In this week’s Green Felt Journal, I consider the place of sports betting and DFS in Las Vegas. It’s growing:
In the throes of March Madness, sports betting is just about omni-present in Las Vegas. States across the nation are legalizing daily fantasy sports. Locally, speculation about possible NHL tenants of the T-Mobile Arena or the wisdom of building a UNLV stadium that may host an NFL team is dominating much conversation. That makes this a good time to consider the evolving relationship between Las Vegas and sports betting.
I just had a nice chat on Twitter about my $760 million number. It’s just a guess, based on Nevada, of what US commercial casinos might make from sports betting when the market is mature. That is assuming that the rest of the country has the same proportion of sports betting/overall casino win as Nevada.
You could argue that the percentage would be lower, since Nevada has a high proportion of visitors who bet and people who move to Las Vegas to pursue legal sports betting. Nevada might not be a great model for the percentage of sports bettors in the overall US population. So maybe, nationally, the percentage is less than 2% of total gaming win.
Or you could say that with the opportunity to bet legally regularly, more Americans would be drawn to sports betting, in which case the number may be higher than 2%.
So the $760 million is just a projection of the current Nevada number, which may or may not be an accurate estimate of a national market. But it’s as good a number as any to start the conversation.