NC sports betting activity was up 56% during the first and second rounds of March Madness compared to the same four-day period a week earlier, according to sportsbook geolocation service provider GeoComply.
From March 21 to March 24, North Carolina sports betting apps had a total of 19.5 million geolocation transactions, which include location-dependent transactions like logging in, betting, or depositing funds, GeoComply found.
There were more than 743,000 unique active player accounts over that four-day span, a 39% increase from March 14 to March 17, just a few days after North Carolina launched online sports betting March 11 and during the middle of conference tournament play.
NC sports betting market locals boost
The activity surge came as the Spectrum Center in Charlotte hosted two rounds of NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament games and the state’s teams went undefeated.
March Madness betting activity in Charlotte was up 51% week-over-week during UNC’s and NC State‘s first-round games on Thursday, while unique active player accounts increased 41% week-over-week.
Each of those schools, along with Duke, advanced to the Sweet 16, which takes place Thursday and Friday.
“I would expect as the number of events and available wagers diminishes that the engagement with the books would also decrease, but we’re not privy to the wagering information like handle which could very well go up even if activity goes down,” said Danny DiRienzo, senior director of government relations at GeoComply.
More than 1 million active accounts
There have been more than 1 million unique active player accounts created in the state since it launched online betting, according to GeoComply.
That is about one account for every six people in the state over 21 years old, the legal age to bet, according to census data from info.
By comparison, Kansas’s first two weeks of legal sports betting saw unique betting accounts totaling just less than 10% of the state’s eligible betting population. That was one of the highest state ratios of accounts to adults at the time, DiRienzo said.
NC sports betting activity outpaces expectations
DiRienzo said that North Carolina’s high activity has outpaced the provider’s expectations so far.
“We expected North Carolina would be a very big market, not only due to population, but due to the rabid nature of sports fans,” DiRienzo said. “North Carolina is a mecca for college basketball and being live for the readiness of the NCAA tournament was huge in terms of the interest in NC, but you could say this was higher than expected.”
