SugarHouse Sportsbook Review
As one of Pennsylvania’s smallest casinos, the SugarHouse is – despite its name – pretty dang spicy. With loose slots, fine dining, and modern gambling machines of all kinds, the SugarHouse gets excellent reviews across the board from most visitors. And when sports betting in Pennsylvania is finally open to the public, you can expect the SugarHouse sportsbook review to be just as solid, if not even more so.
For those PA sports bettors who would rather wager on their favorite leagues, teams, and players online, Pennsylvania’s recently-passed sports betting legislation (Act 42) allows for local sportsbooks to have online wagering systems in place. That said, it will likely be some time before any SugarHouse online sportsbook gets up and running, as there are various technological hurdles to clear above and beyond opening an on-site sports betting lounge. By most accounts, though, PA residents and visitors should be able to wager at the SugarHouse by the end of 2018, while they will likely have access to the facility’s online sports betting solution sometime next year.
In the meantime, if your only accessible means to wager on sports in Pennsylvania is to use an online sportsbook, you don’t actually have to wait for the SugarHouse Casino to get its book up on the Internet. Instead, you can immediately use a legal offshore sportsbook like Bovada, SportsBetting, BetOnline, 5Dimes, and other first-class services that have been accepting PA customers for the last couple of decades.
These sportsbooks are entirely legal to use, and – better yet – you will almost always get more value-oriented odds and lines by sending your wagers overseas through such services (especially considering Pennsylvania’s huge 36% tax on state sportsbook revenues). No matter how good the SugarHouse sportsbook reviews are going to be, the bottom line might be the one line where it just can’t compete with existing foreign brands, at least until the PA legislature fixes its financial restrictions on in-state sports betting.
The SugarHouse sportsbook is not open for business yet, but it should be only a matter of weeks before PA patrons can get access to the newly-designed betting lounge on the casino’s premises. The casino operator was the fourth to apply for a sports betting license in the state, and just has to observe a 90-day waiting period before sports gambling can launch. This currently gives an ETA of December. Once that happens, of course, sports betting at the SugarHouse will be open year-round, available to the venue’s hundreds of thousands of annual visitors. Like the SugarHouse’s famous slogan says, “Philly loves a winner!” And you can be a big winner once you start placing all your sports bets with the SugarHouse sportsbook.
Again, the timeline, while not set in stone, should see the SugarHouse Casino sportsbook up and operational sometime in or around December 2018, with its online component rolling out after that. However, even if there are delays, you can expect the SugarHouse sportsbook to be accepting bets on-site before Super Bowl LIII. Let’s just hope the Eagles, as hometown favorites, don’t skew the action too much when the book finally goes live.
Once it’s allowed to open its doors to the Pennsylvania sports wagering community, the SugarHouse sportsbook will definitely offer a full sports betting menu. After all, it wouldn’t be a particularly sweet sportsbook if it didn’t.
Pennsylvania residents and visitors will be able to place every kind of athletics wager imaginable at the SugarHouse Casino, where they’ll have daily access on tens of thousands of MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, NCAA, NASCAR, MMA, and PGA odds, as well as popular international sports like boxing, soccer, rugby, tennis, cricket, and more. Add in live betting, and Pennsylvania sportsbooks and visiting gamblers will literally never run out of sports betting chances to win.
Once the SugarHouse Casino gets its online system up and running, everyone 21 and older will be able to wager on their mobile device at the Sugarhouse sportsbook. That said, there is an important difference between an online sportsbook and a mobile sportsbook app. Apps, of course, are more optimized for your mobile devices (iPhones, Android phones, iPads, etc.), but they also must go through Apple and Google approval processes that can take a lot of time and delay the app’s market availability.
As such, PA residents will have access to the SugarHouse online sportsbook – which they can get to via their mobile device’s web browser – long before an official SugarHouse sportsbook app hits the scene (which, by most accounts, should happen sometime in the first half of 2019).
If you plan to wager at your favorite sportsbook while out of the state, you will want to stick to using an online sportsbook. Proxy betting is when sports bettors can place wagers through local intermediaries, which is essentially what the federal Wire Act forbids. As such, it would be a good idea for those interested in placing bets on their favorite sports to stick to using the sites that have been accepting wagers for years.
Remember, any SugarHouse sports betting site or mobile app will be geo-fenced as a matter of course, requiring its users to physically be inside the state of Pennsylvania when placing their wagers. As such, there will always be a need for online sports betting sites, and any honest SugarHouse sportsbook review should include these as an alternative for readers.
