Illinois Lifts In-Person Registration For Mobile Sportsbooks
There’s palpable excitement in the air after Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced the suspension of the in-person registration requirement on Illinois mobile sports betting – for the second time.
The first time Gov. Pritzker removed the in-person registration requirement was in June, when only a single operator, BetRivers Illinois was ready to go live. Much to everyone’s dismay, Pritzker reinstated the requirement in August.
Conspicuously, the reinstatement of in-person registration occurred just as other operators prepared to go live. That led to a lot of pushback, and Pritzker relented on Friday, and once again suspended the in-person registration requirement.
Operators are already capitalizing on it, and with more sports betting operators ready to register customers remotely, sports betting is prepared for takeoff in the Prairie State.
The Illinois Sports Betting Experience So Far
Calling the early days of legal sports betting in Illinois a disappointment would be an understatement.
With 12.6 million residents, Illinois is the fifth most populous state in the US. But with casinos scattered in far-flung locales across the state, and a moratorium on online registration, the state’s legal sports betting industry, launched in early June, has failed to deliver.
Making matters worse, the state’s biggest population center is just a short ride to the Indiana border, where they can register an online betting account.
The Illinois Mobile Sports Betting Opportunity
In 2019, Chris Grove of Eilers & Krejcik Gaming estimated Illinois sports betting potential at $762 million annually. That estimate comes with the caveat of if the state did everything right. Illinois fell far short of doing everything right, including the 18-month moratorium on in-person registration for mobile betting.
Pritzker’s decision to remove that requirement (hopefully permanently) will bring it much closer to reaching Grove’s estimates.
Indiana Loved Illinois In-Person Registration Requirement
One entity that will not praise Pritzker’s decision is the state of Indiana. As noted above, Indiana has been capitalizing on the lack of remote registration in Illinois.
The Indiana sports betting industry had the third-highest handle per resident, $10.58, in the country in July. A big reason for that success is Indiana’s well-crafted sports betting law and regulations, but the state is also getting a big boost from Chicagoans driving over the border to place their sports bets.
As SportsHandle’s Matt Rybaltowski noted in a November 2019 column detailing cross-border play:
“… [GeoComply] has seen a huge volume of traffic throughout the state’s Northwest corridor. Geotracking trends indicate that bettors from the Greater Chicago area are traveling to Indiana to place mobile bets at highway rest stops before returning to Illinois…”
How big of a dent full-mobile-registration in Illinois will put in Indiana’s revenues is unknown, but based on the populations of Indiana and Chicago, it will be significant.
The city of Chicago’s population of 3.6 million is more than half of Indiana’s statewide population of 6.7 million. Even if Indiana is only pulling from a quarter of Chicago, that’s nearly one million people. And if all bettors are equal, and all Chicago bettors begin betting in-state, it would result in a 13% decline in Indiana.
Steve Ruddock is the content director for BettingUSA and the Editor-in-Chief of Gaming Law Review.
Steve has covered the legal and legislative developments in the US gambling sector for more than a decade for online and print publications.
