Rules intended to govern legal sports betting in the Green Mountain State are officially official.
Vermont’s Board of Liquor and Lottery met Wednesday and ratified amended "procedures" that will apply to the online sports betting sites that could launch later this year or early next in the state.
The board initially approved the rules on Monday, but another public hearing and vote was required to get the Vermont sports betting procedures over the line. That's partly because a few fixes needed to be made to the rules before they were given the final sign-off by regulators.
“There were a couple of typos that we wanted to correct,” said Wendy Knight, commissioner of the Department of Liquor and Lottery (DLL), which will regulate sports betting, during Wednesday’s meeting. “And a couple of instances where, in the draft, the version that the board approved, there were some inadvertent strikeouts that were lingering from the corrected version.”
The Vermont Board of Liquor and Lottery approved updated sports wagering "procedures" yesterday, including a very explicit change forbidding proxy betting. Legal sports betting won't launch in VT for at least a few months, and maybe I'm off base here, but feels like… pic.twitter.com/RfDhRzxkuk
— Geoff Zochodne (@GeoffZochodne) July 18, 2023
The rules approved by regulators will govern the two to six operators of mobile apps and sites that the state hopes will eventually set up shop in Vermont following a competitive bidding process that has yet to begin. Although the legislation passed earlier this year envisions that sort of competitive market, the DLL can choose one operator or none if the bids are lackluster.
Interested mobile sportsbook operators now have a better idea of the regulations they must follow to enter the Vermont market. The procedures approved this week cover the basics, such as a requirement for operators to have house rules approved by the DLL, as well as more technical matters, such as mandatory "vulnerability scans" of internal and external networks that must happen at least once a quarter.
Residents will have to be 21 or older to wager in Vermont, and users can't fund their accounts using credit cards. Most events and sports will be available for betting, but wagering on Vermont colleges is not in the state unless the schools are in a tournament like March Madness.
More changes to come?
The legal age of wagering, the ban on credit cards, and the restrictions on college betting are enshrined in Vermont’s sports betting law and are unlikely to change anytime soon. Other aspects of event wagering in the state could still be tweaked between now and the launch of mobile sports betting sites, which is TBD.
“That's the way the legislature set it up so that we could be as nimble and responsive as possible,” Knight said Monday. “And I suspect that as we move forward, after we… we get this up and running, and we launch, that we will see things that are working and things that aren’t in feedback.”
