Gambling on WNBA is way up, led by bets placed on Indiana Fever games

The Minnesota Lynx’s home winning streak to open this WNBA season was in jeopardy against the Los Angeles Sparks in June, when Lynx guard Kayla McBride stood at the free throw line with her team up just six points in the fourth quarter. But for at least one vocal fan, the outcome of the game was not the most pressing concern.

“Rickea!” he yelled. Loud enough to be audible on the telecast, the fan implored Sparks forward Rickea Jackson to keep scoring—something he needed to win his parlay bet.

“Shut up!” Jackson’s teammate Dearica Hamby yelled back in a clip that circulated on social media. Sparks all-star Kelsey Plum appeared to say the same, adding an expletive for good measure.

Despite frustration among some players, the WNBA is courting gamblers more aggressively than ever. Money wagered on the league doubled at several top sportsbooks last season compared to the year before, coinciding with the debut of Indiana Fever sensation Caitlin Clark, and has continued to increase this season. The league responded by expanding its roster of sportsbook partners to seven, and the Fever, Chicago Sky and Las Vegas Aces recently added their own betting sponsors.

This means more gambling ads at WNBA arenas and during telecasts, more gambling content on the league’s website and social accounts and more WNBA-themed promotions from sportsbooks looking to attract new customers.

But as the league faces significant growing pains, including a rash of abuse toward players, the WNBA could be especially vulnerable to some of the dangers that can accompany increased gambling: the risk of games being fixed, the threat of harassment from angry bettors and the culture clash between fans who love women’s basketball for its own sake and a new crop of viewers who bet on WNBA games to pass time during the NFL and NBA offseasons.

In response to concerns about embracing gambling, the WNBA has been mostly silent. The league declined to comment for this story, as did the players association and the league’s official betting partners, FanDuel and DraftKings.

“The WNBA’s rise in popularity is something to be celebrated,” said Victoria Jackson, a professor of sports history at Arizona State University and a former ASU track star. But trying to grow even faster by encouraging gambling, she added, could inject toxicity into a league known for its positive atmosphere.

“That,” Jackson said, “has the potential to really suck.”

From afterthought to growth engine

Robert Walker, a longtime Nevada sportsbook director, began taking bets on the WNBA during its inaugural season in 1997. Over time he became “a huge fan,” he said, explaining that because hardly anyone wagered on the WNBA, he could enjoy watching games without having to stress over how their outcomes affected his business.

That hadn’t changed much by 2015, when Stephen Master, then head of sports at Nielsen, which measures TV audiences and other media consumption, was hired by the American Gaming Association. The industry trade group, in its ongoing effort to convince leagues to embrace betting, had him study how many more games bettors watch compared with traditional fans, then present his findings to the NFL, MLB, the NBA and the NHL.

But the AGA didn’t bother having Master analyze WNBA viewership, he said. “It was not even on our radar.”

As states rushed to legalize sports wagering, gambling operators spent tens of millions of dollars to partner with men’s franchises but largely ignored women’s sports. (Last year, the Illinois House Democratic Women’s Caucus bemoaned this disparity.) A former trader at sportsbook PointsBet, which since has been acquired by Fanatics, estimated that on a given night before 2024, WNBA games often generated about 5 percent of the money wagered on the NBA.

But with fan interest in the WNBA exploding since Clark’s rookie season, Master said it’s easy to see why sportsbooks are so eager to cash in. It provides an opportunity to convert more women to sports betting—an activity that long has been overwhelmingly male—while giving sportsbooks’ core clientele something to bet on during a relatively quiet stretch of the sports calendar.

Operators are expanding their capacity to handle WNBA action. Last year, BetMGM, the country’s No. 3 online sportsbook, hired Hannah Luther to serve as its first trader devoted to approving bets on women’s sports, namely the WNBA. The company reported a 133 percent increase in WNBA betting last year. It’s up another 9.5 percent this season, though that number probably would be bigger if not for injuries to Clark and other stars.

“I think we expected Caitlin Clark to be a big part of our success,” Luther said. “I honestly was a little surprised by the extent. She’s overwhelmingly popular, and the Fever are overwhelmingly popular.”

BetMGM said eight of the company’s 10 most-bet games this season involved the Fever. It also said 62 percent of money wagered to choose the eventual WNBA champion has been on Indiana despite the team sitting just a few games above .500.

Sportsbooks now offer vastly more ways to bet on all WNBA teams, especially through prop bets, which involve player and team statistics. Generally, the more confident a sportsbook is in its odds, the more money it allows customers to bet. Josh Reid, a sophisticated bettor from Chicago, said when he started wagering on the WNBA four years ago, opportunities to bet were similar to those for Class AAA baseball, and he often couldn’t bet more than $250 on a game. Now, he said, sportsbooks often allow recreational bettors to risk a few thousand dollars on a WNBA game.

