Bally Bet became the Old Line State’s newest entry into its digital sports betting industry and will try to gain traction in a market that has been accepting wagers since November 2022.
Maryland’s Shifting Market
A full 20 months after Maryland launched mobile sports betting, Bally’s has decided the time is right to launch its online app, Bally Bet. The Rhode Island-based gaming company announced its arrival in Maryland’s sports betting market on Monday and the delay follows a similar strategy it has employed in other states it has entered.
Maryland becomes the ninth state in which Bally Bet operates including Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, New York, Ohio, Virginia, and recently Massachusetts. Bally’s recently accepted an offer from majority owner, Standard General, to buy its remaining shares and cede control of the company.
The Maryland sports betting market has seen plenty of activity recently with the addition of Bally Bet and Veterans Services Corporation (VSC) entering within weeks of each other. The latter had an inauspicious debut with a bewildering interface and onerous MLB odds like Houston -129/Toronto -121 on the night it launched. Any other sportsbook would have had a much more reasonable line like Houston -129/Toronto +119 or even +109.
Jake Paul’s Betr is expected to enter the Maryland market in the very near future while Betfred and SuperBook Sports are on their way out. Maryland’s fiscal year 2024 saw $5.37 billion in accepted wagers, which was up nearly 86% from the previous year. Maryland’s tax coffers swelled by $60.3 million in FY 2024.
Bally Bet Arrives Fashionably Late
Bally’s has had a unique strategy regarding its mobile sports betting strategy. Unlike the major players that enter immediately and spend oodles of money on advertising campaigns and promotions to acquire early adopters, Bally’s has chosen to let the market settle and enter at their leisure, without the enormous expenditures of advertising and lofty bonuses.
New York is the biggest market in the mobile sports betting industry, having launched in January 2022, but Bally’s decided to wait until July to make its debut. Soo Kim is Bally’s chairman and the founding partner and Chief Investment Officer of the hedge fund Standard General which recently agreed to acquire Bally’s.
Kim was asked about delaying the launch of Bally Bet in the nation’s biggest market and his answer lends some perspective on why the company also delayed its launch in Maryland.
“… we have a longer-term plan and I think part of this is why maybe our plan isn’t fully being grasped by the public markets. The public markets tend to be very short-term minded, what’s going to happen in the next earnings, what’s going to happen at the next, you know,” Kim said.
“But we think that actually, the current version of sports betting is not a great business. It’s a fine business, it’s not a great business. We think that there will be a wave of consolidation that will rationalize promotions. But more importantly, I think people will stop competing with just free money but people will start competing with product,” he added.
Bally Bet has had minimal success in the digital realm with this strategy but it doesn’t appear it will shift gears anytime soon as Kim will have even more power than ever before with Standard General’s purchase of Bally’s.
