• The sector read-across from Entain’s DPA isn’t clear cut.

• Flutter confirms New York dual-listing date.

• DraftKings launches its latest product innovation in DFS.

• Robinhood belatedly enters the UK’s share trading market.

• BettingJobs’ Jobsboard features marketing, acquisition and sales roles.

Don't think about it too much, too much, too much, too much.

Dotcom blowback

Suggestions that Entain’s Turkish travails mean the end of UK operators’ gray market businesses might be wide of the mark.

Chronicle of a death forestalled: Comments from the crown prosecutor regarding how the gambling sector should conduct itself in the future in light of Entain’s deferred prosecution agreement are in danger of being over-interpreted, according to sources.

• This week the details of the DPA contained a warning about “non-legal” activity.

• Entain was ordered to “exit all gambling markets in which it is currently operating and which markets are not yet subject to gambling regulation” within 12 months of the signing of the DPA.

Message in a battle: Further, chief crown prosecutor Andrew Penhale said the “wider gaming industry may wish to reflect on the implications of this agreement for their own corporate compliance procedures and, where appropriate, take action to address and report any failings they identify”.

• That caused lawyers Colette Kelly and Andrew Cotton from Irwin Mitchell to suggest Penhale’s comments would “reverberate across the gambling industry”.

• Meanwhile, analysts at Regulus said the Crown Prosecution Service has “effectively used Entain’s alleged historical malfeasance under the DPA to call time on dotcom markets”.

But these conclusions have been questioned elsewhere. “Nowhere does the DPA say that dotcom operations are incompatible with obligations imposed by British laws and regulations,” said Stephen Ketteley, partner at Wiggin.

• By Ketteley’s reckoning, gambling regulators – including, crucially, in the US – have “come to understand and acknowledge the legitimacy” of gray market operations.

• “Deriving revenues from a market in which an operator does not possess a local license does not need to involve bribery,” he added.

Just the facts, ma’am: Legal sources pointed out it is only once the statement of facts involved in the DPA are made public that the market will find out exactly what happened with Entain’s Turkish business and what led to the prosecution in the first place.

Don’t follow the leader: As one lawyer argued, while the DPA “contains a commitment” on the part of Entain to only derive revenues from current or soon-to-be locally-licensed markets, “it does not, in our view, automatically follow that dotcom operations must be shuttered for everyone”. 

• Meanwhile, Ketteley pointed out what “may be pretty self-evident” about assessing gray market risk.

• “Much of the industry merely assesses the extra-territorial application of the laws in place where the end-user resides,” he suggested.

• But companies run the risk of “losing sight of the legal implications, back home, of the business methods, particularly payment processing, that facilitate such revenue generation”.

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Start spreading the news: Flutter has confirmed it will begin a dual-listing of its shares on the New York Stock Exchange on January 29. It has also confirmed the cancellation of its Dublin listing on the same day.

• Meanwhile, the company said it will release a Q4 trading statement on January 18 while its FY24 earnings will be released on March 26.

The Seminole’s Hard Rock Bet on Thursday announced itself as fully live in Florida via an ad campaign. The tribe also launched craps, roulette and retail sports betting at its casino locations in the state.

VICI is further broadening out from gaming with a $212m mezzanine loan investment to Kalahari Resorts & Conventions to fund the development of a Kalahari indoor waterpark resort in Thornburg, Virginia.

The affiliate provider GiG has confirmed the issuance of a new €75m senior secured bond, which will go towards paying off its previous SEK550m (€49m) bond as well as partly finance the recent KaFe Rock acquisition.

Career paths

Mike Rumbolz has been elected as chair of the American Gaming Association. He replaces outgoing chair Jim Allen, Seminole Gaming CEO.

What we’re reading

Brewing scandal: Ex-Jaguars employee who allegedly stole $22 million bet on football, daily fantasy, attorney says. In The Athletic.

