ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. – The typical American sportsbook will rarely be a sportsbook at all within a decade.

That’s what executives from technology and gaming companies said as part of a panel on Thursday at the East Coast Gaming Congress. Moti Malul, CEO of internet gambling and lottery technology platform NeoGames surmised that “90-plus percent” of wagering on sports in the United States will be placed online within 10 years.

Malul’s prediction is not outlandish if New Jersey, where sports betting got underway exactly a year ago, continues as the bellwether of the industry. According to a New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement report, 82.6 percent of sports bets made in the state in May handle were placed online, up slightly from April and markedly from the 62.6 for all of 2018.

That’s bad news for casino operators who manage in-house sportsbooks as a low-margin amenity – as little as 5 percent, anecdotally – in the hope that customers will buy a beer, play a few hands of poker or plug money into a slot machine.

But it’s in keeping with what the American market – to this point moreso than its more mature European counterpart – has shown through its nascency after the repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in May of 2018.

American Mobile Proclivity Revealed Quickly
Parikshat Khanna, CEO of CG Technology, said that 60 percent of the wagers his bookmaking company took were coming online within two years of its 2009 mobile launch in Nevada.

The market, he said, dispelled conceptions the company brought to the project.

“It was always assumed you wanted to sit in a sportsbook for three or four hours to watch the game,” he said. “But that (first) year was 60-40 in favor of mobile. We think that will foster itself in some of the other jurisdictions all across the globe. So tremendous opportunity here.”

Mobile Component Prominent in Budding Market
Tennessee, which has no casinos or lottery, last month became the first state to pass a mobile-only sports betting bill. Delaware and New Mexico are the only two of eight states where sports betting is currently legal and underway not to have a mobile component.

Still, some states are encountering trouble tapping into the potential being revealed in New Jersey, the state which is making gains against national gambling mecca Nevada and siphoning money from neighboring states. New York, particularly, continues to wrangle over how to implement sports betting, with it likely confined to the property of four upstate casinos instead of statewide like in its neighbor across the Hudson River.

Of the nine jurisdictions in same phase of passage or implementation of sports betting, Montana, Arkansas and the District of Columbia are alone in not planning to offer mobile.

And there can be pitfalls even if statewide mobile has been approved. Pennsylvania launched mobile betting in late May, but apps have been slow to market with the exception of SugarHouse Online Casino & Sportsbook and there is no iOS version available in the state.

U.S. Now World Mobile Test Lab
Nevertheless, the United States has become the world litmus test for mobile sports betting products, Malul said. The expected growth of in-play wagering should only fuel the American market.

"When we brought our solutions first to the U.S. market, we obviously brought our European solutions and customized them for the U.S. market,” he said. “But it had the frog-leap effect because while Europe was moving from desktop to mobile slowly but surely and pushing into 30- or 40-percent usage of mobile, we started in the U.S. with 50, and we're now at 80. And also now, the U.S. has become our forefront of innovation.”

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