The sports betting world has had an interesting ride, to say the least, this year. A lot of sports had to shut down or completely rethink how they were doing things to keep operations going during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many fans and bettors of sports had to turn to other ones that were still available to watch and bet on. These sports were table tennis, MMA, baseball, soccer, and golf.
The most popular one to bet on in that group was table tennis. In fact, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been pouring into the sport a day for the past month in some states.

What Happened

As noted, certain sports had a change in revenue for sports betting. Table tennis had been fairly successful in the betting world. However, that option is no longer available after a turn of events.

Betting on table tennis in Ukraine is a gamble all in itself. First off, the matches are difficult to see clearly, as if the events are being recorded with a phone or some mobile device.

Second, official information and legitimacy are hard to come by. Details surrounding much of the matches are unavailable or misguided and cannot be verified.

Third, the governing bodies of these events are not sanctioning these events. So it is unclear as to who has control of the events taking place or organizing them.

The Change

Gaming laws on third-tier leagues are subject to more risk even during normal times. The governing bodies, or lack thereof, are not necessarily covering this, and the players are under less of a magnifier.

Just recently, the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) has taken table tennis away from their list of offerings. So the ability to bet on state-licensed books (FanDuel, DraftKings, PointsBet) is now out of the question.

This is all due to the table tennis matches being subject to the games potentially being fixed. While there has not been much of any evidence yet, the alerts from everything going on have made the Division ultimately decide about it.

It is not just limited to New Jersey. In fact, this has now spread across the country, and even the likes of Colorado have suspended the act of betting on the events even after having a great month of sports betting in May on the sport.

Conclusion

These regulations are in place to help keep bettors away from losing money in an unfair way. The act of them taking away table tennis, for now, makes for a good argument and, as such, might have had to happen before things got any worse.

You can even look back in March to see that something was up. The Ukrainian Tennis Table Federation on March 30 had made a statement saying that if anyone played at the Setka Tournament, they would be subject to disqualification and access to possible future events.

They later went on to disqualify 365 players. It did not go into detail as to what happened, but the statement had somewhat clear rules to not playing or risk the chances of being disqualified.

In all, bettors were just happy to find something to pass the time over these last few months. Everyone wanted everything to get back to normal, so it is understandable that people would bet on things that they do not normally bet on.

Again, nothing has been shown yet to clearly say that these matches have been fixed, and bettors can still find sportsbooks taking bets on these events. However, the integrity at question has led to many of them saying no to the sport in general.