West Virginia iGaming Up in June; Sports Betting Ends Record Fiscal Year

The West Virginia iGaming market had a spike in handle and revenue for June compared to May, thanks in large part to having an extra week for which to to account.

The state’s sports betting, meanwhile, dipped in June but still set a record with the fiscal year ending on June 30.

The Mountaineer State reports its revenue and handle figures for online casinos and sports betting weekly, rather than monthly, as most states do. For June, there were five weeks counted, from May 29 to June 30, to end the 2021-22 fiscal year.

Here are three takeaways from the month in West Virginia.

Thanks to a five-week counting period for June rather than the four weeks for thefigures reported in May, the state had a 20% hike in iGaming handle.

The June iGaming handle was $255,820,886, to be exact, a 20.1% increase from May ($213,094,190). The revenue figure rose as well, though not quite as dramatically, going from $7,665,190 to $8,295,743, up 8.2%, according to the West Virginia Lottery.

The 2021-22 fiscal year was the first full one for WV online casinos, as the market launched in mid July 2020. Still, even though the 2020-21 fiscal year was a couple of weeks shorter as far as iGaming, the figures show a dramatic enough difference to argue for a robust online slots and table games market.

In the 2021-22 fiscal year, West Virginia had $1.178 billion in handle for iGaming and $33.85 million in revenue. Those numbers shot up dramatically for 2021-22, with $2.58 billion in handle and $86.17 million in revenue.

Part of the reason for that growth is the expanding list of online gaming options for customers.

That list will only expand with the 2022-23 fiscal year, which began on July 1.

For instance, DraftKings Casino in WV announced in late June that it was adding live dealer games such as baccarat, infinite blackjack, roulette and more.

And to start July, BetMGM Casino in West Virginia started offering live tables, including the state’s first private blackjack table. That added to the BetMGM offering in the state, including Wizard Games (an Aspire Global brand), which became available in the state in March.

In January, PointsBet made West Virginia the third state where it offered iGaming, joining Michigan and New Jersey. Those three states, plus Connecticut, Delaware and Pennsylvania, are the only ones offering real money online casino options at this time.

All six of those states have legalized online poker, as has Nevada.

Despite a dip in June, West Virginia set a state record for the most sports betting handle and revenue in a fiscal year.

For the 2021-22 fiscal year, the total sports betting handle was $599.1 million, up 15.6% from 2020-21 ($518 million). And the mobile sports betting handle rose far more sharply than that – up 35.4%, from $356.24 million in 2020-21 to $482.3 million in the fiscal year just ended.

The revenue and state share of taxes each rose 9.4% in 2021-22. Revenue went from $41 million the previous year to $44.845 million; taxes rose from $3.5 million to $3.8 million.

In June, the total handle was $33,301,204, down 10.7% from May ($37,283,884) but an 11.3% increase from June 2021 ($29,923,766). The mobile handle fell 14.6%, from $31.9 million to $27.26 million. And the revenue was off by 29.7%, falling from $3.4 million to $2.4 million.

None of this is surprising in the middle of summer, with no NFL or college football and a dwindling number of basketball games as the NBA playoffs came to a conclusion. This is especially true in a football-mad state such as West Virginia.