Facilitating bets between friends
The Tennessee Education Lottery (TEL) has approved social sports betting site Wagr to begin offering its product in the Volunteer State. With the green-lighting of both Wagr and Barstool Sportsbook on Tuesday, Tennessee now has nine sports betting operators.
Wagr is an interesting sportsbook, different than most traditional bookmakers. It is billed as a social sports betting app, a platform that aims to facilitate friendly bets between friends and family. As investor and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian said, “It’s about productizing what already goes down in everyone’s group chat, which is wagers between friends about sporting outcomes.”
Social, not exactly peer-to-peer
But while its focus is on letting people bet against each other and not the house, it is not technically a peer-to-peer betting company, and that’s why the TEL granted it a license. Yes, players can challenge each other to bets – I’ll take the Brewers, you take the Giants – but Wagr actually creates the lines and takes the bets.
It’s a legal workaround. Players are really betting against the house since Wagr is taking the bets, but Wagr is always taking both sides and is thus working more like a middle man to facilitate bets with friends. In this way, the site can still calculate adjusted gross income in order to pay taxes.
Earlier this year, TEL CEO Rebecca Hargrove said that the Lottery was against peer-to-peer betting because it was iffy legally. But with Wagr, because the site is the one that actually accepts the bets and thus can be taxed on its adjusted gross income, everything works out legally. To customers, it still feels like a social, peer-to-peer setup, and that’s what matters to Wagr from a marketing and differentiation standpoint.
ZenSports is actually peer-to-peer
Compare this to ZenSports, which recently received a license in Nevada. ZenSports is truly a peer-to-peer wagering site. On that site, customers really do book their own bets. They create the bets and choose how much they are willing to wager. Bets can be made public for anyone to find and jump on or be made private just for fun between friends. Customers can also bet against the house like on a traditional site, but it’s the peer-to-peer that is the draw.
ZenSports also heavily encourages the use of cryptocurrency, giving bonuses and other financial advantages to customers who buy and use their own, proprietary SPORTS utility coin.
Interestingly, though, Nevada does not allow either peer-to-peer or betting with crypto, so ZenSports won’t be able to offer either of its main draws yet. In the meantime, it plans on leasing the Big Wheel Casino – a truck stop – in Lovelock and operating The Book at Baldini’s in Sparks. The license is short, just two years, and 16 conditions were attached to it so that ZenSports can prove itself.
