Tag: Delaware sports betting
Delaware Sees Slight Dip in Betting Handle for October
In October, Delaware’s total sports betting handle dropped almost $2 million, from $16,830,010 in September to $14,738,223, according to the latest report from the Delaware Lottery. But that $14.7 million September handle is the second biggest since the First State became the first state outside Nevada to offer full-fledged, legal sports betting in June.
Previously the state offered parlay wagering on NFL contests only, an offering that was “grandfathered” in under the 1992 federal law ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in May. That law had banned full-fledged sports betting outside Nevada.
Delaware Park, located less than an hour from Philadelphia, remained the busiest sportsbook. Bettors placing $10.6 million in wagers there, compared to the $2.2 million handle at Dover Downs and $1.9 million at Harrington Raceway.
Read more Delaware Sees Slight Dip in Betting Handle for Octoberon SportsHandle.
Get a Grip: The Week in Sports Betting and Sports: Iowa, Delaware, NJ and More
The post Get a Grip: The Week in Sports Betting and Sports: Iowa, Delaware, NJ and More appeared first on SportsHandle.
It’s information overload everywhere, and there’s not time enough to sleep and eat and stay fully apprised of what’s happening on this crazy blue dot of ours (two out of three ain’t bad).
Here’s the weekend Sports Handle item, “Get a Grip,” rounding up top stories in sports betting and gaming, and the world of sports at large. You may have missed them, and they are worth reading. This is meant to be brief, so that’s it.
Iowa Sports Betting Prospects; Delaware Sports Betting Profits; New Jersey Sports Betting Partnerships and More
The Iowa City-based Gazette reported this week that Iowa lawmakers, its casinos and the state lottery are “all in” on sports betting. Iowa sports betting had decent momentum but little runway in the spring of 2018, when Representative Jake Highfill (R-Johnston) led the the charge on HF 2448 — a bill that would legalize sports wagering in Iowa.
“I really think that if the Supreme Court ruling came in our favor, we would’ve had it done by now because of the momentum,” Highfill told Sports Handle in early April, after one of the possible decision dates passed with no ruling yet on Murphy v NCAA.
Now that SCOTUS has ruled favorably for states’ rights and the ability of each to legalize sports betting or not — Iowa stakeholders appear to be congeal around the same points and surrounding states willing to take deposits from their neighbors, it seems likely to get done early in 2019.
“They’re all in,” Rep. Highfill said about Democratic and Republican colleagues who have been calling him since the Supreme Court ruling.
“Now that the Supreme Court has ruled, there is a lot more awareness,” said Wes Ehrecke, CEO of the Iowa Gaming Association.
On the business side, there are over 20 commercial casinos in Iowa. The Iowa sports betting bill would levy what amounts to a 7.66 percent tax rate on sports wagering revenue and would allow mobile wagering off the bat. Rep. Highfill has previously said that the “integrity fee” or “royalty” is a complete non-starter. They’ll be back in session in early January.
The Other Most Important Stories of the Week in Sports Betting and US Gaming
DEBUTS: Delaware sports betting yielded $7 million in handle and $1 million profit in the first three weeks [SH]
REFRESHING: Ohio State AD Gene Smith has a rational approach to sports betting [Dispatch]
GOOD QUESTION: Taking a slice: Pirates seek sports-betting cut. Will play improve? [Post-Gazette]
THEY WANT NEXT: ‘Kansas and Missouri should get ready to offer sports gambling’ [KC Star]
POSITIONING: Mississippi poised to become sports betting capital of the South [Gridiron]
MEDIA: Legal gambling could change the way we watch, talk and experience sports [WashPo]
EVERYTHING’S RELATIVE: For the last time, NFL ratings aren’t down. They’re up, compared to everything else [Deadspin]
TRUTH: Lawyer whose firm reps Yankees and Cubs takes a cut at MLB’S ‘integrity fee’ [NJ OG]
AGREEMENTS: SBTech announces partnership with Resorts Casino for NJ sports betting [Marketwatch]
INDEPENDENCE DOGS: Wait, how many hot dogs did Joey Chestnut just eat? [ESPN]
Elsewhere in the Wild World of Sports:
SCOUTING: Hunter S. Thompson told Colts owner Jim Irsay to draft Ryan Leaf over Peyton Manning [ESPN]
GOLDEN STATE: DeMarcus Cousins on the Warriors is fascinating and frightening [TBL]
ON THE LINKS: Eagles will wear home jerseys in New Orleans after golf bet between coaches [PFT]
AND, OH, YEAH: LeBron James is now a Laker! Lingering questions [Ringer]
Tweets of Note:
My mate has two tickets for the England vs Sweden game on Saturday. He didn’t realise that it’s going to be on the same day as his wedding, so he can’t go. If you’re interested and want to go instead of him, it’s at St. Andrew’s Church in Cambridge and her name is Sarah
— Billy
(@Billy_WHUFC) July 5, 2018
With the addition of Cousins, the Warriors now have more gold medals than 102 countries/teams recognized by the IOC in all Olympic events.
