SECAUCUS, NJ – The opening of the American sports betting marketplace, after the repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, has created the potential for sports bettors in the U.S. to be able to bet in ways that far supersede the standard sportsbook options that have been used for decades in Nevada and New Jersey.
This new market liberation, however, has created another issue: what new betting options does the U.S. sports bettor want, and how should gaming providers and sportsbooks create and deliver them?
A panel of international gaming experts did their best to answer this question at a seminar Wednesday afternoon at the Betting on Sports America conference. Moderated by Genius Tech Group’s Nathan Rothschild, the speakers included GiG Director of Sports Endre Nesset; the Action Network’s Matt Restivo; Golden Nugget Sports Betting director Paul Chopin; DraftKings head of Sports Book Digital Jamie Shea; and Canadian gaming consultant Harley Redlick.
Asked to define some of the types of U.S. sports bettors, Shea said that DraftKings focuses on three groups: the novice bettor, which needs a lot of education; the recreational bettor, which has been to Vegas and “maybe has a bookie around the corner,” and the sophisticated bettor, which knows how sports betting works and might bet professionally.
Action Network is focusing on educating those users who are “dipping their toes into the water,” Restivo said.
“We want to turn all sports fans into bettors,” he said. There are approximately 10 million people in America who bet sports weekly, and seventy or so million who either play fantasy sports or are familiar with wagering on an event. The trick is in making traditional gambling lingo more understandable.
“Seventy percent of Nevada sports betting is on basketball and football because there’s a point spread,” Redlick said. “It’s simple. You can go in blind, you can cheer for your favorite team, it’s easy to understand. Hockey and baseball suffer from -160, +140 – I just wanna bet twenty bucks! It doesn’t matter, and it’s easy.”
But, when asked whether the American market should consider shifting its odds to a decimal-based format, he said, “You do know they still use inches and pounds here, right?”
Both DraftKings’ and the Action Network’s apps offer odds translation, Shea and Restivo pointed out.
Redlick emphasized that providers setting “bad lines” and then trying not to pay, or saying “oops, we made a mistake” in setting that line, “would not fly” in New Jersey or Nevada.
He alluded to the case in late 2018 in which DraftKings was forced to pay an $82,000 win on an in-play wager made against an erroneously generated 750-1 line at the end of a Raiders-Broncos game.
“UK operators, beware – if you’ve got sloppy traders, you’re not going to last more than one bet in North America,” he said.
“We will make mistakes as operators, and sometimes we need regulators to help us out,” Chopin said.
Mobile vs. Retail
Chopin said that one of the differences between retail and mobile customers is the variety of options available on mobile. He called mobile a “much deeper, richer sports betting product,” saying that it includes in-play and prop bets and is significantly different than the traditional Las Vegas offering.
“It’s very different to what people are used to… there might be 200-plus bet types for a football game day,” he said. The challenge of retail, he said, is in trying to sell those options to the retail customer.
Shea pointed out that, at Resorts in Atlantic City, DraftKings has sought to combine the two. She said that the company had set the book at Resorts up something like a man cave, in that “it’s the place you want to go and watch, you can get bottle service” but at the same time “they’re playing on their phones. So it’s really a good blend – they have the kiosk, they can go to the window, but at the same time they’re sitting there with their friends” and have the option of making online wagers.
Shea also said that the potential for overwhelming bettors with new options can be mitigated by offering an agile app, saying that the more content that is offered, the more that the player learns.
“They find things that they never knew they could bet on, and now they can. We’ve seen a great uptick in tennis, which I wasn’t expecting coming from the retail side. Maybe there’s a preconceived notion that the U.S. player is only going to play what they’ve always played before. I don’t think that’s true.”
Regional differences
One of the challenges providers face in the new market, Chopin said, is that customers want different things in different states.
“In New Jersey, we’re seeing a lot more price sensitivity, a lot more sharp action,” he said, “and they have a very high expectation of quality.” By contrast, he said, the Southern bettor tends to bet much more passionately and is focused on college sports, which are dominant in the South. This leads to not only the need to navigate the complexities of dealing with the NCAA, but also means that the data might not be as accurate as it is in the pros.
Shea said that DraftKings have also found that college basketball and college football are bigger than the pros in New Jersey. Restivo said that the Action Network has seen much the same in its data.
“We have an option for users to set their favorite teams,” he said. “I had thought that would be a pretty low number, but (overall) 65 percent of users (of the Action Network’s app) have set their favorite teams.”
“Statistical betting is going to be the future,” Chopin said. “The American customer wants to be entertained, wants a quick fix, and a lot of that will be around player betting and player performance.”
The younger generation has grown up around a fantasy product, and they can translate that into a more fixed odds product. And it’s not necessarily about scoring, Redlick said, citing rebounds and blocks in basketball.
American sports fans know their stats, Chopin said, and that’s something the European operator invasion needs to appreciate.
“The data is telling us that the U.S. customer is quite complex,” Chopin said. “How do we sell to that customer?”
