Bally’s is pulling the plug on Monkey Knife Fight, a daily fantasy sports (DFS) site the company acquired during a buying spree aimed at beefing up its sports products. Monkey Knife Fight’s untimely demise comes just two years after Bally’s acquired the up-and-coming DFS operator for $90 million.
When Bally’s first purchase Monkey Knife Fight, it was America’s third largest DFS site. More importantly, according to a recent report on SBC Americas, Bally’s wanted access to Monkey Knife Fight’s customer database. Bally’s former CEO George Papanier said Monkey Knife Fight, “will provide Bally’s with a significant advantage in launching its own B2C sports betting operations.”
Gaming industry watchers suggest that Monkey Knife Fight is still a pretty active site but that Bally’s was looking to unload assets to increase profitability and the DFS site was simply costing too much money. “There were attempts to sell and salvage the Monkey Knife Fight business, which still maintains a passionate user base. But, today’s announcement suggests that burn rate had grown too high for the platform to sustain operations without further infusions from Ballys.”Lloyd Danzig, Managing Partner at Sharp Alpha Advisors told Legal Sports Report recently.
Monkey Knife Fight is not, however, the only sports product Bally’s wants off its books. In recent comments, the company’s newly appointed CEO Robeson Reeves talked about a desire to unload Bet.Works, a betting platform Bally’s purchased for $125 million. “On sports, we recognize that the Bet.Works acquisition did not give us the platform required to develop a competitive product. We didn’t react fast enough there, and this will not happen again,” he said.
Reeves says he’s focused on building Bally’s presence in the rapidly growing US online casino market and that’s what he’ll be working on when he officially takes the helm of the company in March.