The Innovation Group, a leading casino industry consultancy, hosted a webinar panel last week outlining how casinos should prepare for a repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), the federal ban on sports betting.
The Webinar, titled “Sports Betting: Opportunities In and Out of Nevada, was held as part of The Innovation Group’s Emerging Leaders of Gaming series.
Panelists included Dan Kustelski, co-founder and chief executive at Chalkline Sports; Will Green, senior director of research at the American Gaming Association; and Dan Shapiro, vice president of strategy and business development at William Hill US.
The program focused on the market potential of sports betting, and what casinos and sports books need to be doing ahead of time to lay the groundwork for a successful sports betting rollout across their properties.
“Obviously, everyone is trying to figure out when this might become legal,” said Kustelski of the panel, according to CDC Gaming Reports. “More importantly, we need to ask the question: When it does become legal, what do we do?”
Panelists commented that the potential market for legalized sports betting is sizable enough to both attract new players and further monetize existing ones, and if done right.
“As an operator who integrated a sports book into a large casino group in South Africa, I see a tremendous opportunity for U.S. operators to leverage sports betting to expand loyalty programs, use online products to drive retail revenues, and, most importantly, drive profits through coordinated cross-channel marketing,” said Kustelski.
Panelists said casinos should start now in wading through the potentially difficult logistical and operational questions so sports betting can be deployed in a way that builds market share and a competitive edge.
“The first thing we did was integrate loyalty program points so you could earn on sports betting and earn in casinos,” Kustelski said of his experience in South Africa. “That was a complicated process, but once we got it right, it was huge.”
Kustelski added that Las Vegas bookmakers shouldn’t see a PASPA repeal as the end of their legal monopoly, but as an opportunity to further monetize customers when they aren’t physically in Nevada.
“If I were a casino group in Nevada, I would be pretty excited about the opportunity to increase my revenues. I would be figuring out a national rollout and implementation,” he said.
