With the Olympics, the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup finals, July was a major month in sports — but Washingtonians weren’t placing many wagers on the city’s legal sports betting app.
July’s dismal betting revenue, the least lucrative month of the fiscal year for the consistently underperforming GambetDC app, is just the latest evidence that the District’s gamble on a city-sponsored sports betting website has fallen drastically short of what top D.C. officials once promised.
With the city’s auditor expected to publish a review soon of the GambetDC site’s revenue performance, D.C. leaders and gambling professionals are pointing fingers, trying to explain why the promise of legal sports betting in D.C. — which officials once predicted would bring in tens of millions of dollars to the city’s coffers — fizzled as soon as it began.
When D.C.’s chief financial officer asked the D.C. Council to approve a no-bid contract to start city-operated sports betting in 2019, he forecast that the app would net more than $22 million in revenue for the District in fiscal year 2021. But in March, the Office of Lottery and Gaming decreased that estimate to $6 million. Two months later, lottery official Craig Lindsey testified at a council hearing that revenue up to that point in the year was just $230,000.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Julie Zauzmer Weil over at The Washington Post
