New Jersey’s big bet on sports betting continues to pay off as regulated Garden State bookmakers turned in their most successful month to date in January 2020. The combined casinos and race tracks of the first state in America to offering regulated sports wagering took in a handle of $540 million. That number is more than enough to both shut down critics and breathe desperately needed life into the state’s once ailing gambling industry.
January 2020 represented the third straight month in which the handle for NJ sports betting has exceed half a billion dollars. By way of reference, our colleagues at Legal Sports Report report that Nevada, the only state where sports betting was legal for about five decades, has never clocked that big a handle in January.
When all was said and done, the state’s licensed bookmakers collected revenue on that handle of $53.6 million. That represents an astonishing 185 percent increase over January 2019.
Leading the Garden State’s sportsbooks in the revenue race was the Meadowlands. The racetrack offers sports betting via Pointbet and the FanDuel sportsbook and took in revenue of $26.5 million. Resorts Digital clocked in $15.9 million from their DraftKings and Fox Bet operations.
Of particular note to casino affiliates is the fact that the lion’s share of this bonanza did not take place in the seaside casinos of Atlantic City. Legal Sports Report reports that 87 percent of the January action was done via mobile betting apps. While that’s good news for the state’s gambling industry as a whole, it’s not quite the boon that AC casinos were hoping for when New Jersey started the legal sports betting fight nearly a decade ago.