On Wednesday, March 3rd, the Nevada Gaming Control Board recommended the approval of a license for William Hill, one of the biggest names in the betting industry.
The license, if approved, would give Caesars Entertainment control over William Hill US sports betting locations across the state. The board’s recommendation was unanimous and Nevada Gaming Commission will consider its adoption when it meets on March 18th.
Bally’s Corp. Included
Board members also recommended the approval of a number of licenses that would register Bally’s Corp. as a publicly-traded company in Nevada. The company will operate the Montbleu resort in Stateline at Lake Tahoe and issue favorable suitability findings for several of its executives. In this case, as well, final approval is expected for March 18th.
Bally’s is a Rhode Island-based gaming company that operates many facilities across the US. As of December, it owns 11 casinos that comprise 13,260 slot machines, 459 game tables, and 2,941 hotel rooms, in addition to a horse racetrack across seven states.
Bally’s President and CEO George Papanier assured board members that the company has one of the best regional gaming footprints in the market and the third-largest footprint for online sports betting on the national level.
William Hill The Third-Largest Sportsbook in the US
William Hill plc, founded in 1934, is a bookmaker based in London, England that spread across the continents. In addition to betting, which they are primarily focused on, they also offer other gambling games like Poker, Roulette, Baccarat, or slots, and, together with some other big names, they are also known for providing their players with poker tournaments and daily online slots tournaments.
Currently, William Hill is the third-largest sportsbook operator in the United States. It has more than 120 sportsbooks and kiosk locations across Nevada. Ever since 2018, it has ridden a wave of expansion started by the US Supreme Courts’ decision to overturn the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. This enabled establishing legal sportsbooks in all states that were open to them.
Beginning of the Deal and a Look Ahead
In September 2020, Caesars Entertainment agreed to buy William Hill for $3.7 billion. The owner of Las Vegas’s Caesars Palace intends to sell William Hill’s non-US operations, including more than 1,400 UK betting shops, and it plans to integrate the US business into Caesars with minimal job losses.
The acquisition should be finalized on March 23rd and Caesars and William Hill currently operate as US joint ventures with 20% and 80% equity ownership respectively.
Caesars will partly fund this deal with a $1.7 billion issue of new stock. This is a move to take control of – and expand – the companies’ US sports betting joint ventures. The deal was unanimously recommended by the UK company’s directors and it came after two rival bids by the US private equity group Apollo were turned down.
Caesars CEO Tom Reeg said he expects sportsbooks to help drive traffic to other parts of the casino, and added: “We’ve seen customers show up that were not otherwise coming that skews younger, tends to be a table-games customer, tends to drink a lot of beer — all good for a casino operator,”. “This is the best option,” William Hill Chairman Roger Devlin agreed.
Through the currently existing joint venture, William Hill runs online sports betting operations through Caesars’ market access in each state and retail sports betting operations in Caesars’ properties as well as those of other casino operators around the US. The 54 domestic properties in 16 states owned by Caesars operate primarily under the Caesars, Horseshoe, Harrah’s, and Eldorado brand names.
The deal was characterized as “a straightforward merger” between the two companies by the Control Board Chairman Brin Gibson: “It’s a big one and there’s lots of background material, but there are not a lot of issues,” he concluded.
The merger is expected to have a great effect on William Hill operations, as indicated by the fact that shares in William Hill hit a two-year high in September 2020, after it was announced that the British company had received a takeover offer from Caesars.
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