New Jersey sports bettors can now wager on table tennis, commonly known as ‘ping pong’ in the United States. The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) recently authorized pre-match betting on the sport, but in-play wagers are not available. That is a little short of what is on offer in Pennsylvania and Indiana, where live betting on table tennis is allowed.
Rush Street Interactive, which operates SugarHouse and BetRivers in Pennsylvania and BetRivers in Indiana, has taken a bigger handle on table tennis than any other sport in the last few weeks. That is not surprising considering the lack of sports betting options available due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Gamblers in the Garden State may be happy to have any sports wagering options, no matter how limited. All the major American and European sporting competitions are on hiatus, while the popular Australian Rules football and rugby league markets were taken off the boards last week after the AFL and NRL suspended their seasons.
Ukraine’s TT Cup and Russia’s Setka Cup have daily matches from early afternoon until the evening. This is convenient timing for bettors in the United States.
Tale tennis is a fast-paced sport that offers a multitude of betting opportunities. A Rush Street spokesman stated that the average time separating points scored is “between four and eight seconds, and the duration of the game is one to three minutes”.
Online sportsbooks that feature fast technology can offer a variety of in-game bets for table tennis. The TT Cup (tt-cup.com) and Setka Cup (setka-cup.com) each have websites that run live streams of matches. Those streams are also available at several US betting sites.
Table tennis matches are best-of-five contests where to first player to score 11 points wins the game. If a player reaches 11 and the margin is only one point, the game continues until either side opens a two-point gap.
Rush Street Interactive COO Mattias Stetz stated, “Ping-pong has the same characteristics as popular betting sports like tennis or baseball, but the game is faster. It is a perfect game for live betting in that it starts and stops all the time, with very fast changes in momentum.”
Besides table tennis, there is now very little to bet on at New Jersey sportsbooks. PointsBet NJ is offering odds on the Belarusian Extraleague hockey finals, where Yunost Minsk and Shakhtar Soligorsk are 1-1 after two games, while FanDuel NJ also has free-play fantasy horse racing.