Massachusetts collects $514m in sports betting tax revenue

Massachusetts collected $514m in sports betting tax while Ohio fights over who may take the bets

Two numbers landed this week that belong in the same sentence, though no one has put them there yet.

Massachusetts reported $82.69m in gross gaming revenue from its three casinos in September 2026, and $71.19m in taxable sports betting revenue from licensed operators in the same month. Taken together, and added to the $514.58m in sports betting taxes the state has collected since 2023, these figures describe what a functioning licensed regime produces: a steady, compounding stream of public revenue that no regulator has to chase through a federal court.

Ohio, this week, is doing something else entirely.

Andromeda Morrison, the Ohio Casino Control Commission's interim executive director, told the seven-member Commission on Wednesday that licensees continuing to support prediction market operators face consequences to their "future and ongoing suitability." The word suitability carries specific weight in gaming regulation — it is not a warning letter, it is a threat to the licence itself. Morrison confirmed the Commission received notice of Polymarket's new federal lawsuit on Tuesday, the day before she addressed the Commission. The sequencing matters: Ohio is now managing active litigation and active enforcement simultaneously, against different companies, on overlapping legal theories.

The list of companies that received cease-and-desist letters is worth reading slowly: Underdog, Gemini Titan, Coinbase, Prophet X, Novig, Robinhood, Polymarket, Plus500, Moomoo, and Webull. That is not a list of grey-market operators. Several of those names hold federal registrations, serve millions of retail customers, and have legal teams that will contest jurisdiction in detail. Ohio's enforcement posture assumes the Sixth Circuit ruling gave it authority broad enough to reach all of them. Whether that assumption survives contact with federal preemption arguments in each individual case is still open.

The consensus read on this situation treats Ohio's position as strong because the Sixth Circuit sided with the state. I don't think the strength of that ruling is where the real exposure sits. The Commission's October 30 compliance deadline applies not just to the prediction market operators themselves, but to every licensed intermediary that touches them — payment processors, data providers, platform infrastructure. That second-order enforcement is where the legal map gets complicated. A licensed Ohio sportsbook operator that also provides, say, identity verification services to a federally registered exchange has now been told that relationship may cost it its licence. The legal argument that follows will not be about sports betting law. It will be about whether Ohio can use sportsbook licensing as leverage over conduct that occurs on a federally regulated exchange. That is a different question from the one the Sixth Circuit answered.

Massachusetts built $514m in tax revenue by licensing the activity and collecting from it. Ohio is spending enforcement resources to prevent the activity entirely, while simultaneously watching operators contest that position in federal court. Morrison said the Commission "cannot sit utterly by while watching Ohio law be violated." That is a defensible institutional position. The question no one in Columbus appears to be asking aloud is what the enforcement effort costs, in legal fees and regulatory attention and chilled licensed-operator investment, relative to what a licensing framework might eventually produce.