For the second year running, sports betting expansion in the US of A was the Western Hemisphere’s dominant gambling story. There were eight states with legal betting markets at the end of 2018, while 2019 will close with 14 active states (thanks to the December 30 launch in New Hampshire) plus six more that have authorized but not yet launched betting.

Even notoriously fractious/legislatively inept California got into the legal betting spirit as the state’s tribal gaming operators hatched a plan for a 2020 ballot initiative that envisioned a role for state racetracks while excluding their cardroom rivals (who continued to demonstrate their apparent unwillingness to uphold basic financial regulatory obligations).

Only nine of the 14 active betting states currently permit some form of statewide digital wagering, which has utterly dominated its land-based counterpart when allowed to go head-to-head (86.5% of November’s handle in New Jersey). Want a more extreme example? Tiny Delaware (which has mobile betting) outperformed New York’s upstate casinos (which don’t offer mobile) in betting revenue in November.

DraftKings surprised onlookers two days before Christmas by striking a three-way merger with a ‘special purpose acquisition vehicle’ and European betting tech supplier SBTech that will see the enlarged DraftKings Inc list on the Nasdaq exchange by mid-2020. The union spells trouble for DraftKings’ current betting tech partner Kambi, which thought it had extended the parties’ relationship in August.