The books are back.
After a chalky NFL regular season, during which favorites avoided upsets at an abnormally high rate, online sports betting sites appear to have turned the page and begun winning back what they might have lost from bettors over the past few months on football.
Reporting by states and operators for this year's Super Bowl are the clearest indication that the books have had a good start to 2025.
"Super Bowl LIX was the single biggest betting event in the history of BetMGM – it took the most bets, and was one of the best single game results in company history,” senior trading manager Christian Cipollini said in a statement last week.
The New York State Gaming Commission reported on Thursday that licensed mobile sports wagering operators (including BetMGM) took $129.1 million in bets on this year's Super Bowl, not including futures. The New York operators generated $41.3 million in gross gaming revenue from that action, or a hold rate of about 32%.
CORRECTED: Fan Duel revised GGR for the #SuperBowlLIX pic.twitter.com/HxNlviVip9
— NYS Gaming Commission (@NYSGamingComm) February 13, 2025
That is an exceptionally high win rate for sportsbooks. For all of January, the hold for New York's licensed mobile operators was just shy of 10%, as they generated around $247 million in gross gaming revenue from almost $2.5 billion in handle.
Nevada, meanwhile, reported “a new all-time record for sportsbook win” for the Super Bowl this year, at $22.1 million. New Jersey sportsbooks saw their Super Bowl winnings shoot up to almost $25.2 million this year, compared to about $8.5 million in 2024.
Still, not every state had it so good, namely, the one home to the Super Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles. The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board announced on Thursday that Keystone State sportsbooks took a $6.5-million hit on the Big Game.
A Super start
Overall, though, the impression given is that the Super Bowl helped online sportsbooks get off to a hot start in 2025.
The success was due to a few things, such as bettors who backed the usually reliable Kansas City Chiefs to win and then watched them get blown out of the Caesars Superdome.
It was also due in part to several things not happening that many bettors expected to happen, such as certain high-profile players not finding the end zone. Those negative effects for bettors, and positive effects for books, were heightened by the growing amount of same-game parlays being placed on the Big Game.
“[T]he lack of touchdowns from key players (e.g., Saquon Barkley/Travis Kelce) indicates Super Bowl 59 was likely a positive margin story for [DraftKings] and peers, as players' parlays were likely broken,” Jefferies analyst David Katz wrote in a note to clients last week.
DraftKings agreed, calling the Super Bowl a “successful event” for the company in its latest financial filings, which were released last week. Again, part of that success was because of parlays, plenty of which were banking on a Barkley or Kelce anytime touchdown.
“We set our own daily record for sportsbook handle at $436 million,” DraftKings chief financial officer Alan Ellingson wrote in a letter to shareholders. “Bet mix was favorable as same game parlay handle increased approximately 40% year-over-year, which ultimately resulted in the highest sportsbook gross gaming revenue day in the history of the company.”
The investor materials that DraftKings published highlighted both the hurt they took during the 2024-25 NFL season and the hopefulness they feel for the coming year.
The Boston-based sports betting and iGaming operator noted in an investor presentation slide that NFL favorites won 75% or more of their games in 10 weeks of the 2024 regular season. That was the highest rate since at least 1983 and well above the average of 4.6 weeks between then and now, the company said.
Unwanted favors
Favorites winning is typically a bad outcome for sportsbooks because favorites are usually who the betting public like to back on the moneyline. DraftKings called it “the most customer-friendly NFL sport outcomes in over 40 years,” and reported a “Sport Outcome Revenue Impact” of $487 million for 2024.
“The stretch of bad outcomes proved to be one of the worst NFL seasons in history for sportsbooks,” Citizens JMP analyst Jordan Bender wrote in a note to clients on DraftKings’ latest results.
But things are looking up for the books (and, as a result, less so for bettors).
DraftKings is predicting its "structural" hold percentage will rise higher. In 2024, the company's actual win rate was 9.4% while its structural hold was 10.5%. For 2025, DraftKings is forecasting an 11% structural hold.
The company is hoping that live betting on games will help drive hold higher, especially after a round of acquisitions, including its purchase of microbetting technology provider Simplebet.
“We're very bullish on the outlook for structural hold for 2025 and hopefully we can do even better,” DraftKings CEO Jason Robins said on Friday during a call for analysts and investors.
Hold that L
The company’s CFO, Ellingson, said their actual sportsbook hold percentage in January was 11%. From Feb. 1 through Feb. 11 it was 13%, he added.
DraftKings raised the midpoint of its 2025 revenue guidance and now expects those receipts to be somewhere in the range of $6.3 billion to $6.6 billion for the year, compared to the $6.2 billion to $6.6 billion forecast it provided in November.
That guidance “does not include the benefit of favorable year-to-date sport outcomes,” Ellingson said. And these sorts of things have been music to the ears of investors, with DraftKings shares up more than 20% over the past month.
As Ellingson said during DraftKings’ earnings call on Friday: “We are off to an excellent start.”
