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The year 2020 took everybody by surprise. It would be a safe bet to say most people had high hopes riding on this year back in the final months of 2019.
Most probably asked for it to bring them a lot of blessings and surprises their way. And a big surprise it brought to everyone, just probably not the one they were hoping for.
The 2020 pandemic has been an unprecedented situation that brought the whole world to a stop the likes no one could have foreseen.
This affected both regular people and large enterprises, even entire industries for that matter, which brings us to the point of this article: What has been the current pandemic’s impact in the global state of gambling for the year 2020.
The whole pandemic and subsequent sanitary lockdown had an enormous impact on the industry as a whole, that’s for sure. Yet, the impact has been markedly different for each different segment of the industry. Let’s have a look.
Global State of In-Person Gambling for the Year 2020
It has been more than a bad year for traditional in-person gambling; there are no two ways around it. The loss of business stemming from the lockdown cannot be better appreciated than by looking at a picture of the desolated Las Vegas strip casinos from the month of March throughout early June.
The city of Las Vegas is considered worldwide as the world’s gambling capital. Thus, its shutdown was deeply symbolic. Equally symbolic are the images coming from its reopening during starting June 4th.
You can clearly see how, even though they are now operating again, the pandemic still affects business there. The social distancing instructions remain in place and must be respected by the establishment.
What does that mean? It means that now there’s a limited capacity for how many people are allowed inside of any land-based gambling establishment. Only up to 25% of their total capacity is allowed now.
All personnel are required to wear the mandatory personal protective equipment while players must wear a face mask. That mask may or may not have an effect on their next poker match depending on who you ask.
Another thing that the pandemic brought was the use of a whole lot disinfectant lotion to clean your hands and anything they’ve touched. All in all, for each day the larger casinos remained completely closed, estimates say that they lost 700,000 USD a day in revenue. It remains to be seen just how much revenue the reopening with social distancing manages to amass.
Global State of Online Gambling for the Year 2020
On the other side of things, online gambling is only thriving. Most popular online gambling sites report a serious spike in traffic the moment the lockdown came into effect and traffic remained high even months later.
Why? Well, where else were regular gamblers going to go if not online. The pandemic is set to end up being a windfall for online gambling for the year 2020.
For comparison, official figures of how much In-person gambling lost during the month of March was 61.7% compared to figures from the same month last year.
At the same time and according to sources like casinobee.com, online gambling reported an increase in revenue of 65.7% compared, again for the same period last year. There’s no other way to put it, the fever for online gambling is at pandemic levels these days.
