The Oregon Lottery has released its long-anticipated online sports betting game, Scoreboard. Bettors can use it to place wagers and collect winnings from desktop and mobile devices. Players will have the ability to place wagers on many of the most popular sports, events and matches.
The selection of covered sports includes familiar ones, such as basketball and football, along with more obscure offerings, including rugby, NASCAR and cricket. Wagering on any single event is currently capped at $250,000.
How to start betting with Scoreboard
To begin, players need to create user profiles on the Oregon Lottery website. These profiles include identifiable information to better address problem gambling. It is the first game of its kind in Oregon. Until now, all games had been played anonymously.
“With all of our other games, it’s anonymous play. But, with Scoreboard, you’re going to go in and establish an account with your name and all those sorts of things,” said Chuck Baumann, an Oregon Lottery public affairs officer. “With that, we have the ability, as the player does, to monitor what you’re winning and what you’re losing.”
Players will have the ability to set limits for themselves. When those limits are reached, the player receives a notification from the lottery.
“If there’s a level the player has reached that’s above what they’ve set, we have the ability to email and contact them and say, ‘Do you understand that you’re at your limit?’” Baumann said.
Oregon rollout
Originally slated for release at the end of the NFL preseason, the app has been delayed several times, causing it to miss the projected release date by several months. The lottery has expressed concern over how those delays will affect its initial reception.
“It’s difficult to say if there will be a loss due to the later-than-projected start of the game,” Baumann said. “We will have a much more concrete idea about the accuracy of the projections after a month or two of having the game available.”
Estimated revenue from sports betting game
The company estimates that the game will make as much as $5 million in its first year. By three years, the estimate is nearly $40 million. This money will go toward several public funds, including the state’s Employer Incentive Fund. The state will use the money to fund PERS, Oregon’s public employee retirement system, a system that has amassed $27 billion in debt.
The Oregon Lottery will oversee the product due to the organization’s experience with gambling. It had offered a similar online sports betting game for many years in the past, called Sports Action. It focused on football. The game was discontinued due to pressure from the NCAA, which issued a statement that the organization would hold no tournament in a state with legal gambling.
The NCAA eventually deferred alongside the federal government in a 2018 ruling on states’ ability to individually decide their own gambling policies.
The lottery also discussed if it would pursue more online lottery games, like scratch cards, keno, jackpot lottery draws and “second-draws” for losing tickets. Lottery spokesman Matt Shelby responded, “Long term, we’d like to [offer other options online], but we don’t have any specific roadmap to offer other products for sale via the digital channel. We have focused more on what we won’t sell: video lottery-type games.”
