With four of the nine NY Betting Apps operators going live at once Saturday morning, and with a population of 19.3 million residents making it the largest legal online sports betting state in the country, glitches and technical issues are certainly bound to happen and are to be expected, especially with no soft launch testing before going live.
Caesars Sportsbook New York encountered such a scenario on Saturday’s first day of launch with an outage of two hours, 42 minutes with its first tweet notifying customers of the situation at 8:11 p.m.
Another tweet landed at 10:53 p.m. and it read: New York, we’re back! We apologize for the service interruption, but the issue has now been resolved. We thank you for your patience.
Caesars CEO Does TV Interview
Tom Reeg, the chief executive officer of Caesars Entertainment, did an interview Monday morning on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.
“When you have massive demand, that’s when you see the pinch points in your system and, unfortunately, we had a couple and we did not have flawless performance this weekend,” Reeg said. “As a sports bettor myself, I know how frustrating that can be and I apologize to those that could not get a bet down for a brief period of time. “
Still, despite the system issue, Caesars played a huge role in the record-setting weekend in New York.
There was a pronounced appetite to place online wagers in New York, and the numbers were certainly helped by the New York sports betting promo codes offered by Caesars and other operators.
How About These Numbers for Starters?
According to GeoComply, a geolocation company based in Canada, in excess of 5.8 million geolocation volumes were recorded in New York on Saturday after the market launched at 9 a.m. Sunday was even bigger, as there were 17.2 million weekend log-ons to Caesars or one of the three other platforms. Of that number, 8 million were from New York City (Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island).
The three other operators live this past weekend were DraftKings New York, FanDuel New York and BetRivers New York.
“We took nearly a million bets this past weekend,” Reeg said, “and we will be even better going forward and we will improve every weekend.”
A Caesars spokesperson confirmed with EmpireStakes.com on Monday afternoon that the issues were short-lived and that the sportsbook was up and running as soon as possible.
“We knew that New York sports bettors were a passionate group and they did not disappoint this weekend,” Reeg said. “The numbers for us were massive. We had almost a million individual bets taken in 39 hours the first two days. To put that in context, the last state we launched was Arizona, which was a four-day launch and volumes in New York were nine times more than Arizona in a shorter period of time.”
