The Cashout: Early October Sports Betting Numbers

Plus a roundup of US gambling news

TCL will offer market analysis in the US gambling space in The Cashout every Friday for paid subscribers; with a news roundup for free subscribers as well.

We have the very early metrics for October sports betting — not many states have reported as of today — but we’ll take a look at what’s going on beyond the start of football season.

Before that (and before the paywall), here are some quick hitters in the news:

• The FBI raided the apartment of the CEO of Polymarket, best known for allowing election betting via cryptocurrency.

• An effort to raise the tax on sports betting revenue in Louisiana is dead, at least until next year.

• Meanwhile, there’s an effort in Ohio to return the tax rate on sports betting to 10%.

• Some good news for gambling affiliates as Gambling.com Group posts a record quarter, although its revenue in North America was more or less flat.

• In data that will probably shock no one, DraftKings and FanDuel are the best US sportsbooks at keeping odds up during NFL and college football games.

• I am running a job seekers board for gambling if you’re hiring.

• Some data from the sportsbooks about Week 11 in the NFL.

The story of October sports betting data

I will caution that we don’t have much data so far: It’s just New York, Maryland and Iowa. We’ll have much more data next week.

But we can at least see directionally what we might encounter for the rest of the month and the quarter. We also already know that revenue data will be noisy based on the betting public doing better against the sportsbooks than they normally do in football.

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Top-level takeaways on the data:

• Handle is up both MoM and YoY, but revenue is down MoM across all operators in this bucket of states. With the addition of basketball and hockey to the betting menu in the US, we generally expect handle to improve MoM for October.