Sports betting in New Jersey blows past expectations
Sports betting has been legal in Nevada since 1931, though it didn’t really get going until the early 1970s when A) the federal government relaxed a 10 percent tax on operators and B) Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal opened up his sportsbook at the Stardust. (You may know Lefty as “Ace Rothstein,” as played by Robert De Niro, in “Casino.”)
So any way you look at it, the sports betting scene in Nevada is mature. Been around forever. And since forever, it was the only legal game in town. You wanted to place a legal sports bet, you did so in Nevada.
So it would make sense that the state’s gambling operators handled $4.87 billion in action in 2017, netting revenue of $248 million. Both of those numbers were records. Sports betting, still on the rise in Nevada. Exploding, even. As recent as 2010, the casinos took in only $2.1 billion in bets.
Well now, get this.
New Jersey legalized sports betting over the summer. Then, in time for the NFL season, online sportsbooks appeared.
In November, the state’s brandnew sports betting industry took in $330 million in bets for revenue of $21.2 million (with the state collecting $2.45 million in taxes.)
Extrapolate those numbers over a full year and you get $3.96 billion in action with $252 million in revenue, which obviously puts us right up there with Nevada, a state that has a 87-year head start. (It would also mean about $28 million in tax revenue, which would surely help pay for the daily brining of the state’s highways by the Murphy administration, no matter what the weather forecast calls for. Anyway …)
Anyway, these numbers fluctuate. Sometimes the bettors win more than expected (for instance, in October, the revenue was *only* $11 million) and so these projections can’t be firmed up with any degree of certainty, but know this: We are blowing through the state’s projections on how big this was going to be.
In fact, back in May, the state treasurer Elizabeth Muoio announced the state expected to bring in $13 million in tax revenue in the fiscal year starting July 1; to date, over $8 million has been collected, with over half of that coming in the last two months. If I were a betting man (I am; in fact I hit an 11-leg parlay the other night, netting $100 on a $3.89 bet, screenshots to prove it, feel free to @ me) I would expect that $13 million number to collapse well before the Super Bowl. And I can only imagine how much action — and new customers — the Big Game will bring to New Jersey. In the end, not so farfetched to see this being a solid $20-$25 million tax revenue generator for the state.
Of course, that’s a drop in the $37.4 billion budget bucket — literally, .0006 percent of the budget, or, put another way, 6 cents out of a hundred bucks — but it’s better than your car exploding after you leave a take-out rib joint (that’s what happened to Lucky, but living up to his name, he survived).
One other little hiccup in all this will be when Pennsylvania and New York legalize sports betting. That will probably hurt the bottom line a bit as well, but no matter: Sports betting is a massive hit with New Jersey residents, and I’m sure it will continue to grow as more operators — and more types of bets — enter the field.
In the meantime, whatever the over is for Julian Edelman receptions this week, I’m attacking it. Bet with your head, not over it, etc.