Sports bettors like action and sweating outcomes—and that’s why they’ve turned to table tennis, darts, eSports, virtual sports, lower-league soccer matches, even online poker.
But those in the sports betting industry who spoke at this week’s SBC Digital Summit said they don’t expect that behavior to continue once the NFL and college football, MLB, NBA, Premier League and other major-league sports return to action in the aftermath of COVID-19.
“People are adapting and wanting to spend money and take their minds off the mundaneness of having to stay home,” said Jason Scott, trading director for BetMGM. “My guarantee is that when July and August come, we will be back to MLB and NBA and write as many bets on table tennis as we did last year, which is none. Long term, it will have no effect on any of the market and those wagering options will be stuck in obscurity as they always have been. Belarus and Nicaragua are filling a much-needed hole for us now, and I expect activity will return to the negligible level once normal transition resumes.”
Max Bichsel, vice president of U.S. business for Gambling.com Group, a global performance marketing firm, said he’s not surprised sports bettors have gravitated to obscure sports. He called them “innate gamblers” who don’t care what’s on the board.
“They’re at home at eight p.m. and need something to sweat,” Bichsel said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Belarus or Nicaraguan soccer. If it’s something they can track and stream, you will get some action on it. It may not be the volume of an NFL game, but it’s something, which in this environment is better than nothing.”
Matthew Symmonds, CEO of Web Analysis Solutions, said he’s not optimistic that this gravitation of sports bettors to poker will last. “I’ve played a lot of poker and to play poker you need a lot of time,” Symmonds said. “That’s what people have right now, because they’re home. I don’t think poker will stick as much as people are thinking. I think once sports are back, people will go back to sports. I also can’t see eSports maintaining its level.”
Jamie Shea, head of Sports Digital for DraftKings, said people have embraced table tennis for now and wonders what the landscape will look like when traditional sports returns. She’s more optimistic than the others.
“I think one of the silver linings in all of this is that it’s created a lot of new fans for non-traditional markets like table tennis, Nicaraguan soccer, Taiwanese baseball and basketball and minor U.S. golf tournaments,” Shea said. “I think people have used this time to really get to know who the players are. I’ve been in the business for more than 25 years and can’t say before that I saw people getting interested in table tennis and darts. I like that there’s going to be that new fan base and viewership for those sports.”
Shea said for sportsbooks, it’s about keeping customers engaged with alternative wagers until traditional sports return, even if the amount of revenue pales in comparison to before.
That includes eSports leagues and virtual sports like eNascar. DraftKings is looking to add even more virtual-sports products this month, which she said can have staying power whenever there’s downtime in sporting events.
“We see that eSports has picked up for the moment and I don’t think that will go away,” Shea said. “It may not remain as successful as it is right now, but in my opinion, we will continue to see that grow. Maybe, with the hiatus of sports, we’re creating those fans who become more hardcore into eSports.”
BetMGM’s Jason Scott said they’re seeing growth in eSports, but it’s nowhere near the growth of poker or online gaming. He said eSports is hampered by underage participation and integrity issues that are barriers to its growth into mainstream wagering.
Scott said the best wagering growth in the eSports spectrum is with virtual sports that will “have a place once normal activity resumes, but I don’t expect it to be more than half a percent of our business.”
