Twice weekly, we’ll comb through as many articles, tweets and podcasts as we can find related to the world of sports betting and daily fantasy sports, and publish the good stuff here.
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Last week, Geoff Freeman, American Gaming Association president and CEO, said sports betting will be legal in United States in three to five years.
“The next president is going to have that issue of legalizing sports betting on their desk, and I’m confident they’ll make the right decision,” said Geoff Freeman, head of the country’s top casino trade organization.
He’s not alone.
“I think it’s doable,” Sue Schneider, founder of the iGaming North America conference and editor of Gaming Law Review, tells Player’s Advantage. “I wouldn’t have said that five years ago.”
According to market research, the annual volume of betting on e-sports by 2020 is projected to be around $23.5 billion.
“E-sports has matured over the past few years to the point that it is now on par with some of the leading major sports in terms of viewership, following and interest,” said Alex Igelman, managing director of Gaming Research Partners, in a report.
“Many of the world’s leading bookmakers regularly take bets on numerous eSports matches and although in its infancy, the betting volume already exceeds that of golf, tennis and rugby and is rapidly growing,” he added.”
“Sportsbooks will need to engender a betting interest in e-sports’ core audience, which is perhaps not immediately identifiable as a sports betting one,” he explained. “But attracting a new audience is no bad thing for a sportsbook.”
The PGA Tour is exploring the idea of selling data to bookmakers. The Tour sees multiple benefits including getting a share of the $2.8 billion bet on golf every year in addition to making their product more appealing to future generations of fans who would be able to
The Tour has asked a handful of data companies to submit bids for the right to package real-time tournament data into feeds for gambling houses, according to a “request for proposal” reviewed by Bloomberg News. The governing body of American men’s golf “continues to explore the risk/return trade-off associated with potential entry into the online sports gaming category,” the documents said.
As of now, gambling on golf is pretty straightforward. If you want to bet on defending champion Jordan Spieth — an 8-to-1 favorite to win this year’s Masters — or take 13-to-2 odds on Australian contender Jason Day, your options are kind of boring. Legal bookmakers in Nevada or overseas will let you pick a player to win, finish in the top 10, or shoot the best round. Then you wait.
Increasingly, gambling houses see more money in live betting, where they can offer a new wager with every stroke. A handful of sites already offer this kind of gambling on golf based on unofficial data feeds.
The growth of this kind of point-by-point wagering has created a lucrative opportunity for leagues. In December, Sportradar renewed its data contract with the International Tennis Federation for $14 million a year over five years — six times the value of the company’s original deal with the ITF in 2012.
After blowing the Masters with a quadruple bogey on the 12th hole at Augusta on Sunday, Jordan Spieth opened as the favorite to win the U.S. Open.
The Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook installed Spieth as the favorite at 7-1 to win the U.S. Open, which tees off in June at Oakmont Country Club. Spieth is the defending U.S. Open champion.
When Spieth headed to the back nine Sunday with a 5-shot lead, he was a giant minus-2,500 favorite at the SuperBook to win his second straight green jacket. But he followed back-to-back bogeys with a quadruple bogey on No. 12 and finished in a tie for second behind championDanny Willett. More money was bet on Spieth to win the Masters than any other golfer at the SuperBook.
The Golden State Warriors won their 72nd game this weekend with a 92-86 win on the road against the favored San Antonio Spurs tying the all-time NBA record for wins in a season. They’ll have a chance to set the outright record this Wednesday during a home game against the Memphis Grizzlies. Their regular season win total was set at 59.5.
But if the Warriors falter in the Western Conference playoffs, the critics will say Kerr pushed his players too hard in pursuit of the record. And they might be right, but only time will tell.
“This could really be a detriment to the Warriors in the playoffs. It’s such a long year, and they could be on tired legs,” Westgate sports book oddsmaker Jeff Sherman said. “It’s tough going full bore for 82 games like that.”