There’s a sports betting court battle brewing, and people have been waiting for it for years. Right now, gambling on sports is legal in Nevada, where the Las Vegas casino sports books hum with activity under the glow of giant boards that show the point spreads. Just about everywhere else, it’s a black market, right down to the office football pool.

Now, however, New Jersey wants a piece of the action — and it’s waging that they could reshape sports betting across the country. At stake is the staggering amount of money, up to $500 billion by some estimates, that Americans wager on sports every year, but only about 1% of that is legal. The rest is unregulated, leaving billions of dollars in potential tax revenue on the table.

“Every town in this state has people betting on football, baseball, basketball, hockey, on all the major sports, except now it’s being done by criminals,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told reporters in March. “What we’d like to do is to bring it out in the open and have the citizens of the state benefit from it.”

Standing in the way are the four major professional sports leagues and the NCAA, and they seem ready for the sports betting court battle. The say legalized gambling threatens the integrity of their games, not to mention their billion-dollar businesses. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a court filing that in a country of widespread state-sanctioned gambling, the simplest bad snaps and dropped passes would create suspicion about game-fixing.

The story on New Jersey’s continued sports betting court battle originally appeared on the NBC News website.