FanDuel closed the physical space where customers placed sports bets at Fairmount Park, the horse-racing track in Collinsville, Illinois, on Monday. Vince Gabbert, the track's general manager, told St. Louis Public Radio the move was part of FanDuel's restructuring across the country. Horse-racing wagering continues, the closure does not affect the track's operations, and a FanDuel spokesperson said customers holding winning tickets can collect them at the Fairmount Park sportsbook through June 22.
On its own, a single shuttered betting counter at a regional racetrack is a small story. The reason it matters is what it sits next to: a national FanDuel cost-cutting program, a near-identical closure by DraftKings two weeks earlier, and an Illinois tax regime that has made the math on physical sportsbooks increasingly hard to justify.
The numbers tell the story
The handle figures explain why the betting window was expendable. From January through March, customers placed about 21,000 in-person sports wagers at Fairmount Park, totaling a little over $1.3 million, according to Illinois Gaming Board data. Over the life of the track's online operation, more than 26 million bets have been placed online, worth more than $928 million.
Even accounting for the fact that the retail figure is a single quarter and the online figure is cumulative, the gap is enormous. Annualize that retail quarter and you get roughly $5 million a year in physical handle sitting beside an online business that has done nearly a billion dollars in wagers. The physical counter was a rounding error on the online operation it was attached to. That is not unique to Fairmount Park; it is the shape of the entire US market, where the overwhelming majority of sports betting happens on phones.
There is a regulatory wrinkle worth knowing here. Illinois requires online sportsbooks to be tethered to a licensed physical facility, which is why a small downstate racetrack ended up anchoring a near-billion-dollar online book in the first place. The retail window was, in large part, the legal anchor for the online business rather than a profit center of its own. As the economics and the rules evolve, operators are shedding the physical overhead while the online machine keeps running.
It is not just FanDuel: Illinois is squeezing retail
Two weeks before FanDuel pulled out of Fairmount Park, DraftKings closed its retail sportsbook at Wrigley Field in Chicago, on May 31. DraftKings was blunt about why, and it was not online cannibalization alone. It pointed at taxes. Illinois raised its sports-betting tax to a tiered structure topping out at 40% in 2024, added a per-wager tax of 25 cents in 2025, and in January 2026 Chicago layered on a 10.25% tax on adjusted gross sports-betting receipts. DraftKings said the cost of operating in Illinois, including that tax structure, made it hard to justify continued investment in a standalone retail sportsbook.
The per-bet tax is the quiet killer for retail specifically. A flat 25 cents on every wager barely dents a $500 online parlay, but it is brutal on the high-volume, low-stake tickets that define an in-person betting window. Stack a 40% state rate and a Chicago-area municipal tax on top, and a physical book doing a few million dollars a year in handle simply cannot clear the bar. FanDuel framed its Fairmount Park exit as restructuring rather than taxes, but the two closures rhyme: in Illinois, the standalone retail sportsbook has become the least defensible line on the ledger.
The bigger restructuring
The Fairmount Park closure is also a concrete piece of the broader FanDuel retrenchment we covered last week, when the company laid off several hundred employees in its third round of cuts in a year. The throughline is the same: trim the low-return pieces of the build-out era (retail counters, legacy media, headcount) and redirect money toward the parts of the business that scale. For both FanDuel and DraftKings, that increasingly means online and prediction markets, where DraftKings just reported its event-contract arm topping $1 billion in annualized consumer volume. Closing a betting window that handled $1.3 million a quarter is exactly the kind of decision that program produces.
What happens to Fairmount Park
The track itself is not going anywhere, and in fact it is investing. Accel Entertainment, the Chicago-based gaming company, bought the Metro East racetrack in 2024 and changed the name back to Fairmount Park (previous owners had sold naming rights to FanDuel, which kept running the sportsbook). Accel has since started roughly $100 million in renovations, including a temporary casino with electronic table games and a restaurant, with a permanent casino targeted for 2028. The 101st season of live horse racing opened in mid-April and runs through late October.
That is the more important pivot underneath the sportsbook headline. The on-site gambling revenue at Fairmount Park is going to come from a casino floor, not a sports-betting counter. Losing the FanDuel window while building toward a permanent casino is a venue trading a marginal amenity for a real one.
What it means for bettors
If you bet in person at Fairmount Park, the practical points are simple: collect any winning tickets at the sportsbook by June 22, horse-racing wagering is unaffected, and online sports betting in Illinois continues as before. Nothing about this closure changes your ability to bet from your phone.
The broader signal is for anyone who prefers betting in person. Outside of full casinos, the physical sportsbook is becoming an endangered amenity, especially in high-tax states. Stadium and racetrack betting windows were a novelty of the early legalization years; the economics, and in Illinois the taxes, are steadily closing them. If you value the in-person experience, expect your options to keep narrowing to actual casinos, while everything else moves to apps and, increasingly, prediction markets.
Our take
This is a small closure with a clear lesson. The standalone retail sportsbook at a non-casino venue was always a fragile business: a legal-anchor or marketing amenity riding on top of an online operation that did all the real volume. Illinois's tax stack, the highest-profile per-bet tax in the country among them, turned fragile into unviable, and DraftKings said so out loud when it left Wrigley. FanDuel's quieter exit from Fairmount Park is the same calculation without the press release.
For the state, there is a cautionary note in here. Illinois has been the test case for how hard a legal market can be taxed, and the first visible result is operators withdrawing the physical, jobs-attached, locally taxed part of their footprint while the online business (and its handle) carries on. The bettors do not lose much. The shuttered betting windows, and the people who staffed them, are the cost.
Disclosure: BettingInUnitedStates earns affiliate commissions when readers open accounts with FanDuel and some other sportsbooks through links on this site. We cover the industry, including our commercial partners, on the same factual terms regardless; this note is here so you can weigh it for yourself.
Sources: St. Louis Public Radio, "FanDuel closes Fairmount Park's sportsbook in Collinsville" by Will Bauer (June 9, 2026), including Illinois Gaming Board handle data and comments from Fairmount Park GM Vince Gabbert; reporting on DraftKings' May 31, 2026 Wrigley Field closure and the Illinois and Chicago tax changes (CBS Chicago, Casino.org). Industry-context and bettor-facing analysis are our own editorial commentary. This article is informational and not betting advice.