— Hardwood Paroxysm (@HPbasketball) July 3, 2018
Dan Gilbert has spoken. And no, it’s not in Comic Sans this time. A classy way to send LeBron James off… pic.twitter.com/Nfmaar73cx
— Sam Amick (@sam_amick) July 2, 2018
— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) July 3, 2018
Quote of the Week:
The NFL’s “The Checkdown” asked top active players who they would put on the Mount Rushmore of NFL Players. Said Jaguars All-Pro cornerback Jalen Ramsey:
“My Mount Rushmore is me with four different expressions.”
Video of the Week:
Here’s a preview of the remainder of Grayson Allen’s NBA career before he inevitably ends up in Europe:
Trae Young and Grayson Allen mixing it up in Summer League
pic.twitter.com/wCJx50Q2GS
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) July 6, 2018
ICYMI at Sports Handle:
Bet365 Set to Join European Contingent in U.S. Sports Betting Market
7 Parlay Bets That Overcame Long Odds and Paid Big
‘Enthusiasm Is High’ as Mississippi Sports Betting Preparations Underway
Have a good weekend, everyone!
The post Get a Grip: The Week in Sports Betting and Sports: Iowa, Delaware, NJ and More appeared first on SportsHandle.
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.
Delaware Park Took State’s First $100,000 Bet
The most significant wager to date, Kirk said, was $100,000 in college football bets from a single bettor. The bets were placed at Delaware Park, and Kirk said the bettors put down the six-figure wager across multiple college football teams.
Delaware Park, located in Wilmington in the upper northern tip of the state, has done most of the sports betting business – about $5 million, according to Kirk. The casino’s proximity to Philadelphia (about a 35-minutes drive), the New Jersey border and Baltimore (just under 1 ½ hours driving) make it the most accessible casino in the country’s second-smallest state.
Kirk can’t point to any real hiccups during the first month of sports betting in the First State. The only real “glitch” may have been that casinos were a bit underprepared for the NBA Finals – the last two games of the Golden State Warriors’ 4-0 sweep – were June 6 and 8.
“We had one brief moment when we were overwhelmed on the second day,” he said. “There was a pro basketball game and Delaware Park was a little unprepared for the volume. Otherwise, I can say that we were ready.”
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Having too much business and too many people, is, of course, a good problem to have. And one that Kirk is sure will be resolved before the start of college football season in August. But he feels very strongly that Delaware was uber prepared for its moment because prior to PASPA being struck down, the state offered parlay football betting, and in 2009 was prepared to offer single-game sports betting before the courts denied it the opportunity.
“To be fair, we had an advantage,” Kirk said. “We’d been doing this for years with parlay cards. We had the infrastructure in place, so we just had to dust off the software, retrain the ticket writers at the casinos and that all went very smoothly.”
The Debate Between In-Person and Remote Deposits for Mobile Betting
The state hasn’t introduced mobile betting yet, so that wasn’t a factor through the first month. Kirk’s hope is to get mobile up and running by football season. State law says that mobile betting will be limited to in-state, and mobile bettors will have to register with a casino. Whether they will have to do that in person or not is as yet undecided.
Looking forward, football season will be the ultimate challenge, and not just in terms of volume. Delaware has long offered parlay cards, but now that single-game wagering has been introduced, it will change where people place their bets. That could potentially hurt small vendors who, in the past had handled parlay cards, but will likely see a dip in business as bettors place single-game wagers at casinos.
“We may see our retailers take a hit on parlay card sales, but that can’t be helped,” Kirk said. “The casinos are much better prepared to take single-game betting and they’re better equipped to monitor” sports betting.
“I’m a little concerned about what it’s going to be like with the football. It’s going to be a whole other thing … there are going to be some very busy Saturdays and Sundays, but we’re aware of that … and we think we’re taking the right steps to make that manageable. But you know, the best laid plans of mice and men. If there are some snaggles, we should be able to sort them out.”
The post Happy Anniversary! Delaware Sports Betting a Winner One Month In appeared first on SportsHandle.
