Football's Back, CA Sports Betting Showdown & More Gambling Headlines

The start of the NFL season is the unofficial start to sports betting season in the US. Major League Baseball, golf, and tennis are not big revenue producers. For operators, football represents the most important touchpoint for customer acquisition. There are still plenty of commercials and activations in markets with legal online casino. Money has been spent on commercials for propositions in California that would legalize some sort of sports gambling. It's unlikely that California will legalize online sportsbetting in November.

The US sports betting market is beginning to mature. Responsible gambling has become a big topic of conversation this fall. The industry is still not profitable, but it's getting better.   The biggest operators are still hemorrhaging money despite winning hundreds of millions of dollars from their customers every month. Football's back, CA Sports Betting Showdown and More Gambling Headlines are October sports bets headlines. iReport.com: Football is back. It's on Amazon Prime. BetMGM is the official odds provider for NBC's weekly coverage of Football Night in America.

Football is back in the US. New York and West Virginia show modest annual growth. 31 states with legal sports betting are together hurtling toward a record $100 billion in handle for the 2022 calendar year. The cycle of data reporting for sports gambling is about a month behind the calendar. The remaining financials for this past month will tell us a lot about what to expect for rest of the year and the future of betting.

August sports betting volume is up 50% from August 2021. New York launched online betting earlier this year. Arkansas and New Jersey are maturing. Mississippi and Delaware are struggling. Nevada is feeling the heat from the launch in Arizona. Oregon is worth a positive mention, up almost 60% since last year, thanks to the replacement of the old Scoreboard platform with the superior DraftKings product.

Rumors about a potential retail launch in September in Massachusetts turned out to be premature.

There's a new complication over the mechanics of licensure. Massachusetts is tentatively expected to launch in Q1 2023. The timeline in Ohio has been set in stone for a while. More than two dozen brands and hundreds of brick-and-mortar facilities are lined up to participate in the broadest, most comprehensive rollout to date.

The Massachusetts Gaming Commission can issue licenses for the state's casinos, simulcast centers and slot parlors to take in-person bets. It can also award mobile licenses to up to seven independent companies. At least 30 operators are expected to apply for one of the seven available independent licenses.

Both sides are lobbying for and against sports betting referendums in California. The tribal measure would allow betting only on their native lands and the proponents of Prop 27 would open the country's largest online market. Both have more than a million signatures in preliminary support. Recent polling shows approval hovering below 35% for Prop 26 and less than 30% approval for the tribal one.