Nevada sportsbooks saw a noticeable drop in legal sports betting handle from last season's Super Bowl to this year.
The Silver State took in $153.2 million in wagers for Super Bowl LVII, down 15% from the $179.8 million handle for last year's event at SoFi Stadium.
Nevada’s 185 sportsbooks reported a combined revenue of $11.3 million with a hold of 7.4% from Sunday. That was also a decline from 2022 when the house held an 8.6% hold on revenue of $15.4 million.
Super Bowl LVII marked the lowest hold for sports betting in Nevada since 2019 when the game between the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams also produced a 7.4% hold.
Major operator crashes
One of the biggest names in the industry ran into a super problem on Super Bowl Sunday. William Hill operates Caesars sportsbook, and it suffered an outage that took the online sports betting site and retail systems offline during the second quarter of the big game.
The William Hill crash caused Nevada sports betting customers to scramble elsewhere, potentially leading to the smaller handle.
— William Hill US (@WilliamHillUS) February 14, 2023
The “unforeseen technical issue” means the operator has been unable to receive wagers or pay out Super Bowl winnings via the app since Sunday, angering plenty of sports bettors.
As of Tuesday, the app was still down, but operations at the retail locations have since reopened.