U.S. Sports Betting in 2018: Timeline of State and Sportsbook Developments
The post U.S. Sports Betting in 2018: Timeline of State and Sportsbook Developments appeared first on SportsHandle.
This has been a historic year for legal sports betting in the United States as the long-awaited Supreme Court decision in Murphy v NCAA erased a 26-year-long federal ban on full-fledged sports wagering outside Nevada.
A whole heck of a lot has happened in the first half of 2018 and there’s sure to scores of dominoes yet to fall.
Now that we’re halfway through ’18, so let’s take stock of the key developments that have already occurred. This is not meant to be completely comprehensive but a quick look at most of the many highlights.
Legal Sports Betting in the US in the First Half of 2018: Sportsbooks and States and So Much Happening in Just Six Months
January 5: Scientific Games completes its acquisition of NYX. “NYX ideally positions us to capitalize on the growing online gaming and online sports betting markets,” said Kevin Sheehan, Scientific Games’ President and Chief Executive Officer.
January 9: The first piece of U.S. legislation containing the phrase “integrity fee” emerges in House Bill 1325 in Indiana, introduced by Representative Alan Morrison. The bill didn’t advance past the committee stage.
January 24: NBA Executive Vice President and Assistant General Counsel Dan Spillane testifies at a hearing on sports betting before a New York State senate committee. “We believe it is reasonable for operators to pay each league 1 percent of the total amount bet on its games” he said.
February 4: With Nick Foles under center and the guts to call the play “Philly Special,” the Eagles upset the New England Patriots 41-33 in Super Bowl LII. Many Las Vegas bookmakers took a beating due with the 4.5-point underdog Eagles taking a lot of action, plus a ton of player and scoring props going over.
“We don’t usually lose Super Bowls,” Wynn Las Vegas sportsbook director Johnny Avello said. “Once in a while. The last couple have been tough. Maybe the Patriots won’t be there next year.”
February 17 : At the NBA All-Star Weekend, Commissioner Adam Silver was asked a question about sports betting and the so-called integrity fee. “This notion that as the intellectual property creators that we should receive a 1 percent fee seems very fair to me,” Silver says of levying a fee on potential operators. “Call it integrity fee, call it a royalty to the league.”
March 2: West Virginia passes the first new law of 2018 to legalize sports wagering.
March 3 through remainder of first half of 2018: Hearings and studies on sports wagering occurred in numerous states, including Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Rhode Island and others.
March 30: Shareholders of Pinnacle Entertainment approve a merger with Penn National Gaming. Pinnacle owns 16 casinos in nine states, many of them likely to have the ability to offer sports betting by the end of 2020.
[Also See: Odds Shift in Race for Operator Dominance in Legal U.S. Sports Betting Market]
April 2: On April 2 at a hearing in Connecticut, the leagues appear to officially lower the bar for their ask from 1 percent to 0.25 percent. “This fee is lower than we originally asked for,” says Morgan Sword, Senior Vice President League Economics and Operations at Major League Baseball. “In spirit of compromise, we are willing to accept a 0.25% fee.”
April 4: The PGA Tour publicly aligns itself with the NBA and MLB on sports betting regulation.
April 19: ESPN Chalk reports that MLB and the NBA begin looking to end their respective ownership stakes in DraftKings and FanDuel, in a move believed to be tied to their desire to not have a hand directly in the bookmaking side of sports betting.
April 24: The National Indian Gaming Association adopts a resolution in support of legalized sports wagering — under certain circumstances and rules.
April 24: Former Mets and Yankees pitcher AL and and former Celtics forward Cedric Maxwell appear in Connecticut capital Hartford, to lobby lawmakers for sports betting legislation favorable to the financial interests of their respective former leagues.
May 4: The Vegas Golden Knights just keep on winning and threaten to put a large dent into Las Vegas sportsbooks.
Now the Big Daddy:
May 14: The United States Supreme Court issues its decision in Murphy v NCAA, ruling 7-2 on states rights principles that PASPA is unconstitutional. Justice Samuel Alito writes for the majority:
The legalization of sports gambling requires an important policy choice, but the choice is not ours to make. Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own. Our job is to interpret the law Congress has enacted and decide whether it is consistent with the Constitution. PASPA is not.
May 14: Utah Senator Orrin Hatch — one PASPA’s co-authors — announces his intention to introduce a bill regulating sports wagering. “We need to ensure there are some federal standards in place to ensure that state regulatory frameworks aren’t a race to the bottom” his office says in a statement.
May 14: No longer an open secret, DraftKings announces its intention to move into the sports betting market.
“Our mission has always been to bring fans closer to the sports they love and now, thanks to the wisdom of the Supreme Court, DraftKings will be able to harness our proven technology to provide our customers with innovative online sports betting products,” says Jason Robins, CEO and co-founder of DraftKings. “This ruling gives us the ability to further diversify our product offerings and build on our unique capacity to drive fan engagement.”
May 18: NIGA says in a statement that “Each Tribal Nation must determine for themselves what the risks and benefits are and decide accordingly. NIGA will continue to serve as an information gathering and information sharing resource for our Member Tribes.”
[Also See: The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) and Sports Betting]
May 21, the NFL announces its “core principles” for sports wagering, which made no mention of a fee or royalty, signaling a public break in strategy for monetization of sports wagering. There are rumors that the NFL is pursuing a strategy through Congress, for a new bill with not-yet-known concessions, or possibly carving a pathway through modification of the Wire Act.
May 22: DraftKings erects this billboard in New Jersey:
first look: DraftKings wasted no time after SCOTUS ruling in getting billboards up in New Jersey advertising forthcoming sportsbook.
billboards on highway and at train stations say: “WHY SHOULD VEGAS HAVE ALL THE FUN?” and “LEGAL SPORTS BETTING IN JERSEY? YOU BET” pic.twitter.com/vHmxdwWgPJ
— Daniel Roberts (@readDanwrite) May 22, 2018
May 23: Paddy Power Betfair announces its acquisition of FanDuel.
May 23: States push to keep federal regulation out of sports betting.
May 25: The New Jersey Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association sues the sports leagues for $139 million for acting in bad faith in blocking the racetrack from offering sports betting in 2014.
May 29: MGM Resorts International makes a bet in New York with the purchase of Empire City Casino and Yonkers Raceway.
May 30: By now, all of the leagues have released statements and intentions regarding sports betting.
June 5: The Post-PASPA sports betting era begins in Delaware — the first state to offer full-fledged wagering outside Nevada. Three state-licensed operators draw a combined $322,135 in bets on Day 1. Governor Jay Carney’s $10 bet on the Phillies — the first in the state — is a winner.
June 7: New Jersey’s legislature unanimously passes its bill to legalize sports wagering in the Garden State. Governor Phil Murphy signs it into law on June 11.
June 8: Paddy Power Betfair lands a pair of deals to become the sports betting operator for online, mobile and retail sports betting for Meadowlands Racetrack in New Jersey and and Tioga Downs in New York.
June 12: Mississippi’s Band of Choctaw Indians announce their intention to move forward with sports betting in time for football season, possibly making it the first tribe to do so.
June 14: New Jersey sports betting begins at Monmouth Park in Oceanport, and shortly after at The Borgata in Atlantic City.
A lot more action and poeple in the @WilliamHillUS sports bar at @MonmouthPark.
For a day with only baseball and golf and World Cup, this is quite a crowd. pic.twitter.com/jIN0xMr55H
— Sports Handle (@sports_handle) June 14, 2018
Dr. J made the first ever sports bet at Borgata today and we think you’ll like his wager.https://t.co/Rb6Y41xY7L
— NBC Sports Philadelphia (@NBCSPhilly) June 14, 2018
June 15: Pirates president Frank Coonelly tells the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) in a letter that “revenue collected from sports wagering should be allocated to the maintenance and upkeep of PNC Park…”
June 15: The NFL submits a letter to the PGCB in which it agrees with every casino operator that the state’s mammoth licensure fee ($10 million) and tax rate on revenue (36 percent) is prohibitively high and will keep people in the black market.
June 16: DraftKings and Resorts Casino in Atlantic City announce they will partner up for sports betting.
June 19: ESPN learns that the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on sports betting on or about June 29, when the NFL would testify. It is later postponed.
June 20: New York State’s legislative session closes with a dud. No sports betting bill gets passed.
June 21: The West Virginia Lottery Commission sets forth its sports betting regulations, and expects that operators will be ready to go by September 1 at the latest.
June 21: Mississippi, which previously legalized sports betting, rolls out its regulations and believes its casinos will be ready to go by football season.
June 22: Rhode Island legalizes sports wagering. Per the law, the state will get a whopping 51 percent cut.
June 26: FanDuel scores a deal to manage sports betting operations at the The Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.
June 29: USA Today reports that it NCAA won’t seek an “integrity fee” or royalty from sports betting. It also tells its member schools regarding sports betting that “they will need to look at their own values and decide” how to proceed.
And on and on and on. Stay tuned for what will be an eventful football season and remainder of 2018.
The post U.S. Sports Betting in 2018: Timeline of State and Sportsbook Developments appeared first on SportsHandle.