Super Bowl Safety Cuts Into Sportsbook Profits
Sunday’s Super Bowl safety hurt the sportsbooks bottom line both in Vegas and across the Web.
At MGM, one lucky sports bettor reportedly made off with $50,000 after placing a $1000 wager on the safety being the first scoring play.
And there was more.
CNBC's Darren Rovell tweeted that Sportsbook.com took a $200 bet on a safety being the first score at +7,500, paying out at $15,000. And every Las Vegas book Covers.com spoke to Sunday evening admitted that single play was a major blow to their bottom line.
“Yeah, that one hurt for sure,” Jimmy Vaccaro, oddsmaker at Lucky’s Sportsbook said. “We still ended up all right in the end. That’s the first time in years we’ve been burned like that on a prop.”
The safety had only occurred in two prior Super Bowls. Gambling911.com even suggested coming into this past weekend that “the safety was probably due”. But as the first score of the game, that safety turned out to pay out in an even bigger way.
The excitement of the safety was so big, search traffic managed to take the Gambling911.com website down for approximately 15 minutes.
- Don Shapiro, Gambling911.com