Illinois Sports Betting: Operators Raise Minimum Bets

Watch Illinois Sports Betting: Operators Raise Minimum Bets - SportsGrid on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00all right so you know sam what's your take on what's going on in illinois um you know a couple

00:03of the different operators sped mgm hard rock are raising the minimums on on sports bets like

00:11my theory i think is completely wrong my theory was that they were just tired of people dropping

00:16a buck and throwing down like 20 team parlays i i'm probably wrong on that because they want money

00:23but what what am i missing here with this you know i definitely don't think you're completely wrong

00:29that's always part of it if they can get people to bet more they will bet bet mgm just announced a

00:34250 minimum for any bet and hard rock the same thing with a two dollar minimum but this all comes

00:40because uh it's only in illinois so this all becomes because the state has uh chosen to raise sports

00:45betting taxes tremendously over the past year uh they just added a new 25 cent per bet fee to every

00:53bet that an operator will take and then after the first 20 million uh of bets that an operator takes

01:00that increases to 50 cents so uh if you're bet mgm or hard rock you want people to bet larger amounts

01:06because then part of that is going to go in the fee you get to keep more of the money we saw draft

01:11kings and fanduel introduced their surcharges which essentially just passes the fee directly to the

01:16customer now interestingly enough uh draft kings and fanduel are the only companies that qualify for that

01:22kind of higher 50 cent per bet fee that's why you haven't seen the other companies do it but um

01:27it's going to be a case of we we're going to see how betters respond is this going to change their

01:31behavior i tend to agree with you craig that i think that kind of people are just going to bet

01:36uh you know two dollars instead of one it's not that big of a difference and the companies at the

01:40end of the day while they are absorbing you know a higher tax burden it's also going to allow them to

01:45kind of get away with um you know taking more bets and squeezing more money out of people which

01:50at the end of the day is all kind of what this comes down to for the sports books uh certainly

01:54other states will be watching we've seen plenty of others consider raising their tax rates but

01:59illinois is going to be a really great test case where we see these new policies actually implemented

02:03that change the betting behavior and then we'll have to see how that actually impacts things and

02:08kind of where we go from there across the rest of the country