The Early Line: More Expansion For Nationwide Sports Betting Via Robinhood
Robinhood rolls out moneylines for pro sports playoff games. Gambling news roundup: Caesars digital spin-off still possible; Underdog back in New York, sort of.
TCL offers a roundup of recent US gambling news with analysis called The Early Line every Monday.
Robinhood Launches Moneyline Betting For NBA, NHL (Event Horizon): “Robinhood is getting into moneylines for sporting events in earnest. The financial trading platform started offering single-game betting markets on Monday, posting markets for both the NBA and NHL playoffs, thanks to its partnership with Kalshi.”
Reading the line: Back in February, Robinhood halted betting on the Super Bowl after just a day. Three months later, and it seems to be all systems go for sports betting at Robinhood. I am not sure what the strategy for expanding nationwide sports betting at Kalshi and Robinhood is exactly, other than continuing to push forward. As long as no one is going to stop Kalshi, it seems like Robinhood will be content to follow, at least with the biggest markets that Kalshi offers. Given how glowingly CEO Vlad Tenev has spoken about sports betting at Robinhood, it seemed pretty obvious more of it was coming.
When you think back to how all this started earlier this year, the sports betting offering from Kalshi was pretty minimal. Now we have more sports covered, single-game markets, and more robust futures. I have questioned the “drip, drip, drip” method of rolling out new sports betting markets. But in some ways, it’s kind of normalized how quickly all of this has expanded. Doing it all at once — ripping off a Band-Aid — might have been pretty jarring if we just got a full-blown sportsbook overnight via Kalshi. It’s still jarring, but maybe not as much as it could have been when we get moneylines here and win totals there as time goes on. And it’s continuing to happen despite legal pressure at the state-level … and without any pushback from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
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Buffalo Bills are only team to be favored in every game this upcoming NFL season (The Athletic): “Just over two months before the NFL preseason kicks off, reigning MVP Josh Allen and the Buffalo Bills are favored in each of their upcoming regular-season games at DraftKings Sportsbook. Buffalo is currently the only team in the league favored to win every game on the early betting lines. Can it go undefeated? BetMGM has the Bills’ total wins set at over/under 11.5, far short of the 17 it would take to complete a perfect season. So, who are some of the toughest teams on the docket?”
Reading the line: A few stray thoughts here. First, it’s crazy how much football and the NFL dominate not just sports, but sports betting. The schedule release created a ton of content in gambling; even Kalshi got in on it by adding win-total markets after the schedule was announced. The NBA and NHL are in the playoffs, baseball is happening, and still the schedule release is perhaps the thing that has been talked about the most in sports in the past week. (Other than the Caitlin Clark-Angel Reese WNBA drama.)
Second, take a look at the NYT vs. ESPN in attempting to convert/activate bettors via content. You can see the activation in the screenshot below; this doesn’t happen on written content at ESPN beyond single text links. And The Athletic just has a marketing deal with BetMGM, not its name on the sportsbook! It continues to befuddle me how ESPN doesn’t do more to leverage its content operation to get people to sign up/deposit/bet at ESPN Bet.
A link between product and market share? (EKG Line): “BetMGM has long struggled with speed, but beneath those issues lies a strong OSB app. … The chart above shows BetMGM’s OSB NGR share plotted against its ranking in our app testing, with a seeming loose correlation between the two. While the trend looks concerning, the major issue for our product testers (see module 1) consistently been speed and BetMGM recently promised a major upgrade on in-app speeds.”
Reading the line: BetMGM is seemingly under threat for third place in market share in the US sports betting market for the first time in recent memory (The Cashout, paywall), from Fanatics. If a product improvement comes alongside staving off that threat, it would be a pretty interesting data point. No matter what, we have an interesting battle shaping up for the podium behind FanDuel and DraftKings in US sports betting in the coming months and years.
Gambling news roundup
Stifel: Caesars Digital Spin-Off Remains On Table (Legal Sports Report): “Now that Caesars Digital is headed toward its $500 million annual EBITDA target, the company wants to see that reflected in its share price. Caesars is still considering spinning off that interactive segment if that disconnect continues, representatives told Stifel during an eight-company field trip in Las Vegas last week. The company has ‘strong conviction’ that it will hit that $500 million run-rate in 12 to 18 months, but some sell-side forecasts do not reflect that, partially leading to that share price disconnect. ‘Management noted they would not expect a spin-off of this nature to warrant a valuation directly in line with digital-native operators (high-teens multiple) but they would have to weigh the discount associated with remaining within CZR after the company either hits or misses its $500M long-range target,’ Stifel said.”
Colorado governor signs betting promo deductions bill into law (SBC Americas): “By the middle of next year, sportsbooks in Colorado will no longer be able to deduct free bets from taxable sports betting revenue. Gov. Jared Polis signed the legislative change into law on May 15 after the proposal had passed first the House and then the Senate earlier this year. Currently, Colorado’s sportsbooks are taxed at 10% of their sports betting revenue, but they can deduct 2.25% of the value of promotional non-cash wagers placed by bettors. That was already scheduled to fall to 2% this July and 1.75% in 2026.”
Exorbitant Sports Betting Taxes Could Kill the Legal Market (Tax Foundation): “A recent call to increase the federal tax on sports wagers fails to fully consider how doing so would substantially change the sports betting landscape." … The growth in federal sports betting collections, timed with very active tax reform discussions on Capitol Hill, has reopened discussions for reforming the sports betting tax. One prominent recommendation, from the Bipartisan Policy Center, is to increase the tax rate from 0.25 percent to 5 percent—a 1,900 percent tax hike. …
Underdog Fantasy relaunches draft games in New York (SBC Americas): “Two months after it pulled all of its daily fantasy sports (DFS) operations out of New York, Underdog Fantasy is back in the Empire State. The operator announced on Thursday evening that it has relaunched its draft-style DFS games in the state. The fantasy game is now included under the terms of the company’s temporary DFS license within the state. While draft games are back, neither the against-the-house or the P2P version of the Underdog pick’em product has returned to the state.”
Legalized Alaska Online Sports Betting In Demand (Sports Betting Dime): “John Pappas, senior advisor to GeoComply, a geolocation service for gaming companies, testified to the committee that Alaskans have made hundreds of thousands attempts to access legalized sportsbooks in others states. From Jan. 1, 2024, through May 1, 2025, GeoComply registered 126,933 geolocation checks within Alaska of residents attempted to access legal sportsbooks in other states. All efforts to do so were blocked by GeoComply. Additionally, GeoComply identified 23,000 unique online sports betting accounts in the state. ‘This is a 60% increase in registered accounts over the prior year, clearly demonstration a substantial consumer demand,’ Pappas said.”
Get rich or die trying: how sports betting is changing our love of the game (NPR): “It's been seven years since the Supreme Court legalized sports betting outside of Nevada. For some, it's a hobby that spices up a game, but for others it's become a side hustle or investing strategy. And in a time where 60% of U.S. households don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living... that can be a problem. … Today on the show, writer Manny Fidel and journalist Danny Funt join Brittany to get into how sports betting is changing the way we watch sports, and what that means for the love of the game.”
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