PointsBet in Talks Over Selling to Jake Paul's BetR

Corporate bookmaker PointsBet Holdings Ltd. is said to be in discussions to sell its Australian trading busines to an online betting firm linked to YouTube sensation and boxer Jake Paul. 

The Australia-listed company says it's talks with BetR are for now preliminary and incomplete.

"PointsBet advises that as part of its ordinary course of business it routinely explores options to maximize value for shareholders, including evaluating proposals from third parties that are received from time to time," PointsBet said.

PointsBet, which also operates in the U.S., Canada and Ireland, said it confirmed the talks in response to a Friday media report by The Australian newspaper.

Shares in PointsBet are down 33% so far in December and 81% so far in 2022.

BetR's primary focus will be on micro-betting, which it describes as the "TikTok-ification of sports betting" whereby individuals can place the tiniest of wagers on such things in real time as pitches & at-bats of baseball games and plays & drives of football games.

Paul's business partner in the venture, Joey Levy, is the co-founder of Simplebet, the B2B technology company that has pioneered micro-betting on U.S. sports by building the machine learning and automation infrastructure to enable this new form of betting to exist at scale.

"I co-founded Simplebet to simplify the sports betting user experience – to reconsider why sports betting products felt uninterpretable to the casual fan who had never bet on sports before," said Levy, Founder and CEO of Betr. "In doing so, we discovered that the technology required to enable a scalable micro-betting platform around the moments that drive U.S. sports did not yet exist, given the global market's focus was on soccer, a fluid sport without a natural start and stop cadence. So we decided to build it ourselves at Simplebet; however, years later, the user experience remains unintuitive for a mass market consumer."

PointsBet, while building a niche market in states such as Colorado, has mostly lagged behind competitors like FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM and Caesars.  The company currently offers legal sports wagering in eleven U.S. states including New York, Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com