American Idol Betting a "No No" When it Comes to Home Grown Talent

Place a bet on American Idol contestant Blake Lewis and it could cost you a few months behind bars.  That's because Washingtonians are faced with a Class C felony for betting on their favorite Idol.

Washington State has made American Idol betting and all other forms of wagering on the Web illegal with the potential for a jail sentence usually reserved for child predators, drug peddlers and second time drunk driving offenders like Paris Hilton. 

Blake Lewis comes to us from a small town in Washington State.

This did not bode well for those looking to place bets on Idol's most talked about contestant of the season, Sanjaya Malakar, who also came to us from Washington State.

Lewis is the only male and the -300 favorite to be voted off American Idol this week.  The folks at Betmaker.com believe that Blake Lewis will be going home after this weekend and a final will contain Melinda Doolittle and young Jordin Sparks.

Sparks incidentally is a +775 huge underdog to be voted off this week (would result in a $775 payout for every $100 bet).  Doolittle would pay out $245 for every $100 bet.

Jordin Sparks goes down in history as the first Arizona Idol to make it to the final three.  But betting on Arizona's favorite daughter may draw the watchful eye of Republican Senator, Jon Kyl, who has worked aggressively to keep his citizens from betting online (unless of course it is on the horses, which he has deemed to be "acceptable").  Kyl calls online gambling "the crack cocaine of gambling".  He encourages Arizonians to gamble on the state lottery instead of Jordin Sparks. 

While Arizonans do not necessarily have a law specifically banning online gambling, Kyl at the federal level has worked with the major sports leagues (some of whom reportedly contribute to his election campaign) to keep betting on American Idol out of households.  Unless there is some horse running in Saturday's Preakness named Jordin Sparks, Arizona residence should reframe from betting on the American Idol.

“It’s so easy to do. It’s so easy for kids to do. It’s so addictive. And it has frequently been demonstrated that there’s a lot of graft and corruption in this,” Jon Kyl says of online gambling.   “Our kids have access to the Internet. They’re frequently not supervised. And you can run up a huge debt on your folks’ credit card very, very quickly.”

Politicians like Barney Frank (D) of Massachusetts and Shelley Berkley (D) of Nevada have been working diligently to get online gambling legalized and abolish Kyl's "prohibition".

"I oppose efforts to remove the tools that our state and federal authorities have long sought to help enforce existing laws prohibiting any form of online gambling," says Jon Kyl, including Jordin Sparks betting in the equation while excluding horse racing.  

But while online gambling websites like Betmaker.com do accept Visa and Mastercard, there are safeguards in place to prevent teenage Idol fans from betting on the show.

Former CEO of Sportingbet.com, Nigel Payne, explained in a 60 Minutes interview "That 16-year-old has got to give me four or five pieces of information about him relative to his bank account, his personal details, where he lives and other things. So I can be 99 percent comfortable that this 16-year-old doesn’t even get through my front door.”

A 60 Minutes producer provided his 16 year old son with his own Mastercard to test the theory and found out that Mr. Payne was right.  As Alex attempted to register with Paradise Poker - a Sportingbet subsidiary - something made the computer suspicious about him. Warnings kept popping up – “You must be 18 or older” – and then he was rejected.

So whose left?

Melinda Doolittle.  And we trust that she's got plenty of fans back home in Tennessee, a state that has not been overly aggressive when it comes to betting online even though it is home to the former Senate Majority leader, Bill Frist, who helped push through Jon Kyl's controversial anti-online gambling law (the UIGEA) by attaching it to a pivotal unrelated port security act.

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Christopher Costigan, Gambling911.com

Originally published May 15, 2007 10:34 am ET