Do Sportsbooks Ever Lose Money?
As the Las Vegas saying goes, the house always wins.
Online sportsbooks, like DraftKings, FanDuel, and Bet365, rarely have a bad week, even more rarely a losing month, and never a losing year. Online betting sites always win in the long run.
Owning an online sportsbook is like printing money from losing bettors. Many online sportsbooks put the revenue back into advertising to entice more people to sign up. Some of these online betting businesses technically aren’t profitable because of their customer acquisition spend. They want to grow as fast as possible.
More than 30 states have online sports betting, and since 2018 there have only been a handful of instances where a state reported that its online sportsbooks didn’t profit from gamblers.
Some states sanction only a few online sportsbooks, while others have more than 20.
In this article we’ll explain why you can’t beat the sportsbook.
Do Sports Bettors Ever Win?
Individual sports bettors can win in the short run. However, like all forms of gambling, you will more than likely lose in the long run. Online betting sites are infamous for banning or restricting the rare customer who develops a system to win more often than they lose.
As a group, the betting public can also win, but it’s rare. For example, the betting public can sometimes have good luck in several marquee NFL matchups in a given week, causing bookmakers to lose money. It’s rare because books are adept at balancing their liabilities.
In Nevada, the state’s sportsbooks lost money on the NFL Super Bowl just once in over 30 years, according to figures from the Nevada Gaming Control Board.
A state with a smaller sports betting industry could see a month where its sanctioned online betting sites as a whole lost money, but it’s never happened for the larger betting states.
For a full year worth of wagering, no legal sports betting state has ever seen a loss.
Collectively, sports bettors never win the long run, and they virtually never win in the long run as individuals. You shouldn’t bet on sports because it’s a losing endeavor, and sports betting doesn’t involve skill.
Why Sportsbooks Never Lose
The reason why online sports betting sites never lose is because of compulsive betting.
According to a recent study out of Connetiticut, roughly 50% of sports betting industry revenue comes from people suffering from a full-fledged gambling disorder.
The foundation of sports betting industry revenue is made up of problem gamblers. If addiction didn’t exist, then sportsbooks would lose money much more often. In fact, they wouldn’t even be in business.
It’s almost unheard of for a sports bettor to quit after winning a large payout. For people suffering from a gambling problem, a large payout is just future losses.
It’s estimated that 30% of online sports bettors have moderate to severe gambling problems, according to the latest sports betting addiction statistics.
Not everyone who loses money at sports betting will develop a problem. The betting industry makes some money from customers who bet seldomly, but it’s not the core of the business.
If you are thinking of betting on sports or have just started doing so, there are ways to prevent a betting addiction. Don’t be a cash cow for an online betting site.
Image by Iqbal Nuril Anwar Pixabay.