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There is an awesome story running in June’s edition of Texas Monthly. It offers in excruciating detail how Las Vegas Sands completely failed to legalize betting in Texas. This piece reads like a mini book, just thousands of words of prose that covers the failed attempt by The Sands.
We strongly, strongly recommend reading the original article. It’s long, and might take you an hour to go through, but it really is explosive stuff. Journalism at its finest.
For your convenience, we’ve boiled down some of the best parts of the story. It’s not everything, but here’s what caught our attention of Adelson’s so-far-flawed plan to legalize betting:
The Sands Playbook
To level-set things, we need to establish who exactly The Sands is. In the world of legal betting, they’re one of the most respected names, akin to top betting apps like BetMGM. Sands is the company behind the Venetian Casino at the Las Vegas Strip (though they sold it in 2022). With properties all over the globe, the company pulled in $11 billion in revenue in 2024. Sheldon Adelson built the empire, but handed the reins to his widow, Miriam, when he died a few years ago.
Sheldon and Miriam are mega donors to the Republican Party. They forked over more than $100 million on Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. So they know the political arena, which is why in Texas, they came swinging with lobbyists, TV ads, political donations, and empty-sounding promises like “let Texans vote on destination resorts.” This was after Miriam bought the majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks NBA team — a shock since Mark Cuban was one of the league’s most popular owners.
Besides throwing around their influence and money, Sands backed flashy bills — SB 1288 in the Senate and its House twin, HJR 155 — that would allow for resort-style casinos in major Texas metro areas and open the door for sports betting. The state has both banned, which allows billions to flow through other means: neighboring casinos in Louisiana and Oklahoma, and popular offshore sportsbook sites.
There was reason to believe Adelson and company were on the right side of things too. Support for legalized gambling has grown inside the state in recent years. A 2023 poll from the Texas Politics Project showed 75 percent of Texans either somewhat or strongly supported legalizing casinos. There was no major public outcry. No wave of angry citizens flooding town halls. But… The Sands overlooked its real opponents.
The Sands Runs Into Multiple Roadblocks
The Adelson family, despite their wealth, are still new to the Texas scene. With that newness, there’s opposition from the “old guard” per se. Ultimately, Sands’ progress was stifled by three opponents: conservative leadership, internal House dysfunction, and the silent power of status quo donors.
The two biggest political leaders never got fully behind it. House Speaker Dade Phelan said he was open to the idea, but never threw his full weight behind it. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who controls the Senate agenda, has publicly said, more times than once, that he’s not for legalizing betting. Then there’s the head honcho, Gov. Greg Abbott, who stayed mostly silent. And with that, all the horseman of Texas conservatism killed any momentum made by Sands’ leadership.
That was just the public-facing voices. Behind the scenes, plenty of big-money conservative groups lobbied hard against it. They didn’t need a popular campaign. They just needed to whisper in the right ears. That’s how influence works at a high level, and unfortunately for Sands leadership, they’re not privy to these convos yet.
The Irving Implosion
Texas Monthly’s story leads with a great anecdote on a particular town hall meeting inside Irving Convention Center. Critics of betting, who were said to be in the hundreds, flocked to the meeting in protest. Signs saying “Don’t Vegas My Irving” and flyers warning against “predatory gambling” were visible.
This wasn’t just any meeting either. It was in March, three days before a critical zoning law vote (and weeks after the Adelson family enraged local sports fans by trading Luka Doncic). If passed, it would’ve given Sands the right to built a resort-casino in the North Texas city. This would’ve been over the land that previously housed the Dallas Cowboys’ old stadium. Along with the casino, the belief was that the Mavericks would also get a new arena here.
These lofty plans in Irving were supposed to signal long-term commitment. Instead, it became a lightning rod for the local community. They rejected the Sands PR spin of the casino-arena hybrid generating economic activity. Opponents said the “moral decay” of gambling would outweigh any of the pros.
The Texas Monthly piece gets into vivid details about how the proposal was booed by the meeting goers. It got so bad that one proponent on Sands’ side suggested the crowd might’ve been paid for — by Oklahoma casinos who don’t want to lose their business from Texans crossing state lines. Whether that’s true or not, the community meetings were a PR disaster for the Sands.
Sands Walks Away Empty-Handed
So what happened next? After the zoning mess in Irving, public resistance, and political indifference, everything fizzled. The bills died quietly. No major debate. Just silence. And that’s the real lesson here — you can come into Texas with big pockets, but if you don’t understand the prideful culture, you’re toast.
The Adelson family thought money and flash would win. But Texas power doesn’t move like that. It’s slow and it’s deeply tied to a conservative identity that doesn’t want to be told what’s moral by outsiders from Vegas. Especially not outsiders who think you can buy your way in.
Texas legislature won’t meet again until 2027. The Sands has said they are in this for the long haul, but they’ll have to learn from these misgivings to turn their luck around.
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