For a small Michigan tribe operating a sports book for the first time, general manager Andrew Gentile said dealing with unexpected five-figure losses on any given day or football weekend has to be ingrained in your mindset, rather than make you fearful.
“There are months in sports betting where you’re not always going to win,” Gentile said at the TribalNet Conference and TradeShow. “And you really have to dive into that.”
Gentile pointed out that he gasped during the second month of baseball when he saw the daily sheet at Little River Casino Resort. He wondered what happened with a $50,000 loss and had to dig into the info and get the answers from the casino’s partner, Rush Street Interactive.
“It turns out we had a bettor hit an eighteen-team parlay,” Gentile said. “Who the hell does that? I wanted to know who it was and what else he plays. In one month, he hit two 18-team baseball parlays (totaling $87,500). It turned out he was a regular, so we said, ‘No harm, no foul. We’ll get the money back, and we have over time. But something like that is going to scare you.”
Gentile said he was once under the impression that parlays were sucker bets, until he worked in Delaware and saw $1.5 million paid out in one weekend in parlays when all the favorites won. The media ridiculed the state for allowing sports bets that can lead to that kind of loss, but it also led to a 1,000 people in line to bet parlays the following week.
“We started to do $1.5 million to $2 million every weekend in handle just on parlay bets,” Gentile said. “They’re holding with online play this season at 17.7% on parlay bets, and it’s making up to 25% of the revenues coming just from parlay betting.”
Gentile said Little River is isolated in northwest Michigan. It’s not like the crowd he saw at previous properties, where there’s density and it wasn’t unusual to get seven-figure- handle days at those locales.
“It might not seem like much to some of you, but it jumped off the page at me, because it wasn’t something I was expecting on a baseball day,” Gentile. “For football and the NCAA tournament, we expect that.”
