Once upon a time, Oaklawn Park was not just the home of horse racing and corned beef sandwiches, but also a place of incredible innovation in gaming. That Oaklawn, led by Charles Cella and his brilliant protégé Eric Jackson, is gone. In their place is an organization insistently committed to the status quo.
The latest installment is Oaklawn's illogical opposition to interactive gaming and its component to raise funds for the Name Image Likeness (NIL) problem facing every college in Arkansas. Oaklawn's leadership today denies the fact that shady offshore online casinos are a very real threat and opposes an opportunity to stop them while raising badly needed NIL money to allow Arkansas colleges and universities to remain competitive in their respective conferences.
Those illegal online casinos have been linked to China, organized crime, and even terrorism. They show no concern for children gambling on their platforms. These products are available not in some dark corner of the Internet, but rather on your phone in the app stores. These shady casinos operate throughout Arkansas with no oversight or taxation of any kind. Recent reports from analysts put illegal gaming in Arkansas at $5 billion a year.
So why would Oaklawn oppose this new concept and business opportunity, especially in light of the fact that its main competitor, Saracen, is thriving? Saracen's casino revenues over the last 12 months exceeded those at Oaklawn. And next fall, Saracen will open 320 luxury hotel rooms along with a 1,600-seat concert venue. With Saracen's success to date, with only a half-built location, one can only assume how a completed Saracen will perform in the future.
In this vein, BetSaracen, the sports wagering app, books three times as much business as Oaklawn Sports, despite the fact that it had an eight-year head start in online gaming with its Oaklawn Anywhere gaming platform. Is the once-innovative Oaklawn's opposition today just based on a fear of Saracen winning in even more gaming spaces? Saracen's proposal is a simple amendment to an existing Arkansas casino provision. Rule 5 today is called Interactive Gaming and already authorizes Arkansas casinos to offer poker online statewide.
In amending this rule, the most immediate goal is to displace the illegal offshore casinos and move this business to the Arkansas casinos, where the money will stay in our state along with tens of millions in new tax dollars, while creating a way to help raise ongoing funding for NIL and the college sports programs.
Reading Oaklawn's opposition to the Saracen plan, several items jump off the page, because they are simply not true.
1. Oaklawn says the money from online gaming would only benefit those counties housing a casino. This is false. The Arkansas Constitution makes it clear that the net casino gaming receipts tax on this additional business will be taxed at 20 percent, with 55 percent of that going to the state of Arkansas, 17.5 percent going to subsidize Oaklawn's horse racing purses, and the balance to the county and city where the casino is located.
2. Oaklawn insists the proposal is flawed because it lacks a local vote to authorize online gaming. This is just odd, and where was this concern with the launch of Oaklawn Anywhere in 2014 or Oaklawn Sports in 2022?
3. Oaklawn contends interactive gaming would decimate the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery. The data does not support Oaklawn's position. According to The Innovation Group, Las Vegas-based gaming analysts, the impact of online casino gaming on lotteries is negligible at a tiny fraction of a single percent (0.04 percent).
4. Oaklawn says Arkansas should just kick out the offshore illegal casinos. If it was this easy it would already be done. Only one state has ever successfully kicked out those bad actors: Michigan. In that case, major law enforcement attention plus competition from legalized casinos displaced them and they moved on to other states, including Arkansas. Saracen's plan is modeled after the success in Michigan.
5. Oaklawn believes online gaming is bad. If sincere, can we expect them to shut down their horse and sports wagering apps? Policy arguments are easier when folks have their facts straight and everyone is honest about the basis for their position. On an issue of this importance, facts and truth are not too much to ask of Oaklawn. Saracen has a substantial sum invested to get this product ready to take to market to help kick out the bad actors, keep children from gambling online, protect Arkansas consumers by providing a regulated and taxed alternative, and to raise NIL money.
Oaklawn, if you don't want to invest in interactive gaming, that's your choice, but don't use disinformation to stand in the way of progress in generating millions more in tax revenues and badly needed funding for college sports NIL programs here in Arkansas. To our friends at Oaklawn, a previous generation of your leadership once created out of thin air a brilliant policy for pseudo slot machines to help the horse track. That was real innovation and had never been done anywhere. You were early movers in simulcast wagering, and you later sought permission for horse betting on phones over a decade ago.
In contrast, this generation of Oaklawn looks to operate in the status quo, hunkered down in the parameters of today with a myopic eye on taking as much cash as possible back to St. Louis, Mo. There is a better way, one in which we can address the $5 billion in illegal gambling here, create tens of millions in tax dollars which will also help fund your horse races, and help NIL too.
Carlton Saffa is Saracen Casino Resort's Chief Market Officer. He was Saracen's first employee and has led the organization since its inception.