How to grow sportsbook handle between game days
A sportsbook lives on a fixture list, and the fixture list has holes. The news cycle does not. Prediction markets give a sports customer a reason to open the app on a Tuesday in the off-season.
In this article 5 sections
A sportsbook's week has a shape, and it is not a flat line. Activity climbs into the weekend slate, peaks around kick-off and falls away on Monday. Then there are the longer troughs: the weeks between seasons, the international breaks, the summer when the big leagues are dark. The customer is still there. There is just less on the board worth opening the app for.
How big the hole is
Illinois is one of the few US states whose regulator publishes sports wagering handle by month and by sport, so the shape of the calendar can be measured rather than guessed. In 2025 the quietest month was July, with $857.9 million wagered on completed events across every licensee. The busiest was November, with $1,672.0 million: 1.95 times as much.1
Seasonality
A sportsbook's calendar has a summer hole
Illinois sports wagering handle by month, 2025, all licensees, with single-event football wagers highlighted inside each bar.
| Month, 2025 | Total handle | Single-event football handle |
|---|---|---|
| January | $1,473.4 million | $286.9 million |
| February | $1,162.5 million | $66.8 million |
| March | $1,489.0 million | $0.3 million |
| April | $1,287.8 million | $4.6 million |
| May | $1,275.0 million | $1.1 million |
| June | $960.4 million | $1.3 million |
| July | $857.9 million | $3.0 million |
| August | $1,017.4 million | $87.6 million |
| September | $1,421.3 million | $414.5 million |
| October | $1,592.4 million | $411.3 million |
| November | $1,672.0 million | $456.9 million |
| December | $1,442.8 million | $400.7 million |
The difference is mostly one sport. Single-event football wagers were $3.0 million of July's handle and $456.9 million of November's. The customers who bet in November did not disappear in July. The board they bet on did.1
Prediction markets did not take that summer off. By Pew Research Center's count, their trading volume more than doubled between May and July 2026, with most of the increase in sports trading that coincided with the FIFA World Cup.2
The gap is in the calendar, not the customer
Promotions can pull a customer back into a quiet week, but they are spending to fill a hole in the inventory. The cheaper fix is inventory that does not follow the fixture list. The news cycle never has an off-season: there is always a vote, a rate decision, an earnings call, an award or a weather event that somebody in your customer base has a view on.
How Parity fills the quiet days
- A catalogue beyond the fixture list
- Politics, economics, finance, crypto, weather, culture, technology and more, in one surface inside your sportsbook. Tens of thousands of open contracts, each with prices, history and resolution rules.
- Five-minute crypto windows
- Up-or-down contracts on Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana on an exact five-minute grid, one window after another, each settled on a published 60-second reference price. A fast, repeatable product for the hours with nothing else on.
- Positions that keep customers coming back
- A prediction-market position has a live price. Customers check it, and can exit before resolution at a market price, which gives them a reason to open the app between results.
- Combos across markets, in preview
- Combos on prediction markets, so a customer used to building a parlay can build one here too. They are in preview, on a practice board.
Beside the book, not instead of it
None of this asks your traders to do anything. The prices come from live markets and your desk is not asked to price an election or a rate decision, and settlement arrives at your webhook on each contract's published rules rather than through your grading team. Sport can be a category inside the surface too, or switched off where your own book already covers it, and that choice is configuration per operator.
What it does to your own numbers is yours to measure, and the regulator's monthly figures above are a fair baseline to measure it against: compare your own quiet months with the same months a year earlier, before and after launch.
Where to go next
The commercial detail is on prediction markets for sportsbooks, the fast product on five-minute crypto markets, and combos, in preview, on prediction market combos. For the build, read how to add prediction markets to a sportsbook.
References
- 1Illinois Gaming Board. Sports Wagering Reports: Completed Events Sport Detail (accrual), January to December 2025. Accessed 10 October 2026.
- 2Pew Research Center. Prediction markets' trading volume doubled between May and July, largely driven by sports. Published 23 September 2026.
