Sportsbook VIP Market Heats Back Up Ahead Of Football Season

An annual American sports betting clarion call like no other, the time is now to get those accounts loaded and ready to fire. It’s football season, baby. 

The whales, aka VIPs, the higher net-worth individuals driving an outsized share of the action and revenue at many regulated sportsbooks, may prepare for the season with bankrolls into the seven figures. Many of them began a couple weeks ago, actually. 

“A lot of these guys were putting action down even on the preseason games,” Kevin Smith of White Glove Bets told Casino Reports. “They were just champing at the bit to get going with football. With the renewed interest of operators trying to onboard these guys, we’ve been preaching over the last month to get moving, so we can get them registered, go through all the source of funds, KYC (know your customer), and AML (anti-money-laundering) checks.”

Smith and his partner have cultivated a business that helps connect big bettors with sportsbooks. Basically a ZipRecruiter for sportsbooks, and they are in tune with the auspices of these well-financed, country club types who may casually risk $50,000 or $100,000 on a regular NFL game.

State of play

At this juncture in the post-PASPA era, the matchmaking game between operators and VIPs has evolved a bit. While a lot of the VIPs have developed an affinity by this point for one sportsbook or another, like casual or recreational bettors, they too like freebies and deals. So there is still some drift from one book to another, and of course many of these players have appetites to play across multiple accounts.

A smattering of Tier-2 and Tier-3 operators, for example Betway and SI Sportsbook, have packed it up. Meanwhile, some sportsbooks like Prime are now making a run, catering to bigger bankrolls and larger limits. 

“The VIPs typically have action with multiple books going at the same time,” Smith said. “Sometimes they might be hedging, a lot of times they just really have a desire to get a lot of action down.”

Two large zones of the sportsbook economy where Smith said his clientele does not spend much time, at this point, are with the two market leaders. Though Smith didn’t identify them by name, we can be reasonably sure that it’s FanDuel Sportsbook and DraftKings Sportsbook.

“We typically don’t deal with the guys that are active there, mainly because of what their definition of a VIP is,” Smith said. “It’s not quite the same as ours, and they’re just frankly not comfortable dealing with the level of liability that comes with our guys. And that’s the reason most of these guys have already been cut off at both of those places. They’ve already got a bad taste in their mouth from that.”

Which is why DraftKings’ proposed surcharge on winning bets in certain jurisdictions, including in Illinois and New York, home to a higher concentration of wealthy finance types, did not really register as a concern or a surprise. 

“When that scuttlebutt was going down, the reaction from our guys was, ‘Oh yeah, here they go again … can they do anything right, in terms of endearing themselves with a sports bettor?’” Smith said. “No surprise that they pulled the plug on that.”

Also over the summer, while the Olympics delivered a nice haul of gold for the contingent of U.S. athletes, it did not move the needle much at the sportsbooks. “Some guys had action on certain events, but [sportsbooks] were pretty limited in what they would allow,” Smith said.

Football now resumes its reign as king, eight days from the NFL’s kickoff — Baltimore Ravens +3 at Kansas Chiefs in an AFC Championship rematch — and just a couple from college football’s opening week.

It’s about make-or-break time for ESPN Bet, while other sports betting outlets continue percolating, including sweepstakes sportsbooks and betting exchanges like Sporttrade.

“Personally, I don’t know if exchanges are going to take a hold in this market, but that’s another segment that we’ve heard quite a bit from over the last couple months,” Smith said. “Time will tell if that market has some validity for this subset of the gambler, the high value VIP guys, but it’s on the radar.”