I want to talk a little bit about why Rush Street is so well-positioned to dominate online sports betting in PA. Rush owns both SugarHouse Casino in the eastern half of the state, located in Philadelphia, and Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, in the western half of the state. It has been reported that Rush will launch the first two sports betting apps in Pennsylvania under the SugarHouse Sportsbook and Rivers Sportsbook brand names. They already have a live app in New Jersey using the SugarHouse brand, so what we see in Pennsylvania should be pretty much direct ports, just with slightly different branding for PA, and obviously for Rivers.
This allows Rush to have three apps in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey early on, and by using popular sports data provider Kambi, allows them to offer betters a wide range of lines. Kambi is actually the company that DraftKings uses to set its line, so there’ll be no shortage of action and live-betting available in the SugarHouse and Rivers apps. Furthermore, they seem to be on-track with the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, as they were one of the first to launch physical sports books at their Philadelphia and Pittsburgh locations, and will be the first to launch an online sports better in Pennsylvania, which is a huge deal.
DraftKings does not yet have a casino partner, so the biggest competition might be FanDuel, or huge local brand, Parx. Either way, Rush will have two of 12 or 13 betting apps in Pennsylvania, and they will be the first out of the gate. They have large brand names with physical locations in the two major sports markets in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Their app is a well-oiled machine, it works well, it has tons of deposit and withdrawal options which, I suspect, won’t be the case for many of the newer operators, particularly Parx, who’s developing their own app, and it doesn’t look like they have public testing yet. We suspect that one might have some hiccups.
Rush Street is looking like a true rising star. Even though it is a company no one has probably ever heard of, they are in a really interesting position in Pennsylvania to be one of the leaders in online sports betting, at least out of the gate.