How Do Sportsbooks Handle the Upcoming Slow Season?
It’s been a whirlwind Spring for sports in North America. On any given night the MLB had a full slate of games while the NBA and NHL playoffs were in full swing. Sports fans were in heaven, but it’s now a challenging time for offshore betting sites.
While sportsbooks may have had a nice April and most of May, the veterans all know what’s coming – the slow season. In fact even as the NBA and NHL enter their Conference Finals and Championship Series’, the numbers are already down.
In New York – where the Rangers are making a deep playoff push in the NHL – the state failed to reach their benchmark of $300 million in handle in three of four weeks in May. It’s not just an East Coast lull either as Tennessee also saw its weekly handle fall below $300 million in May for the first time since August of 2021 – no coincidence a period right before football season started.
Sportsbooks know the Summer months are the slow season it’s simply inevitable. People are doing things outdoors (especially after being locked indoors most of the last two years) and rising inflation costs don’t leave a lot of extra money in the budget for gambling. Sportsbooks aren’t going to simply shut down until football season starts though, and here are ways that they get creative in what are these traditional low handle parts of the year:
Prepare for Football Season
With more and more states increasing the number of betting licenses they offer, sportsbook competition is only going to rise on a year-by-year basis. That’s why many books use this downtime during the Summer months to really ramp up their focus on how to approach when football starts back up in the fall.
This is the time sportsbooks should be ramping up marketing, increasing their user base, and determining which promos did and did not work last season. This is also a good time for sportsbook employees to get some much-needed time off because once the pigskin flies in September it’s craziness through March Madness and into April.
Focus on MLB Promos
Major League Baseball is the only one of the four big North American sports in action during the Summer month so sportsbooks need to make MLB their focal point during the downtime. Baseball betting isn’t for everybody because there isn’t a point spread per se (Moneyline, run line, or totals) but HR prop bets and over/under total bases can be fun wagers even for amateurs.
Plenty of Other Sports to Wager On
Major League Baseball will dominate the weekday betting at online sportsbooks, but there is no shortage of variety on the weekends. The PGA Championship, U.S. Open, and Open Championship are popular golf betting tournaments in the Summer while NASCAR and the UFC runs every weekend as well. The good thing about these events is they are odds betting, meaning a person only has to make a few small-priced wagers on a 15/1 or 30/1 play for the potential of a really nice profit.
Sportsbooks have survived the slow season in the past, and they’ll do so again in 2022 until football season kicks off and record handles are the norm once again.
