We caught up with Asher, a long-time sports betting executive, to talk about a wide range of issues impacting the industry.
Recognizing the need for an independent sportsbook in Nevada, industry veteran Joe Asher reemerged on the sports betting scene to launch Boomer’s Sportsbook in 2025, after stepping away as President of Sports Betting for IGT in June 2024.
Asher founded Boomer’s as a direct competitor to William Hill US, the company he led from 2012 until it was acquired by Caesars in 2021.
“I became convinced that there was an opportunity to set up a business to compete with William Hill and to offer casino owners another alternative,” Asher told Gambling Insider during a recent 45-minute phone conversation. “There are a lot of casinos all across Nevada, and many don’t have the scale to run their own sports betting operation.”
Beginning last football season with four locations, including its home base at the Commercial Hotel in Elko, and counting eight currently, Boomer’s will have at least 18 stores when the 2026 season kicks off.
Taking time during his trip to Portugal, where he was to watch his daughter compete for the US Olympic Development Program in an international soccer tournament, Joe chatted with us about his startup’s customer-focused approach, the price sensitivity of Nevada bettors, limiting sharp bettors, and prediction markets’ impact on regulated sportsbooks.
Gambling Insider: How do you differentiate [Boomer’s] from the Caesars and William Hills and Circas with prospective casino partners and customers?
Joe Asher: With casinos, it’s independence and a Nevada-only focus. A casino is gonna be way more important to us than it’s gonna be to somebody else. Whether it’s Ellis Island in Las Vegas or Ojos Locos in North Las Vegas or Casino Fandango in Carson City or Bonanza in Reno, we’re in touch with the people who run those casinos regularly. We’re super-focused on their property. We have a much, much smaller business, so of course every casino is going to be more important to us than it would be for somebody like William Hill, who’s the 800-pound gorilla in this space.
Number two, this is a very accomplished team of people [on a staff of about 60]. There are people in this business who have a deep, deep background and understanding of it (editor’s note: Among others, Asher mentioned Nick Bogdanovich, a member of both the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame and Sports Betting Hall of Fame, who Asher calls “without question, the number one bookmaker in Las Vegas).
GI: You’ve said you don’t have any desire or intention to expand outside of Nevada. Why is that, because the landscape isn’t set up favorably for startups?
Asher: I’m not sure how we would differentiate ourselves in the other markets, and yes, we’ve been approached for deals in a number of states, been approached about tribal opportunities, but I really think there’s an opportunity for a Nevada-specific business.
Even if we can make a few bucks in Iowa or in some other state, I’m not sure it’s really worth the distraction and the commitment of resources to go do that. I’d rather be entirely focused on Nevada and spending all of my time trying to make our Nevada business stronger and better.
And quite frankly, it fits very nicely with where I am in life right now, and given the age of my kids, it’s nice to not have to travel for work nearly as much as I used to. Now a big work trip for me is going to Reno or Elko, not going over to London half a dozen times a year and running all around the country like I was during the William Hill years or during my tenure at IGT.
GI: What’s something you learned after being through a football season with this new venture that you may apply going forward?
Asher: I learned that the thesis for this business was spot on. There’s an appetite for it in the market from the casino operators and from consumers when they hear about us. We just need to continue to try to get the word out to customers, continue to be in their thoughts, so that they’re motivated to come and sign up with us.
For the consumer, we’re competing on product and on price. We tell people, “check the price”. One of the things that Caesars and William Hill have been doing is raising their margin to customers, which means they’re charging more for the product, and a customer, more times than not, will win more on their parlay if they bet it with Boomer’s than if they bet it, say, at William Hill.
We were offering -105 on all NFL sides last year during the football season.
GI: Are you gonna do that again this year?
Asher: We haven’t made a final decision on it. We’ve got a few months, but I was pretty happy with it so we may well do it again. I don’t wanna kind of jump the gun because I wanna talk to the team about it, but I was happy, and it gave customers a reason to go and sign up for their Boomer’s account and bet with us. …
Caesars isn’t bashful about their objective, right? They’ve put in their investor presentations that they’re trying to get their margin up to 10%. If you want to get your margin up to 10%, that means you’re charging customers more for the product.
And look, we get it. Some customers don’t care. They’re not worried about it. They think they’re going to win their bet, so they don’t really worry about the extra juice they might have to lay. But some people do care. We think clearly a lot of our customers do.
GI: Do you think that customers in Nevada are more price sensitive than in the US as a whole just because they’re savvier?
