5 Months Old, How Virginia Sports Betting is Doing

Virginia went live with sports betting and online gaming in January. Now June, let’s take a look at how the state has done in the first 5 months.

In January, despite being legal for a mere 11 days, nearly $59-million was bet by Virginians. Driven in large part by the Super Bowl, the single biggest sports betting event of the year. The excitement of betting from the comfort of your own home via apps like DraftKings Sportsbook and FanDuel Sportsbook resulted in $3.5-million of gross gaming revenue.

February and March saw $265-million and $300-million bet respectively, driven by the Super Bowl in February and the March Madness Men’s basketball tournament in March. April saw a slight decrease in overall bets, slipping 22-percent from March to $236-million.

This month-by-month revenue data for Virginia shows that the State has already surpassed $800 million in total handles. Once the May numbers get updated, I’m sure that number will have surpassed the $1 billion mark, and putting it on pace to hit $2.5-billion for 2021. That is absolutely incredible seeing as sports betting officially launched just earlier this January. 

I would expect that the $2.5-billion pace may be too low of a projection since we aren’t even in the NFL season yet. The NFL is by far the most bet of sport in America, and I’d be willing to wager that the $300-million high-mark in March is the floor for how much will be bet come September. With fans allowed back into stadiums, the feverish fandom of the NFL will likely double, if not triple, the gross revenue for the state of Virginia.

For the month of November in the state of New Jersey, the NFL account for $433-million of the $931-million total bets — or about 46 percent. I would expect a similar split in Virginia with the NFL accounting for nearly half the total bets in the state. In the first three months, Virginia boasted the strongest start of any state thus far, besting Tennessee by over $100m in total bets.

ESPN has been planning for legal sports betting for some time, launching their sports betting division ESPN Chalk in 2014, then in 2019 announcing that Caesars Entertainment would be the official odds data supplier, and in 2020 a studio for sports gambling content was built at The LINQ. Other sports content creators like Bleacher Report and CBS Sports have followed suit.

As more and more states make gambling legal, it will put extra pressure on the states that have been vehemently against legal gambling. The results from these revenue reports are hard to ignore, and legal gambling is not going away, in fact, it’s becoming the “new norm” here in Virginia. You can’t listen to the radio or watch TV without seeing or hearing sports betting advertisements.

In fact, as I was driving with my daughter this afternoon, an Ad came on the radio and my 8-year-old asked me, “What’s gambling”, and after I explained it, she asked me what a gambling “problem” is, since every commercial ends with the hotline for a gambling problem. It may be sometime before the negative sigmatism attached to gambling is completely gone, but it’s clear that it’s here to stay.