Vegas Sportsbooks to Lose $100M in Handle Because of Coronavirus

March 13th 2020

As you may have heard by now, every American sport has cancelled or postponed their games for the immediate future. The coronavirus scare of 2020 is at pandemic proportions. Here are the changes made to the sports schedule as a result:

• NCAA basketball cancels conference and championship tourneys.
• NHL has suspended its games indefinitely.
• The NBA has suspended its games indefinitely.
• MLS has suspended its games indefinitely.
• MLB has postponed opening day for at least two weeks.
• PGA has cancelled immediate events for at least three weeks.

The result for sportsbooks is that there is virtually zero action taking place. It is estimate that Las Vegas alone will lose $100M in handle as a result of the NCAA tournament being off the board.

Sportsbooks are starting to accept NCAA futures tickets back for a full refund. Its hard to tell how long this will continue but the NCAA tournament cancellation was a hard blow. If the NBA playoffs are cancelled, that could be  death blow for some of the smaller operations in Nevada.

• image from fodors.com