Betting company, SportPesa last week awarded Samuel Abisai, Sh221 million after he correctly predicted the outcome of 17 football matches on which he had placed a Sh200 bet.
Such a windfall from a relatively small bet is set to draw many more consumers to try their luck in gambling, with hopes of such a dramatic win.
“Before the win of the mega jackpot on Sunday, the number of people betting on it had flattened, such that there was no record of any new interest in it, but now we expect it to surge in the coming days as we have proved that it is not unwinnable,” said Captain Ronald Karauri, the CEO of SportPesa.
“People who had stopped betting on it have resumed and we have recently received numerous queries from consumers who have never placed a bet on how they can take part in it.”
The awarding of the jackpot is thus set to give SportPesa an edge over its competitors in sub-Saharan Africa’s largest betting market.
Kenya has the highest number of gamblers in Africa among youth between the ages of 17-35, at 76 per cent, according to a recent survey by GeoPoll. It is also the leader on the amount of money spent on gambling, with consumers spending Sh5,000 per month, betting once a week on football games.
This has led to a surge in the number of betting firms in the country, all eyeing such a lucrative market.
International firms such as Betway and Dafabet have intensified the competition with additional offers of lucrative betting wins. This has increased the range of choices for consumers, meaning they could easily switch to another betting platform if they perceive one as ‘too-hard’ to win.
However, SportPesa’s latest mega jackpot win is now the biggest ever won in Africa and the betting company is likely to pull ahead as a platform of choice.
“The first thing that will register in the mind of a consumer is that this is a credible platform or rather company, and it keeps its end of the bargain, which also serves as an advertising tool for them as it will be the topic of discussion in the platforms offering free exposure for it, thus increasing its consumer database and customer retention,” said Harry Bor, a Kenyan betting analyst.
“Secondly, the higher the jackpot win, the more consumers will be enticed by the next one, as they believe they have a chance of winning from that particular company.”
To understand why consumers increase purchases from a betting platform that has just awarded a jackpot win, economists Melissa S. Kearney and Jonathan Guryan observed the habits of consumers in the US following a big lottery win.
They found that consumers believe that success through an apparently random event leads to further success, thus lottery ticket sales of a particular store increase by 38 per cent if the winner of the jackpot bought it there.
“This explanation could be driven by either of two related cognitive biases. Consumers might appeal to the ‘hot hand’ fallacy and expect positive serial correlation or they might believe in nonexistent variation in luck across stores and infer from the signal of a win which store is lucky,” read the paper published in the American Economic Review titled, Gambling at Lucky Stores.
“From our study we found that the week following the sale of a large-prize winning ticket, the winning store experiences a 12 to 38 per cent relative sales increase for the winning lotto game.
“We find that the effect dissipates over time but that sales at stores that sell winning tickets remain elevated for up to 40 weeks, conditional on existing sales.”
- African Laughter
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