ICYMI

In Sharpr this week, there is news that Riot Games has expanded its relationship with esports data company GRID and also acquired an equity stake in the esports-data supplier.

DraftKings DFS move

Pick a winner: Announcing the launch of a P2P Pick6 game in six states this week, DratKings hammered home the message that for the past 10 years it had “defined innovation in fantasy sports”. 

• The new product is already live in Maryland, Minnesota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin, with further rollouts being promised.

• The product would appear to be DraftKings’ response to the success rivals Underdog Fantasy and PrizePicks have had with pick’em-style games.

• The news received a tongue-in-cheek welcome from Underdog Fantasy CEO Jeremy Levine, who posted on X: “Welcome to competing on product… proud of you guys.”

Recall, during DraftKings’ recent investor day event, CEO Jason Robins said the company’s only limit was its “imaginations”. “We’re able to innovate at an extremely high velocity,” he said at the time, noting the ~1,500 product engineers who were “driving a better customer experience”.

By the numbers – New York

How d’ya like them big apples? Handle for New York was over $2bn for the second month in a row in November. At $2.11bn it surpassed the $2bn garnered in October. Meanwhile, GGR was down 9% to $150.9m. FanDuel maintained its market share lead at 46%, followed by DraftKings (35%), Caesars (7%) and BetMGM (5%).

🗽 FanDuel and DraftKings maintain Empire State leadership

Analyst takes

More pie: The team at Wells Fargo suggested FanDuel recapture of its overall OSB market leadership in October was helped by gains in New Jersey over the month, where the analysts noted the company held on to 62% of GGR versus DraftKings’ 17%. 

• They pointed out, however, that both upped their promo share in the states where the numbers are reported. 

• In Pennsylvania, where promo spend was up 2% YoY, DraftKings pumped in 39% more spend while FanDuel added 19%. 

Time on device: The team added that the app data for ESPN Bet was better than expected. “We were surprised by the sustained level of app engagement, based on usage/time spent on app (download data can be noisy),” they added.

• They said that usage time on the app in the past 14 days for ESPN Bet has been 2.40 minutes, 8% below DraftKings’ 2.62 minutes. However, it was still 40% lower than the usage time for FanDuel.

• Average daily hours spent on ESPN Bet has been about 72,500, just 5% below DraftKings’ 76,500 and 37% below FanDuel’s 114,500. 

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Sector watch – share trading

Hearts a-quiver: The US share trading app and meme-stock frenzy enabler Robinhood finally launched in the UK last week at the second attempt; its first run at the UK having been kiboshed by the pandemic back in 2020. The question, however, is whether the app will attract the same Millennial and below generations as it has at home in the US.

• As the FT pointed out in analyzing the app’s chances, the issue is that equity ownership among its target audience is way lower in the UK, where only a third of people own shares directly.

Moreover, there are questions over how Robinhod plans to make money. In the US, it makes cash from the order flows it sells to big brokers. But that practice is banned in the UK, leaving Robinhood with only the potential to make money from the interest income on cash balances maintained by its customers.

• In the US, Robinhood sells order flows to big brokers. That is forbidden in the UK. However, back home the app makes more money from interest income on cash balances.

• To do that, it needs scale, which CEO Vlad Tenev believes it can do via lower fees for all transactions.

• “We’d like to help lower fees for all customers in the UK, just like we did in the US back in 2019, right before Covid,” he told Bloomberg.  

Sportsbooks! Checkout some of Matchbook’s latest quotes across NFL, NCAAF, MLB & NBA:

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MLB: ARI Diamondbacks ML (vs TEX Rangers); $36k @ 1.99

NBA: NO Hornets +12.5 (vs DAL Mavericks); $170k @ 1.90

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Calendar

• Jan 18: Flutter 

• Marketing Manager – Porto 

• Head of Acquisition – Prague  

• Head of Sales – Remote in Taiwan or Philippines 

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