Interest in modern-day gambling in Connecticut — including online casino gaming, sports betting and lottery play, as well as esports — is expected to explode in the years ahead, creating millions of dollars in profits for the state’s two casinos and added revenues for the state via the Connecticut Lottery Corp. That assessment came from […]
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Interest in modern-day gambling in Connecticut — including online casino gaming, sports betting and lottery play, as well as esports — is expected to explode in the years ahead, creating millions of dollars in profits for the state’s two casinos and added revenues for the state via the Connecticut Lottery Corp.
That assessment came from several gaming experts who took part in a Nov. 18 panel discussion at the Tunxis Community College Foundation’s 2021 Economic Forum and Breakfast, held at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Bristol.
Connecticut this year became the 14th state to legalize sports betting and fifth to allow online casino gaming — with both going live Oct. 19.
“The future is big for gaming in Connecticut,” said panelist Rich Roberts, president of Mohegan Digital for Mohegan Gaming and Entertainment, parent company of Mohegan Sun casino.
Roberts joined fellow panelists Rob Simmelkjaer, board chairman of the Connecticut Lottery Corp., and David Bergman, a UConn analytics professor, at the recent forum.
Bergman has become well-known in local online gambling circles, having won a $2.5 million fantasy football jackpot in Dec. 2020, beating out 199 other top-ranked challengers on DraftKings.
The legalization of fantasy sports competitions in Connecticut actually predated the passage of sports and online betting.
Roberts, who has spent more than 30 years in the gaming and digital gaming markets in several states, said New Jersey legalized sports betting in 2018 and has seen major growth since that time. In October, the Garden State recorded a record $1.3 billion in total sports book wagers, according to published reports.
“Three to four years from now, I’d expect Connecticut to have annual revenues of” about $200 million, he said.
Simmelkjaer echoed Roberts’ estimation of how much Connecticut could see in revenues from the many gambling options and venues now available.
There are three apps on the market in Connecticut to bet on sports: Connecticut Lottery’s PlaySugarHouse; FanDuel put out by Mohegan Sun; and Foxwoods Resort Casino’s DraftKings.
“I see sports betting and online gaming generating hundreds of millions of dollars over a 10-year period to Connecticut,” Simmelkjaer said. “Those are real numbers and significant dollars.”
Coming soon, the gaming experts said, are new forms of betting.
They include iLottery, which the Connecticut Lottery expects to roll out during the first half of 2022. ILottery gives patrons the ability to play popular lottery games online.
In addition, Roberts said, “the next big thing” will be esports, where players and teams battle it out virtually or in person in skills-based video games such as Counter-Strike, Dota and League of Legends.
Esports is expected to surpass $1 billion in revenue this year from the sale of sponsorships, media rights, event tickets, merchandise and other areas, according to esports analytics firm Newzoo.
Connecticut’s newly legalized sports betting law permits esports wagering, though it places some restrictions on betting on the growing number of varsity esports teams that have formed at Connecticut colleges in recent years.
In Hartford, economic development officials have talked about adding an esports venue inside the XL Center, in addition to a sports betting facility.
“I see esports merging with betting over the next few years,” Roberts said.
Analytics and fantasy sports
Bergman, the UConn professor, was asked to sit on the panel because of his expertise in data analytics and past success with fantasy sports gaming.
The 38-year-old White Plains, New York native is a bright star at UConn, where he focuses his work on developing novel algorithms for large-scale automated decision making in both research and practice. He’s a speaker at various forums and was a business consultant for global management consultancy McKinsey & Co.
Bergman said he’s been playing fantasy football since college and daily fantasy football for about three years, and he transfers some of those game strategies to analytics courses he teaches at UConn.
In addition to knowing basics about players and player injuries, Bergman said predictive modeling, optimization and game theory are critical to successful fantasy sports play.
“If you put all those things together, and add a little bit of luck, you can find a winning lineup,” Bergman said.
He noted this past summer he taught a course on optimization, and the final project included a fantasy sports competition. Out of eight students, Bergman said he came in third.
“It shows me that I successfully taught my students something useful,” he said. “It gave them a lot of confidence.”
Bergman said many of his analytics graduates go on to top jobs at companies like Amazon and Facebook.
He also said he’s bullish about the state’s foray into sports betting and online casino gaming.
“There are many pros to online betting, including that it’s good for the state because it draws in tons of tax revenue,” said Bergman, who lives in Greater Hartford. “It’s also an attractive thing to people when considering where to live. A lot of my friends in other states are quite excited about Connecticut allowing them to do online gaming. It’s a fun pastime for people.”
