The opening week of the New York sports betting market has proven to be as lucrative as expected for operators active in the Empire State, according to the CEO of Caesars Entertainment.
In an interview with CNBC’s Square Box, Thomas Rigg detailed that New York sports wagerers ‘didn’t disappoint’ during the state’s inaugural weekend of regulated mobile betting.
“The numbers for us were massive,” Rigg explained. “We had Almost a million individual bets taken in 39 hours over the first two days. To put that in context, the last state we launched was Arizona, which was a four day launch and volumes in New York were about nine times what Arizona was in a shorter period.
Caesars is one of four operators that have initiated operations in New York under a New York State Gambling Commission (NYSGC) licence, alongwith Rush Street Interactive, DraftKings and Flutter Entertainment’s FanDuel.
A further five 10 year licences are due to be awarded to BetMGM, Bally’s, Wynn, Resorts World, and PointsBet, subject to satisfying the will continue to work towards satisfying statutory and regulatory requirements necessary for launch.
“Our expectation is that we will be profitable as an entire enterprise, and that will include New York by the football season of next year, 2023,” Rigg continued.
“You obviously have significant launch costs – promotional costs, you’ve seen all our commercials, and then you have the betting boosts and deposit matches as you gather customers.
“We will start to report data as we have enough to be meaningful that will show that as states move down the assembly line time-wise they become more profitable. We expect ultimately that this business will be a 30% EBIT margin business at maturity.”
However, the launch was not without its setbacks, understandably. Notably for Ceasars, the huge demand for betting in the state of New York – with its population of 20 million – led to a three hour online outage.
Rigg added: “When you have massive demand, that’s when you see the pinch points in your system, and unfortunately we did not have flawless performance this weekend.”
