In 2018, sports betting was legal in exactly one state. By 2023, Americans were wagering more than $119 billion annually across 33 active markets. That is not gradual adoption. That is an industry being switched on, and when something scales that fast, the gaps between what operators built, what regulators expected, and what bettors understood become very wide very quickly.
This Isn’t a Silicon Valley Story
When people talk about tech taking over an industry, they usually mean a startup from San Francisco disrupting incumbents who were too slow to adapt. Sports betting went differently. The companies doing the taking are gambling companies. MGM Resorts, Flutter Entertainment (the parent of FanDuel), and DraftKings didn’t get displaced by outsiders. They became the outsiders, rebuilding themselves from the ground up as data and software businesses that happen to hold gaming licenses.
DraftKings processed its 2024 fiscal year with a technology team larger than most pure software companies of its revenue size. Flutter’s technology infrastructure, built largely through its acquisition of The Stars Group in 2020, runs across 100-plus markets globally. These are not casino operators who bolted an app onto a legacy business. They rebuilt the business around the app, and that distinction shapes everything about how the product behaves.
Ask a casual bettor what sports betting looks like and they will describe picking a side before the game, maybe a total, possibly a parlay. That model still exists. It is also increasingly not where the money is going.
In-play wagering, bets placed after the game has started, accounted for roughly 40% of total handle in New Jersey in 2023, up from under 20% in 2020.In mature European markets like the UK, that number exceeds 70%. The American market is tracking the same direction, just a few years behind.
Micro-betting pushes the concept further. Rather than betting on the outcome of a game or even a half, micro-betting means wagering on the next play. Will this pitch be a strike? Will this possession end in a punt? Sporttrade launched in New Jersey in 2022 built entirely on an exchange model around continuous in-game trading. DraftKings rolled out its “Same Game Parlay” live feature aggressively through 2023 and 2024, combining multiple in-game legs into a single wager that refreshes in real time.
The economics explain the push. Pregame spreads are thin-margin products that attract sharp bettors who shop lines across books and erode the edge. Micro-bets carry better margins, generate more action per game, and keep the bettor engaged from kickoff to final whistle rather than just until tip-off. One game becomes dozens of betting opportunities instead of one.
None of that works without infrastructure that didn’t exist ten years ago. Setting a live line on whether the next NFL play gains more or less than 4.5 yards requires processing real-time tracking data, historical situational splits, current game state, and the book’s existing liability exposure, in under a second, thousands of times per game.
Genius Sports, Sportradar, and IMG Arena supply the data feeds and, increasingly, the automated trading engines that power live odds for most major U.S. operators. Sportradar’s “Betradar” platform, used by operators across North America and Europe, runs AI-driven pricing models that update continuously across hundreds of simultaneous markets. The human trader’s job has shifted from setting lines to supervising models and intervening when something breaks.
The same machine learning infrastructure that prices live markets also handles risk management. When a sharp bettor hits a line, the model flags the account, adjusts exposure, and tightens the limit, sometimes within the same session. Casual bettors rarely notice those guardrails because the guardrails aren’t pointed at them. They’re pointed at the people who win consistently.
Every bet placed through a major U.S. sportsbook generates data. The time of day you bet, the sports you favor, how much you wager relative to your account balance, whether you chase losses, how you respond to promotions, whether you take the favorite or hunt value on underdogs. Over hundreds of bets, that data builds a detailed behavioral profile. The book knows, with reasonable accuracy, what kind of bettor you are before you do.
That profile drives what you see. Promotional offers are not distributed equally. A recreational bettor who bets $50 on NFL games every Sunday will receive different offers than a sharp bettor running a systematic approach across multiple sports. The recreational player gets free bets and deposit matches designed to increase engagement. The sharp player’s account gets quietly limited, or the promotions dry up.
Personalized odds, where the actual line shown to a bettor is adjusted based on their profile rather than just market movement, are the next frontier. Some European operators already test versions of this. U.S. operators have been more cautious given the regulatory environment, but the capability exists and the economic incentive to use it is significant.
The UK Gambling Commission spent considerable time in 2023 and 2024 examining algorithmic targeting and inducement rules. Australia’s state-based regulators have flagged personalization as a responsible gambling concern with increasing specificity. The U.S. conversation is earlier stage, but it is the same conversation.
Regulators have historically had one reliable lever over gambling operators: payment friction. If moving money in and out of a sportsbook account is slow or complicated, that friction acts as a natural brake on impulsive behavior. You have to want it enough to go through the steps.
The industry spent the last four years systematically removing those steps.
In-app wallets now hold balances directly inside the sportsbook. Instant ACH deposits, offered by DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM among others, move money in seconds rather than days. Some operators have pursued or obtained money transmitter licenses in multiple states, which allows them to operate more like a financial services company than a traditional gaming operator. PayNearMe partnerships let bettors deposit cash at convenience stores and have it available in their account immediately.
The practical result is that the moment between deciding to bet and having the money available to bet has nearly disappeared. That matters because impulse control research consistently shows that friction reduces impulsive decisions. Removing it does the opposite.
Embedded finance also makes these platforms structurally harder to regulate through payment channels. When the wallet is inside the app and the operator holds the money transmitter license, state gaming regulators have less leverage than they did when bets required a credit card or bank transfer that a third party could restrict.
None of this makes sports betting unwinnable. Sharp bettors still find edges, particularly in live markets where model errors surface briefly before being corrected. Line shopping across books still produces meaningful differences on specific games, and with more operators in more states, there are more lines to compare. Bettor-friendly exchange models like Sporttrade eliminate the book margin entirely on matched bets, offering true market prices.
But the environment has changed. A bettor who understands that micro-betting carries higher margins than pregame lines will think differently about where to put their volume. Someone who recognizes that their promotional offers are personalized to their profile, not broadcast equally to all customers, will evaluate a “risk-free bet” offer with different eyes than someone who assumes it’s the same deal everyone got.
The technology being built right now is designed to reduce friction at every point of contact. Faster bets, smarter interfaces, embedded payments, personalized surfaces. For the casual bettor, that frictionless experience feels like convenience. For the informed bettor, it looks like a set of choices about where to engage and where to be careful.
The books have been studying their customers carefully for six years. The infrastructure they built reflects everything they learned. Understanding what that infrastructure actually does is the most useful thing a bettor can bring to 2025 and beyond.