skill.

Every significant gambling study commissioned by the federal government has explicitly recognized that sports betting is also a different species of gambling than “casino style gambling,” he said.

“Would you consider betting on the Kentucky Derby, picking a horse in the Kentucky Derby, to be casino gaming just because there’s a racebook physically located in a casino? That doesn’t make it casino gaming. Casino-style games are games that are endemic to casino environment, such as games of chance, slot machines, roulettes, craps, dice games, that’s casino gaming, where the entirety of the games take place in the casino environment. Whereas, sporting contests and wagers on sporting events are tethered to events taking place entirely outside of a casino environment,” he said.

Georgia, and similar states such as West Virginia, use the “Dominant Factor Test” to determine if an event is a game of skill or a game of chance. These states have concluded that sports betting does not fall under the same rubric as a lottery game, as sports betting is a game of skill, not one of chance, he said.

Lack of competing interests may reduce potential litigation

If the bill is passed, Georgia is less likely to face litigation challenging the law due to the lack of competing interests in the state. Litigation is typically brought by competitors, Wallach said, and Georgia “doesn’t have any competitors.”

“There are no horse racing tracks, no casinos, nobody with a vested economic interest to bring a lawsuit like this. Perhaps a religious organization, but the potentially interested aggrieved parties are less obvious in Georgia than they are in states where there are different groups of stakeholders fighting for a slice of the pie,” he said.

Sports betting litigation exists in states with obvious competing interests, such as recent litigation between California card rooms and Tribes. Lawsuits are a byproduct of battles between competing stakeholders, he said, but not brought in a vacuum by the public.

That’s not to say, however, that a well-financed individual could not file litigation in the state.

“You could have someone decide to bring out a lawsuit. It’s going to be expensive to litigate a case. It must go through the trial courts, the appellate courts, and then the Georgia Supreme Court. That’s why you normally see competitors bringing these lawsuits, not citizens that have a legitimate objection to the legislation, because someone has to pay for the lawsuit,” he said.