There’s no doubt that many Americans enjoy sports as a shared experience and for some fans, wagering on sports is a large part of their engagement.
Bally’s Chairman of the Board of Directors Soo Kim recognizes that it’s an exciting time to be in the gaming business and that sports betting, still in its infancy, will continue to grow. But Kim anticipates the sports betting landscape to look dramatically different in a few years.
During the SBC Summit North America Keynote Fireside Chat Wednesday at the Meadowlands Expo Center, Kim said that sports betting’s future will not just be Super Bowl wagers and football prop bets.
“The interesting thing about sports is that the sports betting we see today is like, ‘Oh, let’s bet on a football game that runs two hours once a week,’” Kim told host Contessa Brewer of CNBC. “Do you know of any casino game that has a machine that runs only once a week for two hours? Sports betting is going to be ubiquitous and it’s going to be always on, all the time.”
That will be possible, in Kim’s vision, thanks to a new sports betting paradigm that doesn’t rely on pointspreads, parlays, or money lines. Instead, he thinks that sports betting will be less about skill and handicapping and more about chance.
Kim bases his idea on how many American actually engage in sports betting. He noted that only 11% of Americans who get ESPN watch the sports channel. And only a fraction of that 11% are people confident about “handicapping and gaming in sports.”
“Sports lotto, or sports slots, how large do you think that market can be?” Kim said. “I think that market will be way many times larger than any of these other estimates.”
Kim also thinks e-sports is a fertile market waiting to be cultivated. Brewer noted that the Hyper Sports Arena in Las Vegas hosts e-sports competitions and that Twitch feeds of live e-sports events draw massive audiences.
While regulatory issues, including e-sports as a subset of mobile gaming, along with data and rights issues, need to be addressed, there are also great opportunities.
“I think the important lesson to learn is the amazing amount of audiences watching e-and interacting with e-sports,” Kim said. “That’s a great analog to the way sports itself should be, and have these sports deliver ways to interact, including gaming.”
Brewer noted that igaming is estimated to eventually bring in seven times the revenue that sports betting generates. How then, she asked, do you “lure” igaming customers to sports betting platforms?
But Kim said the most important thing is being able to interact with customers on their phones, “knowing that your phone is a place that can hold your money and where you can place wagers, period.
“Whether you place those wagers on lives sports events or with a virtual blackjack dealer or a video poker team, it’s all the same,” Kim added. “It’s all mobile gaming.”
What intrigues Kim even more is how the demarcations between types of betting are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish. Noting that $660 billion flows through slot machines annually and lotteries generate yearly sales of $100 billion, he thinks that different types of gaming will start to blend.
“The lines are in the blur between what is a sports bet and what is a roulette machine,” Kim said.” It’s all going to be, can you watch this quarter with (a football team) and predict four things that are going to happen?
“If you think about what sports is, it’s just a random number generator and content,” he said. “You can create anything you want to and deliver whatever your customers want. I don’t think people are thinking about this the correct way.”
