Last updated: April 30, 2024
Delaware’s online sports betting era begins as BetRivers takes the reins after the dissolution of the state’s partnership with 888 Holdings. Marking the 28th state to adopt legal online sports betting, Delaware also sees BetRivers assume control of iGaming sites for its three casinos, ushering in a new era of digital gambling in the First State.
Last week, Rush Street Gaming’s BetRivers Sportsbook became the first online sportsbook in Delaware.
After breaking up with 888 Holdings, the Delaware Lottery announced in August that BetRivers would be its next iGaming partner. Since Delaware legalized online gambling in June 2012, 888 had been running the state lottery’s online casino. The casinos opened for business on October 31, 2013.
In the First State, BetRivers opened for business last Wednesday, December 27. Delaware hadn’t let 888 handle online sports bets before this deal, so it’s the start of legalized online sports gambling in the state.
Delaware is the 28th state to make it legal to bet on sports online.
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The first state to join Nevada in letting people bet on single games was Delaware. This happened after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal law called PASPA (the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act) in May 2018. In June 2018, people could bet on sports in person at Bally’s Dover, Delaware Park Casino, and Harrington Casino & Raceway, the state’s three casinos.
Before PASPA was thrown out, Delaware was one of only four states that didn’t have to follow the federal law on sports betting.
When President George H.W. Bush signed PASPA into law in 1992, Delaware already allowed parlay sports betting. This meant that the state could keep running sports betting businesses that let people combine several bets into one. People from all over the Mid-Atlantic liked Delaware’s parlay cards.
Each of Delaware’s three casinos is privately owned, but they work with the state-run lottery. In a technical sense, the slot machines in casinos are video lottery terminals. The lottery gets about 38% of the gross money from the machines, while the casinos keep about 44%. The rest of the money goes to vendor fees (7%), the horse racing industry (11%), and other costs.
If you win at a table game, casinos keep 80% of your money. They give 15% to the lottery and 5% to the horsemen.
It is also the Delaware Lottery’s job to oversee all sports betting in the state, both in-person and now online. BetRivers took over as the lottery’s retail sportsbook partner from William Hill.
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As part of their deal with BetRivers, the Delaware Lottery agreed to let the sportsbook take bets over the Internet.
Rush Street thinks it will have more luck in Delaware than it did in Connecticut. In April, the company ended its $170 million deal with the Connecticut Lottery to run in-person and online sports betting for the state agency. The company had not come close to meeting its pre-market business projections.
DraftKings and FanDuel, which are partners of Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, were better than Rush’s SugarHouse Sportsbook in Connecticut.
BetRivers launched at the same time as the three casinos’ online gaming sites, which changed their URLs to point to the Rush Street entity. BetRivers now runs the online casinos for Bally’s, Delaware Park, and Harrington.
The online casinos will be run by BetRivers for the state for a first five-year term, with the option to extend that time. iGaming in Delaware helps the General Fund of Delaware.
Only six states allow online gambling, and Delaware is one of them. The other six are West Virginia, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.
Will is a former Grosvenor croupier who relocated to Chicago from London in 2013. Not only is he a highly skilled poker player, but he is also an expert in the art of deception, gambling cons, and the world of crypto. Now he uses his knowledge and experience to write and edit detailed reviews of online casinos in a bid to help players avoid online scams and losing their money to rogue gambling sites.
