West Virginia Sports Betting and Online Gaming Decline in April

April meant a decline in sports betting and online gaming for West Virginia. The calendar is to blame in a couple of ways.

First, April always begins a slow dip in action at sportsbooks across the country. It’s the first month with no football season (not counting the inaugural season of the rebooted USFL) and only the Final Four games happening to end the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

Second, a lot of states report their figures by month. West Virginia does not – instead, it reports weekly figures. A quirk of that system is that some reporting months contain five weeks (which March did) and some contain four weeks (such as April).

Even accounting for that difference, the per-week averages reflect a drop in sports betting, according to numbers reported by the West Virginia Lottery.

There was also a gentler decline in iGaming, though in that category the averages are much steadier because real money online gaming does not have the seasonal volatility that sports wagering does.

The April iGaming handle was $210,875,611, down 26.1% from the $285.4 million in March.

That drop can almost entirely be attributed to the comparison of a five-week month to a four-week month because the averages were fairly close. West Virginia iGaming drew $57.08 million of action per week in March compared to $52.72 million per week in April.

As for revenue, West Virginia iGaming banked $8,036,257 in April, down 22.3% from March, when it was $10,343,361. The averages in those months were nearly identical –$2.07 million per week in March and $2.01 million a week in April.

West Virginia is one of six states with iGaming. The others are Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The sports betting handle in April was $35,864,019, down 41.7% from March ($61,482,860). The decline in revenue was pretty similar, dropping almost 40% from $49.97 million in March to $30.09 million last month.

The year-over-year comparison looked better for West Virginia. The handle was 35.3% ahead of April 2021, when it was $26.5 million, and revenue rose 51.8% from the $19.83 million recorded 12 months earlier.

April’s sports betting revenue was $3,081,491, down 7.6% from March ($3,336,284) and up 57.9% from April 2021 ($1,952,028). The state share of taxes corresponds to revenue so the 7.6% fall was identical, from $283,584 in March to $261,927 last month.