A new anti-iGaming casino coalition has joined the fray in the ongoing legislative battles to legalize online casino-style gambling that are underway for 2025 in several US states. The casino-backed astroturf lobbying entity, the National Association Against iGaming (NAAiG), was created in November and began launching its efforts in January.
To date, NAAiG has followed a course already charted by previous anti-iGaming casino entities and anti-gambling groups. NAAiG's primary claims are familiar, including the claim of excessive cannibalization of jobs at live casinos, purportedly amounting to thousands of lost casino jobs per state.
According to the coalition's home page, these are NAAiG's primary reasons for fighting against online gambling:
- Rising rates of gambling addiction, particularly among young adults.
- Financial instability in families, driven by the unchecked accessibility of online gambling.
- Thousands of family-supporting jobs lost as visits to in-person gaming plummet.
- Declines in tax revenues and public funding as online operators shift profits out of state.
(Source: naaig.org)
Exaggerated and misleading claims
As with prior anti-iGaming groups, NAAiG's claims become more suspect the deeper and more targeted one digs. Yes, gambling can be addictive, and tragedies associated with problem gambling abound. Several studies have also found that younger, newer gamblers are more prone to gambling addiction, and that online gambling of any form is generaly more addictive than its brick-and-mortar counterpart.
Acknowledging the dangers of gambling is one thing; grossly exaggerating them is something else. For example, the most recent research on online gambling conducted by the National Institutes of Health determined that online gamblers are 1.5 to 3.2 times as likely to develop pathological gambling issues. But according to NAAiG, citing research from another anti-gambling group, the National Council on Problem Gambling, online gamblers are eight times more likely to develop such issues. Numerically, something is amiss.
Though NAAiG is prominently dressed in societal-health clothes, the coalition's primary push appears to be the claim by its supporting casinos that online gambling excessively cannibilizes brick-and-mortar casinos. The large majority of data gathered to date shows the opposite: Some cannibalization occurs, but online gambling appeals largely to a different audience, more likely to gamble for brief periods frequently rather than spending hours at once on a casino trip.
NAAiG bases its claims on two studies done by an established gaming-industry research firm, The Innovation Group. Innovation has been around for a quarter century or thereabouts, so its findings have some gravitas within the industry. Yet when it comes to the numbers regarding cannibalization and casino jobs lost, TIG's prospective veers widely to the negative compared to most other studies.
Gambling-media veteran Steve Ruddock, author of the industry-news outlet Straight to the Point, was one of those who noticed the disparity, which has increased of late. Ruddock noted that the first TIG study, in 2023, pegged the cannibalization number at 10 percent. That TIG report was followed by research from another industry stalwart, Eilers & Krejcik, which found there was virtually no cannibalization at all.
One might think that the truth is somewhere in between. But in the latest TIG study, the one prominently cited by NAAiG, the cannibalization percentage has been jacked all the way up to 16%. That purportedly translates, in another part of the report, to the loss of tens of thousands of casino and support jobs from states having or considering regulated iGaming, and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for each US state offering iGaming. Again, something's amiss.
Ruddock, while commenting on Maryland iGaming hearings, agrees that there is some amount of cannabilization, but that the proper response to iGaming foes is, “Yes, there is some cannibalization, and you are already experiencing it at the hands of gray and black market operators.
“Presently, and this will only get worse in the future in the future, [Maryland] is importing the harms and exporting the benefits of online casino gambling. Here is how we are going to structure the market to import the financial benefits of online gambling and mitigate the harms.
"As Steve Jobs said, 'If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will.'"
Who's behind NAAiG?
In typical astroturf lobbying fashion, exactly who's behind the NAAiG creation and launch isn't quite clear. NAAiG declares, "Our members - casinos, local businesses, employees, unions and advocacy groups - support in-person gaming for its economic and social benefits while opposing iGaming's risks, including isolation and addiction."
But who those members are is largely a mystery; there's no human being or business entity listed anywhere on the NAAiG site. The sole physical address offered on the site leads to a mail-drop business in New Jersey, though NAAiG does not appear to be domiciled there, and the domain's ownership information has been made private as well.
It's only when NAAiG started publishing press releases in recent weeks that a few of the entities behind the coalition became known, since quotes are almost obligatory to validate a new group's existence. So far, quotes from officials of three casino groups have appeared within NAAiG pressers: The Cordish Companies, which operates several "LIVE!" casinos, including Maryland LIVE!; Churchill Downs, which has been supportive of online horseracing and sports betting, but not iGaming; and Monarch Casino and Gaming, Inc., which operates Colorado's Monarch Casino and the Atlantis in Reno, Nevada.
The corporate officials quoted are all described as being NAAiG board members, but there are likely several other board members and casino entites already onboard. The cloaked astroturfing is reminiscent of the 2010s-vintage Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling (CSIG), which was funded by Las Vegas Sands Corporation CEO Sheldon Adelson. CSIG folded in 2020 after Adelson died in 2019. Adelson departed without getting the nationwide iGaming ban he desired, but he very arguably slowed down the growth of regulated iGaming in the US for nearly a decade.
Maryland iGaming debate front and center
The influence of the NAAiG coalition may play out most importantly in 2025 in Maryland, where new iGaming legislation has already received two hearings. At the second of the two hearings, Cordish's Mark Stewart, one of the three publicly-known NAAiG board members, testified against the state's iGaming push.
“We stand to make a lot of money if iGaming is legalized," Stewart stated. "We’re a market leader in this state; on the sports-betting side we’re partnered with FanDuel. We have nearly 60% of the market. We will do very well, but we think Maryland won’t do very well, and we know our employees won’t do very well, and that’s why we’re opposed to it.”
Maryland's iGaming proponents noted that the Cordish statement appeared to be self-serving, since the company's Live! Casino & Hotel Philadelphia venue quickly launched an online-casino site serving Pennsylvania after opening in 2021.
Hypocritical or not, Cordish, along with Penn Entertainment, has come out against the new Maryland iGaming measures. Since Cordish and Penn operate two of the six full-service casinos in Maryland, it creates the impression of disunited stakeholders and gives ammunition to anti-iGaming lobbyists, including the new NAAiG entity that Cordish has helped launch.
Penn has signaled it might become a supporter if other market restrictions were enacted, but Cordish, for now, appeares to be a hard no. That makes the Maryland iGaming proposals a much tougher sell for legislators to accept, and that in turn adds to the list of recent bad news for iGaming legislation across the US.
Images courtesy of Flickr/Clarion Gaming
