Like the Van Halen song says to do, Louisiana online sports betting went ahead and jumped. And early numbers look promising for just the short time since online betting launched.
That the late-January Louisiana mobile sports betting launch happened in time for Super Bowl LVI certainly didn’t hurt.
“Our Super Bowl”
The Super Bowl is pretty much Christmas for sportsbooks. As the Head of Sports for Caesars Digital, Ken Fuchs, said:
“The Super Bowl is also our Super Bowl.”
According to Ronnie Johns, chair of the Louisiana Gaming Control Board:
“… they [platform providers] were taking in large volumes of bets over the weekend.”
He credited the participation of Bengals quarterback Joe Burrows, who’s a former Louisiana State University football player, with bringing in first-time bettors, and more bettors overall.
The release of specific data for Louisiana’s Super Bowl betting remains in the near future. However, per WAFB, men between 25 and 36 years of age bet the most.
Overall, “…it was a great turnout,” Fuchs told WAFB. He pointed out that “tens of thousands of people” had turned out to bet in person at Caesars properties Bossier City Horseshoe and Harrah’s New Orleans as well as via its mobile app.
8th is enough
Louisiana mobile sports betting did great from the jump.
In the first three days of the activity, Louisiana beat out Colorado, Connecticut, Tennessee, and Indiana, coming in at 8th place nationwide in sports betting volume with 3.4 million sports betting transactions.
The data comes from GeoComply, a geolocation compliance and fraud security company based in Vancouver, Canada. This company is used by a majority of the legal sports wagering companies in the United States to make sure bettors wager in legal locations.
(Those 3.4 million transactions do not assumptively all qualify as wagers, however, according to GeoComply. But the company also says they can be used as “a strong indicator.”)
In one study, the Pelican State’s mobile sports betting kickoff was compared to that of the Big Apple. As a result, the former came in first in regard to unique betting numbers. Those numbers equaled 3.6% of Louisiana’s adult population. In contrast, reference New York’s 3.3% during its launch weekend on Jan. 8-9, when they pushed New Jersey out of the number one position.
That’s even with New York having about four times Louisiana’s population (around 20 million versus around 5 million).
The numbers never lie
Some of the other data regarding Louisiana mobile sports betting and compiled by GeoComply includes:
- Peak transaction time came from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. Central Time on Sunday.
- 68% of the volume recorded came from Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Not surprising since they’re both big football towns — Baton Rouge with LSU and New Orleans with the Saints.
In Louisiana, people can make sports bets in the 55 parishes that approved the activity back in November 2020. Geofencing will block any attempts in the other nine parishes:
- Caldwell
- Franklin
- West Carroll
- Catahoula
- Jackson
- LaSalle
- Sabine
- Union
- Winn
And WynnBet is the sixth app in the Louisiana sportsbook lineup, joining:
- Caesars
- DraftKings
- FanDuel
- BetMGM
- BetRivers
Big (bet) Mack
Louisiana may owe some thanks to a Texas businessman who goes by the moniker “Mattress Mack.” Because sports wagering remains illegal in his home state, he placed two Super Bowl bets from Louisiana that totaled $9.5 million.
It was “the single biggest bet in the history of sports betting” according to Fuchs. That nice chunk of change should ultimately get factored into state taxes and from there benefit early education and more.
Turns out Mack might just as well have stuffed that money into one of his mattresses, though: He put it all on the Bengals.
But apparently, Mack has plenty more where that came from, so don’t worry.
Concerns do exist about what the convenience of online betting means for problem gambling in Louisiana, however.
“…it’s supposed to be fun and done responsibly,” Fuchs told WAFB. “It just gives you a little added excitement, something to talk about with your friends.”
