When it comes to sports betting, Colorado has had a busy few months.
To recap, March sports had a mostly positive revenue report for the state. In April, the man in charge of the figures retired after 31 years. And the state took steps to deal with social media bullying and threats to college athletes for not performing according to the odds.
The Colorado Department of Revenue (CDR) revealed that the handle for March topped $494 million, up 16.3 percent from February but 2.2 percent below March 2022. Online wagers accounted for 99 percent of the total or $489.9 million, according to Gambling News.
Gross gaming revenue (GGR) almost hit $46 million, a gain of more than 62.7 percent year-over-year and equaling a win percentage of 9.29 percent. March GGR more than doubled the $22.6 million recorded in February, the month of the Super Bowl.
Colorado took in $3.1 million in taxes on sports betting, an increase of 146.8 percent over February, bringing the year-to-date amount to $20.3 million, up 119.2 percent over the same three-months in 2022.
Basketball accounted for some 39 percent of wagers, or $287.3 million. Of that, bettors in Colorado wagered $94.3 million on the NCAA March Madness, or 19 percent of the total. Ice hockey, tennis, soccer and baseball rounded out the top five.
Dan Hartman, the fellow most attuned to the numbers and percentages, retired earlier this month after 31 years at the CDR. Colorado approved sports betting in late 2019, just months before everything shut down as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Still, four operators declared their willingness to launch on May 1: BetMGM, DraftKings, FanDuel and BetRivers.
“There was no retail element, then there really weren’t any sports either,” Hartman told SportsHandle. “It was interesting, but a handful of operators wanted to go, and we knew all these states were coming on and everyone had their due dates, so we went forward with it. It probably would have been an easy call to say we were not going to go and there probably would have been support for that, but it actually worked out OK because it gave us a little bit of a staggered start.”
Hartman said Colorado has more than 20 operators, a reflection of the low cost to enter along with the large betting menus.
“The way it was set up was to be a very competitive market,” Hartman told SportsHandle. “It has a low cost of entry and the only thing that limited how many we had openings was how many casinos we had.”
A quartet of operators—PointsBet, Tipico Sportsbook, Betsson, and BlueBet—elected to establish North American headquarters in Colorado even if they weren’t among the top three.
“What we say is we have regulations that allow them to really operate and be competitive,” Hartman said. “They’re not slowed down and hampered by bureaucracy.”
Hartman began his regulatory career in 1992, first in the greyhound and horse racing industries, then while running the medical marijuana program.
“It’s certainly a little different when you start from white paper,” Hartman said. “Not a white paper, but from plain white paper, with nothing on it.”
Hartman cited responsible gambling measures he shepherded into the state.
“Legal operators are not trying to make money off the back of somebody with a problem,” he told SportsHandle. “Illegal offshore groups, probably so, bookies, probably so, but you don’t set up a legal, regulated safe market to take advantage of players.”
More needs to be done to build a national bettors list that would include athletes and staff of any sports team or university athletic department that generate bettable action. Athletes themselves need better protection, something the Colorado Division of Gaming is discussing.
“When a college basketball player hits a 3-pointer because he’s playing until the end of the buzzer and that throws off the line, it doesn’t change the wins and losses, but it throws off the line. … Those people shouldn’t get berated on social media or anywhere else,” Hartman said.
The CDR approved a $215,000 grant for Kindbridge Research Institute to develop the Colorado Athlete Wellbeing Program. Expected to debut later in the year, the program features an app-based mental health service and training for over 20 college athletic programs in the state, according to Legal Sports Report.
The program will offer a ‘pathway to treatment’ for college athletes dealing with online abuse. The app includes not only a mental health assessment but a way to investigate sports betting harassment. Kindbridge will put its investigative teams in action to try and find the responsible source of the harassment.
The app, the first of its kind in the United States, has brought on Sportradar as a partner for this initiative.