Asher: Yes, without question. There’s been a vibrant legal market in Nevada for a long time, so customers are more focused on price and the cost of the product in Nevada than they may be elsewhere.
GI: William Hill, under your tenure, was criticized for limiting sharp bettors. Is your bookmaking philosophy different with Boomer’s than it was then?
Asher: There’s always gonna be a vocal group of customers who complain about how they perceive themselves to be treated. Nothing’s ever gonna change that for sure. There are always multiple things that go into the decision as to whether you’re gonna limit a customer or ultimately in some cases decide not to do business with them.
At the end of the day, obviously we’re trying to build a sustainable for-profit business, and I think by necessity, there might be some customers who aren’t happy. They think they should [be able to] get down a particular sport or type of wager, whether it’s pregame or in-play, or they see something where the markets move or where one sportsbook hasn’t changed its price, so they try to jump on that.
From the bookmaker’s perspective, you gotta remember, we’ll have sometimes thousands of betting propositions on the board at one time. The customer gets to decide if there’s one that he thinks the number’s awful. It’s almost a situation where people are trying to find those kinds of anomalies.
I was very comfortable with how the business operated during my tenure at William Hill. There’s some things that you learn and evolve with and do a little bit differently, and then there’s other things that you feel comfortable continuing to do.
GI: Are originators treated differently than steam chasers?
Asher: It’s a good question. There are all kinds of things that customers do that you think about, you talk about, you decide “how do we wanna handle this,” or “how do we wanna handle that.” So yeah, you probably do look at different categories of customers differently. The end result on what you do might be the same, but I think you do look at various things that folks do differently.
The other piece that I don’t think people necessarily think about as much is the regulatory aspects of a lot of this. This is a very heavily regulated business, and you’re always thinking about the regulatory aspect of it and source-of-funds issues and being comfortable with the customer betting on his own account and things like that.
GI: Prediction markets are obviously the hot topic in this industry. There are various viewpoints in terms of how much prediction markets may or may not be impacting handle at sportsbooks. Anecdotally, it’s obvious that it’s gotta be affecting it on some level because we’ve heard from a lot of professional bettors and groups that they’ve moved a lot of all of their action to prediction markets. Do you have a perspective on that? Do you see it affecting handle, either industry-wide or at your shop?
Asher: At our shop it’s hard to say because we’re a new company, so we don’t have anything to compare it to historically, we don’t have year-over-year comps yet. But the answer is, of course it’s affecting handle in the industry writ large.
Obviously some of that money that’s now being bet on prediction markets would otherwise find its way to the legal and regulated market. How much, nobody knows.
… The Kalshis, the Polymarkets, and these other businesses, I fully support the efforts of the Nevada Gaming Control Board to try to shut them down unless they comply with state law. I think these are illegal bookmaking operations and they should be treated the same way you treat any illegal bookmaker.
GI: Is there something that sportsbooks can do or or should be doing to get some of that handle back, beyond fighting them in court and lobbying. Assuming [prediction markets can continue to offer sports event contracts], what can sportsbooks do to get some of that handle back?
Asher: I don’t see how you can [get the handle back] at scale, because these guys are running illegal gambling operations, illegal bookmaking operations. This idea that, “oh, it’s an exchange, so you’re betting against somebody else” – like the guy in Vegas is betting against some guy sitting at home in Iowa – I mean that’s nonsense. There are market makers on the other side of a lot of, if not most of these transactions.
Kalshi has a market making affiliate. Susquehanna is on the opposite side of a number of these transactions. So this isn’t Bob betting against Mike. There’s a bookmaker on the other side of this.
So what can the legal and regulated industry do to get it back? Short of supporting the efforts by the AGA and the Nevada Gaming Control Board to try to shut this down, I don’t think there is anything because they’re unregulated and untaxed. So how are you going to compete with that? In New York there’s a 51% gaming tax; they’re paying zero percent. How is a legal operator supposed to compete with that? Not to mention all the regulations.
You offer the best product that you can. Inherently, I think a sportsbook product is a better product than an exchange product. The exchange product is, broadly speaking, a niche product. Certainly that’s been the experience in the UK.
This is not new technology. Betfair has been around for 25 years in England, so there’s nothing new about a betting exchange, and certainly the experience there has been that it’s a niche product, but over there it’s legal, it’s regulated, it’s taxed.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
The post Sportsbook Veteran Joe Asher Discusses Limiting Sharp Bettors, Prediction Markets’ Impact on Handle in Gambling Insider Q&A appeared first on Gambling Insider.
