For the price of $20 per month, select DraftKings customers in New York can now enroll in a program that the company is calling DraftKings Sportsbook+. What does a subscription to this stupidly named product get you? It seems to be a way for eager sports bettors to pay DraftKings an extra fee for the opportunity to lose more money.
People who pay the monthly fee will have access to boosted payouts on parlay bets, which are already the most profitable type of bets (for DraftKings). These boosts will only apply to parlays where odds on the individual legs are -500 or shorter, and will scale up with the size of the parlay: A two-leg parlay comes with a 10-percent profit boost, a six-leg parlay gets 50 percent, and so on up to an 11-leg parlay, which can qualify for a 100 percent boost. The maximum eligible bet is $25.
It's no secret that sports books rely heavily on parlays to increase their margins. There's only so much money to be made from millions of people betting either side of the same line, but parlays allow the books to rake in losses that don't automatically get dwindled by payouts. DraftKings and other sports books have been very open about the fact that their very survival depends on their business models becoming increasingly parlay-based.
What sticks out about Sportsbook+ is the audacity. If DraftKings needs more of its customers to be making parlay bets more frequently, then it would follow that they would lure customers to those bets. This is how it has always worked, both online and in brick-and-mortar casinos: You log into the app and you are greeted with a promo for an odds boost on a longshot parlay; you spend enough time at a high-stakes blackjack table in the casino and you get a free steak dinner. DraftKings seeks to reverse that equation, or at least scramble it. Instead of being coaxed by something real, bettors are now being asked to pay up front for access to those incentives.
It's easy enough to laugh this off as an obviously backward idea, and to anticipate that not even bettors who love parlays will be stupid enough to fork over real money to bet more parlays with slightly better payouts, but I don't think this particular innovation should be ignored or written off so quickly. This kind of program isn't aimed at casual bettors who can easily spot a bad deal when one is presented to them, but at those people who already have the hooks in them. If you're the type of bettor who is already routinely making multi-leg parlay bets, then the chance to get a 100 percent profit boost on a 11-leg parlay might feel like it's worth $20 a month.
Even the branding of this subscription service seems designed to create a smoother on-ramp for that cohort of bettors who have already self-selected for self-destructive betting behavior. The name "DraftKings Sportsbook+" feels like an obvious attempt to situate this service alongside other entertainment services (no different from Disney+ or Paramount+ or AMC+), for the purpose of reinforcing the idea within problem gamblers that they are not throwing money at a vice, but entertaining themselves. This has always been the goal of the sports betting industry: to make itself a daily part of sports fans' lives, and to snugly fit itself into their entertainment diet. That these efforts are being increasingly microtargeted at parlay enthusiasts and problem bettors means that there's even fewer reasons to be bashful. Forget the steak dinners—why not just charge the suckers for the right to be even further taken advantage of? They haven't said no yet, so why would they start now?
