The house doesn’t always win and that was proven again on Super Bowl Sunday when DraftKings cleaned up while BetMGM got cleaned. Below we see how the Empire State’s nine mobile sportsbooks fared on the biggest sports betting day of the year.
DraftKings Wins the Day as Handle Surges
New Yorkers’ appetite for Super Bowl Sunday was bigger than last year as the hungry betting public wagered $162.2 million including futures bets, a 31% increase over last year’s handle of $123.8 million. The nine online sportsbooks in the state posted a 7.7% hold and generated revenues of nearly $12.5 million for the day.
But that doesn’t mean every sportsbook came out ahead, as BetMGM took a beating from their customers, losing over $4.8 million in one day while DraftKings ruled Super Sunday by delivering a whopping $8.8 million on a staggering 16.87% hold.
FanDuel posted the highest handle of its eight rivals with $53.5 million in accepted wagers, narrowly besting its archrival, DraftKings, which posted a $52.3 million handle. However, in the most important metric, FanDuel was a distant second to DraftKings in gross revenues with almost $3.7 million on a 6.89% hold, trailing DK by over $4 million.
As for all the relevant data on New York’s online sportsbooks after Super Bowl Sunday’s betting extravaganza, we will list them in order of gross gaming revenue (GGR) below.
| Sportsbook | Gross Revenue | Handle | Hold |
| DraftKings | $8,826,191 | $52,331,081 | 16.87% |
| FanDuel | $3,693,757 | $53,582,663 | 6.89% |
| PointsBet | $196,294 | $1,348,668 | 14.55% |
| BetRivers | $79,634 | $1,543,432 | 5.15% |
| Resorts World | $27,944 | $232,536 | 12.02% |
| Bally Bet | $27,079 | $281,585 | 9.62% |
| WynnBET | $17,337 | $460,295 | 3.77% |
| Caesars | $970,404 | $12,514,040 | 8.93% |
| BetMGM | $4,813,246 | $10,862,716 | 44.31% |
| TOTAL | $7,084,586 | $133,157,016 | 5.32% |
Barstool Back in the Sports Betting Biz
Barstool Sportsbook is no longer, after Penn Entertainment divested itself of the controversial brand before hitching its wagon to a much more widely known name, ESPN, to form ESPNBET. The divestiture was a prerequisite by ESPN, as the Worldwide Leader in Sports did not want their brand affiliated in any way with the bawdy bro culture associated with Barstool.
After dissolving Barstool Sportsbook, Penn Entertainment sold the Barstool media brand back to founder Dave Portnoy for $1 just six months after completing the sale of the business for $550 million. Should Portnoy ever sell Barstool, the agreement stipulates Penn would receive 50% of the proceeds of the sale. The other stipulation was that the Barstool brand had to stay out of the sports betting arena until after the Super Bowl.
Shortly after SB 58 came and went, DraftKings and Barstool rekindled their previous partnership, which predated the Penn sale. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but Dave Portnoy shared the news on his Instagram account with his 4.8 million followers.
