KIKK commenced operations as
radio station KRCT in 1947, licensed to
Baytown. The Bay Broadcasting Company was the original owner, having built and operated the station since its inception. Bay Broadcasting would sell KRCT to Industrial Broadcasting Company in 1958, not long after moving it from the original tower site in Baytown, to its current home in Pasadena. On May 1, 1961, KRCT changed call letters to the current KIKK. KIKK only operates from local sunrise to local sunset in order to protect clear-channel
WSM in
Nashville. For a time in the 1960s, Industrial attempted to operate the station earlier than sunrise in
Houston and
Nashville and begin operations at 6:00 am each day. This was denied at district court and appeals court, and the station's prior operation at such times was sanctioned with a fine from the
Federal Communications Commission. Throughout the , , and early , was the
country music station in
Houston. It simulcasted with its FM sister station at times (the former KIKK-FM, now
KKHH), and was part of a heated country war with KILT-AM-FM until 1994. By this point, KILT (AM) dropped the country format programming it has been utilizing since 1981, becoming
Houston's first sports station, while KIKK was merely filling time by simulcasting its FM sister full-time. 650 AM finally broke the simulcast with , and flipped to business news as "Business Radio 650" in 1996. KIKK changed formats in July 2004 to
Hot Talk under the moniker
KIKK Ass 650, which became the
Houston home for
The Howard Stern Show. After Stern's move to
Sirius Satellite Radio in December 2005, KIKK switched to a news format and was affiliated with
CNN Headline News. Their early evening schedule was composed of
Adult Standards music until 2008, when
Headline News completely took over the rest of the schedule, but that network's continuous move away from rolling news to focus more on personality talk caused the station to seek other programming such as the
Clark Howard Show, which then took up most of the station's schedule. In 2010, the station flipped to a local personality-emphasizing talk format (branded simply as "Talk 650"); however, it switched to an all-syndicated lineup in July 2011. KIKK dropped its talk format on January 2, 2013, and became a
sports radio station affiliated with CBS Sports Radio (now
Infinity Sports Network as of April 2024). The network's national programming complemented the locally focused sports format on sister station
KILT. On February 2, 2017, CBS Radio announced it would merge with
Entercom. The merger was approved on November 9, 2017, and was consummated on the 17th. On June 21, 2021, KIKK flipped to sports gambling, branded as "The Bet Houston", with programming from the co-owned
BetQL Network. Infinity Sports Network programming remains in certain timeslots. ==Programming==