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Legal sports wagering in the US continues to explode and nowhere was this better illustrated than with the past weekend's Super Bowl. Records were shattered in nearly all US states offering the activity.
GeoComply, a mobile sports-betting transactions monitoring service, reports more than 80 million transactions over Super Bowl weekend, a 95% increase over last year. And this does not include local unlicensed bookmakers and those online sportsbooks licensed in other jurisdictions like Costa Rica, Panama and Antigua that still take bets from US citizens. Some of these are just as big, if not bigger, than US-based kingpins FanDuel and DraftKings.
"The Super Bowl is the biggest single day for American sportsbooks, and this year didn’t disappoint," said Chris Grove, a gambling-industry analyst at research firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, adding that the level of sports betting around this Super Bowl cemented it as a mainstream activity for sports fans in the U.S. "It seems like legal U.S. sportsbooks will easily eclipse a billion dollars in total wagers on the game," he said.
Caesars Entertainment Inc. and BetMGM are beginning to eat into DraftKings and FanDuel's market share.
Sports betting is now legalized and regulated in 33 states as well as the District of Columbia following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that abolished prior prohibition.
- Gilbert Horowitz, Gambling911.com
