Between the Lines – American Gaming Report -April 2024

Catena Media is offering North America gambling industry insights via Adam Candee, Editor-In-Chief of Legal Sports Report. Catena will offer Candee's in-depth look at the US industry every month with trends and news in regulation, legalization and the companies involved in the space.

Many people have become experts on the US sports betting and online casino markets in the past six years. At least, it might seem that way when you open LinkedIn or Twitter these days. Opinions outweigh information on complex matters of market dynamics, regulation and legislation.

More eyeballs track news around both the mundane and momentous in the regulated gambling space today than before the fall of PASPA. Talk of online sports betting and iGaming entered the mainstream at terminal velocity, creating a vacuum of sound judgment in its wake.

Reporters in the Catena Media Network cover these areas closer than anyone, though, so let's give them the floor to sort the signal from the noise in recent major gambling news. 

PlayUSA: Online Casino State Regulators Debunk Maryland Myths

Some old tropes somehow persist in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

Fear that online gaming is going to cannibalize brick-and-mortar casinos is palpable among the old guard in the space. That idea surfaced again this year in Maryland, where strong pushback from local casinos sunk an online casino bill that now must wait at least two years for another chance to go before voters.

Regulators from the handful of states with legal iGaming, however, say their states are seeing that online and brick-and-mortar casinos can coexist quite successfully.

David Rebuck, former director of the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, told PlayUSA:

“When you hear the fear-mongering of cannibalization and loss of jobs from internet gaming, I have 12 years of data in New Jersey showing it isn’t true. Online gaming doesn’t cannibalize brick-and-mortar casinos and it doesn’t hurt casino jobs.”

Pennsylvania regulators echoed Rebuck. The Keystone State posted its best total to date with $2.1 billion in iGaming revenue in 2023 while also collecting their most-ever overall casino revenue at $5.7 billion.

“Just because you have a good amount of customers at your iCasino games or betting sports online doesn’t necessarily mean they’re cannibalizing your land-based properties. That’s where my comment would be with respect to, is there cannibalization. The answer is no."

“Does that mean you should not worry about it? You should always pay attention to it. You want to make sure you give these casinos an opportunity to continue their success,” Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board Executive Director Kevin O’Toole said.

The Lines: Yes, People Will Be On Women's Sports 

The Caitlin Clark effect is quite real, and it might permanently end the outdated idea that women’s sports cannot attract a mainstream audience.

It is real in TV ratings, where the NCAA Women’s Basketball national championship game on April 7 drew a record-breaking 18.7 million viewers. That shatters the mark for a women’s game and makes it the most-watched college basketball game in the past five years - men’s or women’s.

It also appears to be real in sports betting, where multiple sportsbooks reported Iowa women’s basketball games breaking records for wagers during this year’s March Madness event.

Research by TheLines also shows:

… the WNBA draft audience saw a 42% increase between 2022 and 2023. Global betting data shows that U.S. sports betting increased to $119.84 billion in handle in 2023. This was up 27.5% year over year, according to the American Gaming Association.

Basketball isn’t the only women’s sporting event to see an uptick in interest. Global interest in the 2023 Women’s World Cup also increased from 34% in 2019 to 41% in 2023.

LSR: Shoehei Ohtani Not A Canary In the Coal Mine

The scandal enveloping baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani and his former interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, brought out doomsayers from throughout the cultural landscape. The rise of legal betting is ruining sports, the newly arrived proclaimed on the heels of Ohtani’s entanglement.

The Ohtani situation, however, has nothing to do with the legal US sports betting market. It is, in fact, a stark reminder that the offshore market and illegal bookies continue to proliferate despite the spread of legal sports wagering to more than two-thirds of US states.

Mizuhara reportedly accumulated $4.5 million in gambling debt through an illegal bookie in California over the course of many months. Ohtani accuses Mizuhara of stealing that amount from him to pay back those debts.

Such a red ledger would be nearly impossible to write in the regulated sports betting market. The inability to bet on credit combined with know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) rules largely prevent a bettor from extending so far beyond their means.

Stakeholders throughout the US sports betting industry must take seriously any threat to the integrity of both games and businesses. They cannot, however, account for what people betting through illegal avenues choose to do, even those tied to the most famous baseball player on the planet.

 

About the author

Adam Candee is the Editor-In-Chief of Legal Sports Report. He joined LSR in April 2018, just a month before the dawn of today’s US sports betting industry. Adam earned national and regional awards as a newspaper reporter at the Las Vegas Sun and Arizona Daily Sun for breaking news, feature, and opinion writing. His team at KLAS-TV earned the Edward R. Murrow Award as the best television news website in the country in 2013. Adam also is a two-time Arizona sports columnist of the year and a Golf Writers Association of America honoree. A proud graduate of Northern Arizona University, Adam also volunteers as an editor for Kiva, a non-profit that specializes in microfinance in underprivileged parts of the world.