Online Sports Betting in New York is Officially Legal - What does this mean for NY Bettors?

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Online Sports Betting in New York is Officially Legal - What does this mean for NY Bettors?
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Online sports betting in New York! After a successful launch yesterday, New York bettors finally have the convenience to place wagers online, and what a convenient time to do that too, with the Super Bowl just round the corner!

With DraftKings, Caesars Sportsbook, FanDuel and BetRivers already live in the State, there are just five more operators left to hit the State

What Online Betting Means for New Yorkers

The new sports wagering landscape will give New York sports fans, both rabid and casual, not only a convenient and legal way of heightening the excitement of spectating sports but, for now, there will also be what is called in New Orleans the lagniappe, a little something extra, in the promotional bonuses that gambling operators will be offering. Just one example, FanDuel New York is offering new customers $100 in site credits.

Together, the promotional incentives and mostly, the sheer convenience of placing a bet are likely to drive sports wagering in New York to new high-water marks for handle in the industry within the United States.

It’s often said that “timing is everything,” and in that regard, the timing is certainly fortuitous.

At hand is the NFL playoffs and, in a month, the Super Bowl. More immediately, on Sunday, the Buffalo Bills play the New York Jets in an NFL regular-season finale with playoff implications (for Buffalo).

Monday night is the college football championship game between Alabama and Georgia. And New York sports are constant: This weekend, the NBA Knicks play Boston Saturday evening and the Brooklyn Nets play San Antonio Sunday afternoon but in between, the NHL Rangers play Anaheim late Saturday night.

Is New York Betting’s High Tax Rate a Problem?

An intriguing facet of New York going live with online sports betting will be observing how it fares with an extraordinarily high tax rate on gambling operators, a sky-high 51%.

The question will be whether that tax bite trickles down to the customers in negative ways, such as fewer promotions eventually or more worrisome, disadvantageous odds.

And then there’s a matter of whether being in the New York market can actually be profitable for operators as they pay that tax rate and also make the up-front investments in advertising and promotions that will be required to acquire and retain customers in a fiercely competitive market. But those are reality-check questions to be answered down the road.

In the meantime, there is the euphoria for New Yorkers of having unfettered access to legal online sports wagering — the giddiness of signing onto a computer or fiddling with a smartphone, registering in a few minutes, getting some juicy freebies, and then putting their money where their opinions are. It’ll be just so convenient.

New York Has Come a Long Way

Although New Yorkers have had a few options for sports gambling up to now, it hasn’t been so ... convenient.

A handful of upstate New York casinos had traditional sportsbooks but those places were a long schlep for the 70% of the state’s population that lives in the NYC metro area (about 14 million of the state’s 20 million people).

As an alternative, many downstate folks have been making their way across the Hudson River to New Jersey, and some have even been traveling to Pennsylvania or Connecticut.

But now that online sports betting has gone live in the State, the good people of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, Staten Island and points east on Long Island and points north in Westchester County, no longer need to leave their comfy couches and their big-screens to place a bet.