- Smarkets owned sportsbook platform SBK is now live in Indiana.
- Indiana is the second state for SBK following a 2020 launch in Colorado.
- SBK’s Indiana launch is in partnership with Full House Resorts owned Rising Star Casino.
At this point, I don’t even know why I bother telling you which state a new sportsbook has launched in. If it is anything other than a legacy gaming company owned platform, FanDuel or DraftKings you can pretty much guess the state yourself. Odds are that it will be one of the following: Colorado, Indiana, Iowa or New Jersey. Such is the decrepit reality of the US sports betting industry where you can count the states that ‘get it’ on your fingers and have a few left over.
UK betting exchange Smarkets has announced that they’ve launched their SBK sportsbook platform in Indiana. That’s the second US state for SBK following a June 2020 launch in (where else?) Colorado. The launch in Indiana is once again with a Full House Resorts owned property, this time the Rising Star Casino Resort. SBK launched in Colorado in partnership with another Full House Resorts owned property, Bronco Billy’s Casino. At some point, Bronco Billy’s was rebranded as ‘Sir William’s Casino’ though the property’s website is still up under the previous name and the change is not reflected on the Full House Resorts corporate website. The name of the property has been updated on the State of Colorado’s listed of licensed sports betting operators.
Smarkets is a well known brand in the UK market. Here’s a bit of background from today’s press release:
– Founded in 2008, Smarkets is an award-winning, product-focused, sports betting company headquartered in London, with offices in Washington D.C., and Malta.
– It was founded by a team of finance and software engineering professionals and is backed by Passion Capital, Deutsche Telekom, and Susquehanna Growth Equity.
– Smarkets operates two main products – the Smarkets exchange, a sophisticated betting exchange and prediction-market platform, and SBK, a sportsbook app that delivers industry-disrupting odds by drawing prices from the exchange and presenting them in a sleek, sportsbook interface.
– The Smarkets platform processes billions of dollars of betting volume each year for customers across the company’s licensed and regulated markets.
The company clearly notes SBK’s relationship with Smarkets, even using it as a point of differentiation from competitors:
SBK is powered by Smarkets’ other main product – the Smarkets betting exchange – and provides customers with market-leading odds, as well as an intuitive interface and community-led social network where users can post bets and follow picks from others.
Smarkets CEO/Founder Jason Trost is clearly pleased to be live in a second US state with another on the horizon:
“We have a lot of momentum as a company right now – the launch in Indiana is just one of many more exciting milestones on the horizon. As one of the only smaller, private operators to have successfully launched in the US, I’m thrilled to go live in a second state with SBK. We are simply not like other operators; our focus is on providing the best odds possible and in-house product excellence, and we believe this ethos will win out in the long run.”
Next up for Smarkets/SBK is Iowa–the press release indicates that the brand will be launching there in the next few months. This will be in partnership with Affinity Interactive and their Lakeside Hotel Casino in Osceola, Iowa. Affinity also owns the Daily Racing Form and recently launched a sportsbook brand leveraging the iconic brand name.
