When the BetMGM Sportsbook at Nationals Park opened last Monday, it became the first retail sportsbook connected to an MLB stadium.
A sign of the times, where leagues and teams are increasingly connected to the world of sports betting, the location is open year-round as a place fans can watch and wager on sports.
Physical sportsbooks are foreign to someone like myself who was introduced to the world of sports betting through the internet and mobile apps. Living in Maryland, where sports betting was just made legal a couple of months ago, I had only come across sportsbooks at casinos outside the state and was always too intimidated by all the unfamiliar numbers to figure out what they were all about.
However, now that I have a clue – and plenty of experience crossing state lines to bet – I decided to take the short trip to the BetMGM at Nats Park to see what it’s all about.
The first thing that struck me about the place is how small it is relative to my expectations. In their announcement, the Nationals listed it as 4,000 square feet with a capacity of 187.
It’s not that the place was packed or anything – there were only a handful of people scattered throughout – but that’s to be expected late afternoon in the middle of the workweek. I do wonder what it looks like in the evening when games are going on. Or better yet, when baseball finally returns and thousands of Nats fans are flooding the Navy Yard section of Southeast DC.
It sits just outside the centerfield gate, and you only need to be within proximity of the sportsbook to place bets on the mobile app. So, maybe that’s the method most people who want to bet take. But for someone just curious like myself, I imagine there’d be a little wait to get inside.
I appreciated the small number of people there at the time I arrived. I had my pick of seating – I went with a bar-side booth – and received excellent customer service. You need to show an ID and proof of vaccination before they let you in, and they conveniently accepted electronic proof of the latter. But everyone from the hosts to the servers were extremely nice and attentive.
As for the betting, the place has 17 kiosks along with six of your standard betting windows. I’m stuck in my ways, so I simply made a few bets from my table on the mobile app, while I worked on my laptop and enjoyed a plate of mambo wings. The wings were great, but the food menu isn’t too deep. The drink menu was definitely more extensive, which makes sense if the goal is to get people to make irrational decisions with their money. The bar is pretty big, too. Unless you go to a bartender, all ordering is done virtually.
Working there during the day was fine. But unless you want Soulja Boy telling your co-workers to kiss him through the phone, I wouldn’t recommend taking meetings there. The music – a solid mix of oldies R&B and 2000s hip-hop – plays at a good volume. There are also plenty of TVs – the Nats say 40 – to keep up with the sports action and live odds, though there wasn’t much to watch at the time I was there.
My only complaint is the vents blowing cold air on the bar booths. My bulky winter coat was too much to wear inside, and I made the mistake of wearing a simple t-shirt underneath. So I would recommend layering up to avoid being uncomfortable.
Overall, I enjoyed my experience. It’s definitely a place I’d visit again, though I feel like I picked the perfect time to go. BetMGM at Nationals Park serves its purpose of creating a nice atmosphere to get lost in sports and make some bets. As for my picks that day, those aren’t going so well. It was a bad day of NBA betting, but we still have some Super Bowl action left to put the cherry on this experience.
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