New Hampshire built its three brick-and-mortar casinos close to the border with Massachusetts on purpose to draw in the Bay State populace.
New Hampshire located its retail casinos near the Massachusetts border for good reason. They attracted bettors from Massachusetts, which had no such animal yet. Since Massachusetts in-person sportsbooks won’t be close to the border, that allays concerns over losing customers, according to Charles McIntyre the executive director of the New Hampshire Lottery Commission.
When it came to mobile sports betting, New Hampshire has been winning over Massachusetts fans since late 2019. Now that Massachusetts is inching closer to its own mobile sportsbooks, New Hampshire may lose some of that advantage, thus some revenue, according to Covers.
That may not be forgiving when Massachusetts launched its mobile betting sites come March. New Hampshire has just a single site, run by DraftKings since late 2019.
“Mobile, I would anticipate us taking a small hit,” McIntyre said. “I’m not denying the fact that there will be some players who drove here. We, through our geolocation, can see where the players are playing from with a heat map, and it’s not surprising that they’re all on the border.”
“One of the reasons we have no issue coming here is because not a lot of folks from Vermont come to New Hampshire to play,” he told the Vermont’s Sports Betting Study Committee. “There’s not a big population center on the border coming across. I think it’s less than 1 percent. It’s a rounding error.”
About a quarter of all Super Bowl Sunday bets in New Hampshire came from folks with an address in Massachusetts.
For fiscal year 2022, total sports betting in New Hampshire exceeded $861, a gain of 65 percent over the prior year. Most of the wagers —$670 million—came from mobile bets.
New Hampshire tax revenue grew from $18 million to almost $24 million.
The New Hampshire Lottery reported in September that sports bettors wagered almost $8.5 million on the first weekend of NFL games, up from $7.2 million in 2021.
“This is an incredibly exciting time for sports fans across the northeast, and our record-breaking success this past weekend demonstrates interest in football is at an all-time high here in the Granite State,” McIntyre said in a press release. “The NFL and NCAA football are our biggest sports betting drivers, making major impacts on our ongoing effort to maximize funding for education.”
