D.C. Managed To Lose $4 Million on Its Own Sports Betting App

In gambling, the house always wins. Unless the house is the Washington, D.C., government.

Like a growing number of cities and states, Washington, D.C., allows sports betting. However, bets may only be placed within the confines of designated venues. The only means of placing a bet that is available districtwide is GambetDC, a website and app run by the D.C. Lottery. Reason‘s Jason Russell described GambetDC as “glitchy,” with lower payouts than privately-run betting houses.

Now, as part of a performance oversight hearing, the lottery is claiming it suffered a bad beat.

After the D.C. Council approved sports gambling in the district in 2018, it further authorized a single company to develop the GambetDC app, at a cost of $215 million over five years. In return, the District hoped to see annual tax revenues of $20 million from bets placed. Instead, the lottery admitted this week that the D.C. government only took in about $1.5 million from the app in 2021, its first full year of operation. In fact, after adjusting for the cost of advertising the app, the government actually lost more than $4 million last year.

How is this possible? More than ju