GambetDC Needs to Come Up With Solutions Quickly After the Super Bowl Debacle
The nation’s capital, Washington D.C., may not have a strong sports betting market like its neighboring states and possibly need to look in all possible directions in terms of ways to improve it. The most recent report showed that the sports betting handle has been declining since November of last year.
GameBetDC Might Be in Big Trouble
The District’s Lottery’s Intralot-powered sportsbook, GameBetDC, brought in a total of $5.7 million in wagers and revenue that stood at $952,918 for January. This was a good change in momentum, but things quickly went the other way the following month.
The Super Bowl is when sportsbook operators across the country see a huge spike in average betting volume leading up to and during the game. However, this was the point that showed why the District’s sports betting market is far from reaching perfection.
The biggest challenge the company has ever encountered happened during one of the most important nights of the year. On Super Bowl Sunday, the app was unavailable for use on Apple IOS devices. The reason behind this was the platform’s SSL expired in January.
The Office of Lottery and Gaming provided everything Intralot needed in order to get an update by January 6th. Intralot made a critical error in waiting until February 10th to push for the update, which caused issues that could have easily been avoided. OLG Executive Director Frank Suarez stated that there needed to be more allotted time for necessary software updates.
Intralot Had to Pay the Price For Its Mistake
Suarez added by stating that waiting too long and including unnecessary updates showed a lack of understanding on Intralot’s part of the operation. Suarez took his complaints to Intralot’s CEO in Greece, with the two parties negotiating a payment account for the missed opportunities that presented themselves.
GambetDC has 30,000 registered users on its platform, with only a small percentage of 20 percent or 6,000 users are active on it every week. Of the users, 60 percent of the people are using IOS devices.
Super Bowl Sunday’s sports betting handle just brought in $309,000 across all sporting events from Andriod users and other computer devices. The most recent failings have to lead to positive changes if they want people to register or stay on their platform.
D.C. Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie stated that the outage was an unacceptable error. These problems need to be addressed so it can avoid the same mistakes when March Madness begins on March 15th at different locations throughout the country.
Suarez told McDuffie that Intralot has already made a few changes since the incident. This includes their new V.P. of operations and restructuring the team. How they went about it was bringing on new employees that focused on the sports betting business side of things and quality assurance efforts to make sure bugs and other potential issues are detected sooner.
Projections That Were Just Not Feasible at This Time
Then, interim Executive Director Ridgley Bennett said that the pandemic caused a lot of issues and reassured a $20.4 million revenue estimate for fiscal 2022, but Suarez said that the projected are just impossible to hit as the estimated revenue was cut down to $1.5 million.
BetMGM opened a retail sportsbook at Nationals Park towards the end of January, and Caesars also has a retail sportsbook location in the D.C. area. The two sportsbook operators’ revenue estimates have gone up for fiscal 2022.
If the sports betting taxes were doubled, it could give private operators access to the whole D.C. sports betting market rather than just a two-mile radius.
