The first weekend that mobile sports betting sites were legally available in Massachusetts put the commonwealth in elite company, numbers-wise.
According to GeoComply Solutions Inc., a Vancouver-based technology firm that helps online sportsbooks determine the location of customers, Massachusetts-related figures for geolocation transactions made it the fifth-busiest state in the U.S. from Friday morning to Sunday night, behind only New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.
GeoComply reported 406,400 player accounts and 8.1 million geolocation transactions from March 10 to March 12 tied to Massachusetts sports betting. To compare, in Arizona and Virginia, which have larger populations than Massachusetts, there were 4.9 million and 4.4 million geolocation transactions, respectively, in addition to 174,091 and 179,305 accounts.
Positive side effects
In addition, GeoComply said it blocked more than 5,000 transactions from devices or accounts with a known history of fraud. GeoComply also noted Massachusetts-related estimates of $60 million or so in annual tax revenue from legal sports betting, which could pump around $5.4 million into a fund that chiefly supports responsible-gambling programs in the New England state.
“We are privileged to be licensed in Massachusetts and support operators and the MGC as it builds a regulated online sports betting market with responsible gambling hard-boiled into its regulations,” Lindsay Slader, senior vice president of compliance at GeoComply, said in a press release. “Massachusetts citizens will benefit from legal online sportsbooks dedicated to greater protection and an increased budget for responsible gambling programs.”
The launch of online sports betting in Massachusetts last Friday was the culmination of months of work by regulators in the state, where legal sports betting began on January 31 at three casinos before expanding to apps and sites. The commonwealth was expected to be relatively busy given its sizable and legendarily sports-crazed population, and the early numbers back up that assessment.
Six online sportsbooks are available in Massachusetts right now:
