Microbets are having their moment. But not the kind that sportsbooks who’ve invested in perfecting the delivery of these fast-paced, live-action wagers envisioned.
Putting a market speculating on the outcome of the next pitch in baseball or next type of football play in front of a bettor in real-time, with sufficient leeway to entice them to act and enough lag time to allow the bet to process, is difficult enough. If bettors actually want to absorb their game on television, they’re likely bound for complete frustration, with modern television latency making the image on their screen upwards of 30 seconds behind the data feed on their betting app.
They could follow the live stream in the app if one is available. But then they’re really not watching their game anymore.
Even with those institutional problems, the niche microbets market, according to industry stakeholders interviewed by InGame, was exhibiting improvement on what’s now a relatively small portion of the sport betting handle in the United States.
Then Cleveland Guardians pitchers Luis L. Ortiz and Emmanuel Clase were placed on administrative leave in July and eventually through the season while being investigated for allegedly manipulating first-pitch markets. That has since prompted state legislators in Ohio and New Jersey to take notice, with bans proposed on these types of single-player, single-outcome events. Other states already have established limitations on these bet types.
Microbets’ moment might now depend on whether they’re deemed worth the potential trouble.
Scandal makes microbets macro issue
The Ohio Casino Control Commission is considering disallowing certain microbet markets, under pressure from Gov. Mike DeWine. Assemblyman Dan Hutchison introduced Bill A5971 in July to ban microbetting in New Jersey.
This is an overreaction to Joey Levy, the founder of microbetting platform Simplebet and the CEO of Betr.
“Trying to outlaw a specific bet type is certainly a mistake and hopefully it doesn’t happen,” he told InGame. “I know it’s being talked about in at least a couple jurisdictions, but I think it would be a pretty big mistake.”
Force is being exerted increasingly by professional sports leagues. Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred has intensified his rhetoric in the past year, saying after the Ortiz announcement and before Clase’s that microbets are “unnecessary and particularly vulnerable.”
The NBA convinced multiple sportsbooks comprising 95% of the legal U.S. market last year to eliminate some single-player props for players on 10-day or two-way contracts. This came in responded to the Jontay Porter scandal.
NFL Vice President of Sports Betting David Highhill in August described microbets as having “having “minimum fan-engagement potential and are more subject, potentially, to misbehavior.”
The MLB and NBA player unions have also requested rollbacks on certain bet types.
‘Approach with the right thoughtfulness’
Corey Gottlieb, DraftKings’ chief product officer, said the deliberation over eliminating certain bet types is “pretty case-by-case” with pro sports leagues. Partnerships between sportsbooks and pro sports leagues and teams have become common in recent years.
“We, and I think every other operator, have good relationships with the leagues where us being teammates and collectively having an approach to the space is better than us being at odds,” he told InGame. “And so there have been moments when the leagues have asked us about certain types of offerings or a particular sort of long tail market.
“And we are always reasonable and figure out with them and with other operators what the right thing to do is customer-wise. There’s not really like a blanket answer to ‘If somebody wants us to do something differently, will we immediately do that?’ I think with everything, we run the right analysis from both a legal perspective and a business perspective, but you can be sure that our conversations with the league are very fluid and we listen.”
Gottlieb said that concern is expected over new products that may not yet be fully understood.
“I think in every space that we’re in, the natural dynamic that has evolved around an area like sports betting is that there’s a lot of scrutiny,” he said. “And especially as new product spaces evolve, there are a lot of questions about how those products impact behavior. And in every one of those, we take them very seriously.”
Microbetting, anecdotally, represents a small portion of the national sports betting handle partly because its been available in the U.S. less than five years, only about a quarter of U.S. sportsbooks are fully integrating it, and because the younger generation inclined to use it is still growing into legal wagering age.
A growing criticism of microbetting from regulators and academia has been its effect on the more impulsive younger demographic that it attracts. Gottlieb said one of DraftKings’ biggest investments in microbetting is understanding the responsible gambling aspects.
“I don’t think we take any of those things lightly,” he said. “But I also think that we feel really, really confident that we have the right sort of legal understanding of the way that we should be operating. We have really good relationships with every state regulator. So they’re constantly in conversation with us about our products, our users, our data. It’s certainly not a trivial thing, but a thing that we, I think, approach with the right thoughtfulness.”
Microbetting a relatively new choice
Levy said microbetting’s share of the national sports betting handle is easily explained.
“It’s small because it started from a very small base,” he said. “For context, there wasn’t really a viable user experience for microbetting in the U.S. market really prior to Simplebet. So it’s very nascent, but it’s growing. It’s growing really quickly.
“And I think there’s still a tremendous opportunity to make the user experience around micro markets a lot more bespoke to the type of betting offering that it is.”
Levy said microbetting has “never been as popular as it is today.”
“I think its popularity and share of overall handle is going to continue to grow, especially as new forms of microbetting are developed and operators continue to get better and better at pricing these markets, with high up-time, minimal suspension time, pricing, accuracy, et cetera,” he said.
Microbetting isn’t going anywhere
The microbetting revolution may not be televised. Not if bettors want to second-screen their bets and their game.
“One issue with those markets is the way that you’re going to be streaming those,” Fanatics Sportsbook & Casino Sports Trader Ethan Useloff told InGame. “Let’s say it’s on YouTube TV or it’s NFL Sunday Ticket. Now, through YouTube TV or your local CBS or Fox or whatever, those games are going to be behind what the actual stadium feed is. So what you’re watching might not be what you’re betting on for a market like that.
“That part is definitely at times a little bit annoying or a deterrent for customers. But whatever you’re looking at in the app is going to be updated, which is good. So we do have a data visualization, we have a stream for customers to bet on who are actively logged in and betting on that game.”
Multiple sportsbooks have partnerships to broadcast some game feeds within their apps.
DraftKings purchased Simplebet in 2024, fully integrating its platform to increase its microbetting clout. Now, Gottlieb said, the tech is a key part of DraftKings’ “speed of sports” mantra for the current NFL season and beyond. Gottlieb said DraftKings’ offerings are “hyper-granular, ” including pitch-by-pitch markets in baseball and point-by-point in tennis.
“I think this is one of the reasons why we believe our product is so superior,” he said. “It’s a hard thing to do because if you think about how quickly a football game moves and how fast the TV feed is flying and what’s actually going on in the stadium, you’re trying to match up all these things to have a compelling experience that doesn’t have latency.
“That is a really hard science to get down, only viable by virtue of the right technology, modeling, pricing, all of this sort of in-house infrastructure that we have in the background. The actual answer to the question is we can be as granular as like: What’s going to happen on the next play? If a team has second=and-three on the four-yard line, are they going to score a touchdown on this next play? Is [Patrick] Mahomes going to throw a completion? We’re down to the play level in pretty much every sport.”
And DraftKings, like other sportsbooks invested in microbetting, is determined to stay there.
