Eager to draw customers from casinos in surrounding states, Delaware may legalize sports betting early in the year.   Along with Nevada, Oregon, and Montana, Delaware is one of four states exempted from a 1993 federal law that bans sports betting.

But sports bettors in the Mid-Atlantic shouldn’t get too excited.  What’s being proposed is merely parlay betting, and you can bet that two-teamers at 13-5 won’t be on the menu.   Instead, there will be some sort of heavily regulated parlay card offering. In Nevada, parlay card bettors usually lose about 30% of each dollar they put through the window, and that’s with a few casinos offering reasonably good odds in order to attract customers in a competitive environment.

The Delaware parlays are likely to be saddled with enormous takeouts, like 3-team football parlays at 5-1 odds.  Such offerings have drawn little attention in Oregon and Ontario, and will do nothing to meet the stated goal of attracting gamblers from casinos in Atlantic City and elsewhere in the Mid Atlantic.

I hope I’m surprised, and that 6.5-1 three-teamers and 11-1 four-teamers with potentially stale pointspreads will be available.  But don’t count on any such value being part of the Delaware program.  Instead, there will be bad odds, creating a takeout of 40% or more, and hence, a failure.