July 05, 2018 - Jill Dorson
Happy Anniversary! Delaware Sports Betting a Winner One Month In
The post Happy Anniversary! Delaware Sports Betting a Winner One Month In appeared first on SportsHandle.
A $100,000 bet has been placed. A $1 million “profit” has been made. And about $7 million has been bet.
Yep, Delaware has hit it big.
Today marks the one-month anniversary of legal sports betting in the state and Delaware Lottery Games director Vernon Kirk couldn’t be happier.
Delaware Sports Betting Bringing in More Than Expected
“It’s obviously pretty exciting, but we’re doing well,” he told Sports Handle. “Maybe even a little bit better than the percentages that we expected.”
Not a bad deal for the first state outside of Nevada to accept full-fledged legal sports bets since the United States Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA)on May 14.
The state’s fiscal numbers were due on June 24, according to Kirk. And those numbers revealed that bettors in Delaware had placed approximately $7 million in bets with $6 million paid out to winners, and a $1 million “profit” to cover the likes of vendor fees, computer fees, risk management, commissions to the racetracks, a purse increase and the state’s share.
The numbers also showed that the lion’s share of bets were placed on baseball – approximately $6 million, according to Kirk, including the first bet ever laid down in the state, a $10 wager on the Philadelphia Phillies by governor John Carney on June 5 on the hometown Philadelphia Phillies. There were also a few surprises – about $35,000 was wagered on mixed martial arts, a handful of college softball bets were placed and what Kirk described as a “surprising” amount of wagers were laid down on the World Cup.
The numbers represent 19 days of sports betting, from June 5-24. And Kirk was quick to point out that he’s quoting cash numbers, as opposed to the graded figures generally quoted in Nevada. As an example, he said, when Delaware takes a futures bet, the state counts it immediately where a Las Vegas casino would not.