penn national gaming

Barstool Opens in PA

Just in time for Week 2 of the new NFL season, Barstool Sportsbook Pennsylvania finally launched its sports betting app late last week.

Pennsylvania is being used as the test run for the Barstool Sportsbook, which signed on as a partner with Penn National Gaming back in January. At that time Penn National purchased a 36 percent stake Barstool Sports with a pledge to up that stake in the future. The Barstool Sportsbook is expected to launch in other legal markets where Penn National Gaming has a foothold in 2021.

How did Barstool Sportsbook Pennsylvania happen?

Barstool does have some catching up to do in Pennsylvania after getting in late in the game. Pennsylvania legalized sports betting in 2017 and the first sportsbooks went live in 2019. That means Barstool’s competitors in Pennsylvania have had a year, and an entire NFL season, head start in the market.

The latest reported numbers from Pennsylvania show that FanDuel Sportsbook and DraftKings Sportsbook have gobbled up almost two-thirds of the sports betting market in the state. The question facing Barstool is how much of that market can they take away from FanDuel and DraftKings.

Pennsylvania took in record sports betting wagers in August thanks to a busy sports schedule that included MLB, NBA, and NHL. August set a new record for sports betting with $365 million, which was up 121 percent from July and up 234 percent from the previous August. It was also nearly five percent higher than the old record of $348.4 million set in January, 2020.

Almost 90 percent of wagers placed in Pennsylvania in August were placed online on a sports betting app. With the NFL season kicking off in September the record set in August could be quickly broken.

With only a few weeks remaining in September the numbers for the month when they’re reported in October won’t give a full indication on how quickly, or potentially how slowly Barstool Sportsbook has broken into the Pennsylvania market.

A clearer picture on Barstool’s Pennsylvania launch will come in October when a real look at its market share when compared to its competitors will be revealed.