Arizona: Casino Del Sol to debut new Cross Game Matchup offering this NFL season

Tucson’s Casino Del Sol is launching a new NFL Cross Game Matchup in Arizona, through its Solsports sports betting brand. The new product will allow Solsports to offer players over 450 games to place wagers on weekly, instead of the usual 12-15, throughout the upcoming season. Final scores within a player’s primary game matchup will be used to determine winners.

Solsports’ NFL Cross Game Matchup will permit bettors to place weekly bets on any team playing that week against any other team in the NFL, regardless of who they are matched up with for the week. The idea of the new offering came from Casino Del Sol’s Director of Sportsbook, John Collins, and the casino claims to be the first in the country to offer this product.

“With football prop bets being the most popular among sportsbook players, I knew a wager like this would appeal to our visitors,” commented Collins. “While analytical players will dissect probabilities within each event, fantasy football players will use skills to try and handicap cross-game matchups.”

The casino is now rolling the method out to the public after having tested it first with its trading team. The new sportsbook offering follows approval from the Arizona Division of Gaming, about a year after the first sportsbooks in the Grand Canyon State began offering sports betting.

The NFL Cross Game Matchup will be available to players from the first week of the NFL season, which starts Thursday night. Bets can be placed at any of the 15 self-service betting kiosks or one of the five live ticket writer counters at SolSports, the casino added.

The upcoming NFL season is expected to draw bets from a record 46.6 million American adults, with half planning to wager online, according to new American Gaming Association (AGA) research. As legalization spreads, bettors are moving away from bookies and toward regulated options. In this sense, 23 million Americans will place a bet online, up 18% from 2021. 

Additionally, 10.6 million are expected to place a bet in-person at a sportsbook this season, up 2% from 2021. Just 13% of NFL bettors say they will use a bookie, down two points from last year (15%) and five points from 2020 (18%). Bookie usage is 50% higher in states without legalized sports betting.