Do you realize how unimportant sports books are to the US? They are piddling little things, absolute non-issues. What they are simply are fodder for a handful of so-called representatives to try to prove they care about families and are out to stop people from doing things that aren't approved of by their church. Nothing more. While free trade with Costa Rica will likely result in barely tangible benefits to the US, offshore gambling is a far smaller amount. The reason why the push is strong with CR and the rest of Central America to do this is to try to get Brazil on board, that is the big prize in all this. Seemingly the only way to get Brazil on board is to say hey we got the rest of the hemisphere with us on this, why don't you join? So to think they will get into a spat over something that represents almost nothing to the US economy is really far-fetched. After all CR could say "hey we will do what we can, but we don't regulate these guys and we can't shut all of them down" and if the US balks they can say "well say what you want, but here you are telling us to shut down this business here when you have more money being bet around NY than in all our country." It will quickly become a non-starter.
