Nevada Sportsbooks Come In Second To NJ Again

For the third time in four months, Nevada sports betting ceded its crown to New Jersey in August.

Licensed NV sportsbooks saw close to $288 million in total wagers for the month, up about 16% from August last year. That still wasn’t enough to keep pace with the surging NJ sports betting market, however, which booked $293.5 million over the same period.

Those Nevada operators did have a good result for the month, turning that action into a win of $18.7 million. That, too, represents a significant increase from last August ($12.6 million).

Data comes from the monthly report published Friday by the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Adding those numbers to our US sports betting revenue tracker brings the total handle close to $11 billion across all regulated states since the start of expanded wagering last June.

Football betting returns to the top

August marks a transition for US sportsbooks, the shift from the comparatively slow baseball season into the peak months of the sports calendar. From now through early next year, football will drive a large majority of the action.

That trend showed itself in Nevada, with football betting accounting for more than two-thirds of the reported revenue. Much of that appears to come from NCAA and NFL futures wagers, as MLB handle still outpaced football more than two-to-one.

Here’s the breakdown by sport:

The battle for US sports betting supremacy

Comparing numbers across states says a lot about the appetite for gambling in a given market — and for the structure of its post-PASPA industry.

New Jersey policymakers established a new gold standard by installing a framework that fosters competition and innovation, and the results are evident. Barely a year after going online, the NJ sports betting market is already the largest in the country.

Time will tell whether this represents a temporary overtake or an underlying shift in the long-term balance of power. Although Nevada still has what amounts to a regional monopoly on sports betting in the West, that balance is very much in flux in the eastern US.

Pennsylvania is now online, for starters, threatening to skim some of that traffic from neighboring New Jersey. In just their fourth month of mobile operations, the small group of online sportsbooks pushed PA sports betting handle across $100 million for the first time in August. It’s early days, but it’s not impossible to think that PA could be the largest US sports betting market by the time we get to the Super Bowl or March Madness.

For now, though, it’s a one-on-one brawl between Nevada and New Jersey. And the judges have scored three of the last four rounds for New Jersey.