In May, when BetMGM became the exclusive betting partner of the Aces—what BetMGM called its first “major” partnership with a women’s sports franchise—the sportsbook highlighted that “VIP” bettors who lose the most money will gain access to BetMGM-branded courtside seats at Aces games and pregame shootarounds otherwise closed to the public, a benefit many NBA teams provide to their sportsbook partners’ VIP customers.

The goal isn’t just to cater to existing VIPs, said Molly Wurdack-Folt, who oversees BetMGM’s team and league partnerships. “It’s important for us to make [bettors] aware of what those VIP opportunities and experiences are so that, as they’re thinking about their journey with us, they’re aware of what may be available to them once they reach that VIP status.”

The plan, Wurdack-Folt added, is also to convert more women’s basketball fans into online casino players. BetMGM soon will introduce the first WNBA-themed online slots game.

Wurdack-Folt said the BetMGM-Aces partnership was driven partly by a shared desire to give back to the Las Vegas community. For every Aces steal at Michelob Ultra Arena this season, BetMGM will donate $50 to a local program for food-insecure families.

At season’s end, BetMGM will present an oversize check with its donation. If the Aces record the same number of home steals as last year, however, BetMGM will give $8,500.

Inviting dangers

The NBA, which owns roughly 60 percent of the WNBA, led the push to legalize bookmaking in the 2010s. At the time, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver argued that making it easier than ever to bet on sports, while dramatically expanding the number of available prop bets, would help the leagues detect gambling-related corruption because they would gain a clearer view of betting activity.

Last year, Silver imposed a lifetime ban on Toronto Raptors bench player Jontay Porter after he was found to have colluded with gamblers, removing himself from multiple games to ensure the “under” on his prop bets would hit.

Silver also responded by backpedaling a bit on gambling, encouraging sportsbooks to reduce the prop bets available for players such as Porter, who spend time in the developmental league on two-way contracts, because they, as the NBA’s lowest-paid players, might be more tempted to bet on themselves.

“Certainly, prop bets, depending on how precise they are, lend themselves to more shenanigans than other kind of bets,” Silver said.

At the time, Porter’s salary was about $410,000. All WNBA players make less than that, many considerably so, forcing a significant number to play overseas during the offseason for supplementary income. The WNBA declined to address how the risk that Silver identified for low-paid NBA players applies to its ranks.

Declan Hill, a University of New Haven professor who specializes in match-fixing, said the fact that WNBA players are historically underpaid makes them vulnerable to corruption. “The rule of thumb I’ve devised over the years,” he said, “is to divide the total gambling on an event or league by how much the average player is making. That will give you a rough indication very quickly of the risk of match fixing.”

That risk, he explained, isn’t just that a WNBA player will take the initiative to bet on herself but that players could be pursued by international match-fixers. Hill said that a fixer once told him: “It’s not about the league. It’s not about the teams that are playing. We just go where it’s easiest.”

“So,” Hill added, “if there’s a chink in the armor with the WNBA, that’s where they’re going to go.”

Last year, the NCAA reported “jarring findings” from a study of online harassment directed at men’s and women’s basketball players during March Madness, much of it coming from gamblers. The most prevalent form of harassment was sexual abuse.

In June, the Sky partnered with security firm Moonshot to help monitor harassment and threats of violence directed at players and coaches and intervene as needed. At the time, Sky co-owner Nadia Rawlinson acknowledged that sports betting was partly to blame for an increase in such incidents.

Less than three weeks later, the Sky announced a deal to make Bet365 its exclusive sports betting partner. As a result, the sportsbook’s logo now appears on the base of both baskets at Sky home games and on the team’s telecasts and social posts. Moonshot declined to comment on the gambling-related harassment it has detected since then.

There’s also the challenge of bettors fishing for information on injuries, lineups and other nonpublic nuggets to gain an edge.

“A lot of my friends who didn’t watch the WNBA are definitely into it now because they can gamble on it,” said Chasity Melvin, a former all-star who played 11 seasons, including six with the Washington Mystics. “When they ask me questions about basketball, you have to be aware because you might not know if you’re helping someone with their parlay.”

Melvin said she’s more careful about whom she discusses basketball with to avoid sharing inside info from her connections in the league inadvertently.

“It’s just like, wow, I can’t even chop it up with my friends anymore,” she said.

Katie Lebel, a sports business researcher at Canada’s University of Guelph, recently completed a study of 400 American women who say they bet on sports. One of the most interesting preliminary findings, she said, was the fact that “many women in the study discovered sports or became more invested in games because of betting. This flips the usual narrative and offers a fresh angle: sports betting as a fandom on-ramp, especially in women’s sports.”

Before her study, she had a hunch of how effective gambling could be for growing the WNBA’s audience. At the beginning of her 2024 class on sports fandom, Lebel asked her students how many of them were WNBA fans.

“It was essentially crickets,” she said.

But over the course of the semester, she had students engage with the league in various ways, including predicting winners of games for “bragging rights”—a way of simulating the rush of gambling without asking undergraduates to risk their own money.

“By the end of that class,” Lebel said, “we had a room full of 100 new fans.”