Sports betting almost ready for those in eastern Washington

Sports gambling was set to launch in October at Northern Quest Casino, but supply chain issues have pushed the start date.

"Acquiring our servers took longer than expected," said Kevin Zenishek, Director of Casino Operations. "The servers have been on property for a couple weeks now, and they're getting coded up and ready to go."

Those servers organize all the information when someone places a bet. Now, the Northern Quest teams hopes to launch by the end of November.

"There's a lot of just computing that goes on, so the server's got to be coded and set up," Zenishek said. "There's the software that runs the application for placing the wagers that has to be coded with the different permission levels for users to have those permissions."

Northern Quest is planning to eventually role out a mobile app that would allow betting to happen anywhere on casino property, but that won't be available until early next year.

"It's a little intimidating and a little confusing sometimes, the first time you load an app and you try to look through how you place your wagers. So, we want to make sure people know how the system functions, make sure they can make wagers accurately, and responsibly," Zenishek said.

The casino team anticipates a learning curve for both them and those placing bets.

"There's so many different phases of this project that have to be executed well to pull this off, so we want to do this the best way possible, so we wanted to make sure we weren't bound by time and we gave ourselves enough time to pull this off well."