A Short History of the Legal Sports Book
Legal sports betting in the United States spent most of the twentieth century in a single state, and even there it spent decades as a business the casinos did not want in their buildings.
Nevada licensed bookmaking in the nineteen forties, but a federal excise tax on wagers made the margins hopeless, and the trade lived in independent rooms known as turf clubs, separate from the casino floor. When the tax was cut sharply in the middle seventies the arithmetic changed, and the books moved indoors.
What followed was an architectural shift as much as a commercial one. The wall of boards, the tiered seating, the screens for every game at once: those are artefacts of a business that suddenly had to be worth walking into and staying in.
The federal statute that froze the map elsewhere arrived in nineteen ninety-two, and was struck down by the Supreme Court in twenty eighteen, after which individual states began legislating for themselves. The oldest continuous practice, though, is the one in the room with the boards.