Legal States Set June Betting Records. Texas Gets Zero.
New York, Tennessee and Maryland posted record June sports-betting handle while Texas, with no legal market, collected nothing.
Lorcan Palaca
Texas Teams Own the CFB Futures Boards. Texans Can’t Bet.
The state’s programs top the 2026 college football futures boards at Bovada, and not one of those bets is legal inside Texas.
Sports Betting Arrived in Texas Without a Vote. DraftKings and FanDuel Are Already Here.
AUSTIN – Texas has never legalized sports betting. The Legislature has voted it down, the lieutenant governor has buried it, and no referendum has ever reached the state’s voters. And yet DraftKings and FanDuel, the two companies that define American sports betting, are live in Texas right now, taking Texans’ money on the Cowboys, the … Read more
Texans Can’t Bet on the Cowboys. Betting on Their Own Elections Is Perfectly Legal.
AUSTIN – Cowboys bets are banned in Texas; wagering on a game can technically land you in some hot water. Wagering on who will win the state’s blockbuster U.S. Senate race is legal, federally regulated, and open to anyone 18 and older with a smartphone. That is the strange split screen of 2026. While sports … Read more
Texas Doctors Sound the Alarm on Prediction Markets. They Want Lawmakers to Keep Teens Out.
AUSTIN – The loudest new voice in the fight over gambling in Texas does not belong to a casino magnate or a crusading politician. It belongs to the state’s doctors, and they are worried about teenagers. The Texas Medical Association, the state’s largest physician group, is pressing lawmakers to impose an age restriction on prediction … Read more
Tilman Fertitta Is Building a National Casino Empire. His Home State of Texas Still Bans Them.
HOUSTON – Tilman Fertitta is on the verge of becoming one of the biggest casino operators in America. He just cannot be one in Texas. In May, Fertitta’s company reached a definitive agreement to acquire Caesars Entertainment in an all-cash deal valued at about $17.6 billion, including roughly $11.9 billion in assumed debt. If it … Read more
Sports Betting Is Cutting Into Grocery Budgets, a New Study Finds. Texas Is Still Deciding Whether to Allow It.
AUSTIN – A growing body of research suggests that when a state legalizes sports betting, some of the money wagered comes straight out of the grocery budget. A new study puts a number on it, and the finding lands in the middle of Texas’s long-running fight over whether to legalize the practice at all. The … Read more
The Texas Lottery Was Sold as Money for Schools. It Lands Hardest on the Poor.
Texas lottery education funding is a small slice of the school budget, not the windfall the myth promises. See where the money goes and who really pays.
Bettors Are Threatening College Athletes. The Fixing Scandal Has Reached Texas.
AUSTIN – For a growing number of college athletes, a missed free throw or a quiet scoring night now carries a price that has nothing to do with the standings: a phone full of threats from strangers who lost money betting on them. The uneasy collision of sports betting and college athletes has become one … Read more
Texans Bet Billions in Oklahoma. Its Tribes Spend Millions to Keep It That Way.
THACKERVILLE, Okla. – This town of a few hundred people exists because of the casino at its edge, and that casino exists because of Texas. At the first highway exit north of the Red River sits WinStar World Casino, and most of the people walking its mile-long floor drove up from Texas to get there. … Read more