New Yorkers Bet $603M in First 9 days of Mobile Sports Betting; Caesars Surprises at No. 1

In the first nine days of mobile sportsbook operations in New York, $603 million was wagered.

If those numbers, revealed by the New York Gaming Commission Friday, kept pace for the month of January, New York would have a chance to beat out New Jersey for the No. 1 spot in a month for the first time since Nevada last beat New Jersey in Sept. 2019.

Armed with the most aggressive promotion, which offered bettors to match up to a $3,000 deposit, Caesars is the leader in market share at 42.6 percent of the market ($257M). FanDuel is second at 33.2 percent ($200.3M) and DraftKings is third at 22.2 percent of the market ($134.4 million).

Rush Street Interactive’s BetRivers brand rounds out the group of the four mobile sportsbooks of the nine licensed in the state that were given the green light on Jan. 8.

No data was available for BetMGM, the fifth book that went live, because it got the go ahead on Jan. 17.

For Caesars, it’s the first time they’ve been No. 1 in a state with multiple operators from Day 1. Caesars, which finalized its $4 billion acquisition of William Hill last April, did not, however, escape without growing pains.

The app went down several times due to the strain of the traffic and the book had to publicly address outages. Some concerned bettors waited online for 5-10 hours to address their issues via chat.

Caesars, in a statement said, that New York bettors flocking at such volume “exposed issues in our platform and we’ve made numerous updates every day since launch to improve the customer experience.”

Whether Caesars will be able to hold the lead will be interesting to watch. FanDuel and DraftKings, leaders in most markets, have been under more scrutiny to prove their big spends will return customers and Caesars took advantage of their hesitancy in the biggest market yet.