“And we did a better job than most books. Everyone else was killed a lot worse,” said Mr. Vaccaro, who now runs a sports book at the South Point Hotel Casino and Spa.
The rumors were immediate due to TD’s and subsequent huge public payments. Newspapers and local TV stations began calling Vaccaro and his fellow bookmakers to ask about it. The year after the Super Bowl, the media inquired about a unique prop bet, and it has been increasing every year since.
“Yes, every bookmaker since then has tried to outdo each other with creativity and it keeps growing,” said William Hill director Nick Bogdanovich, a 30-year veteran of the sportsbook industry. “The Super Bowl is really the only mass-participating game and there’s a natural tendency to want them to bet on the props. An ordinary man there will watch the game or go to a party with his friends and he wants to have action on 10 or 15 different props for $20 or $25 each. And that adds up.”
As such, Westgate’s vice president of game and sports operations, Jay Kornegay, even goes so far as to say that he expects proposal bets to make up more than 50 percent of his book’s Super Bowl handles this year. Of course, Westgate (formerly Las Vegas Hilton) has become a mecca for proposal bets. Kornegay spent most of the last week talking about proposal bets on ESPN, the New York Post and other national broadcasters. 온라인경마
“That didn’t happen five or 10 years ago,” said Jeff Sherman, Westgate Assistant Sportsbook manager. “And it’s one of the best things really about the spread of prop betting. It’s getting more and more mainstream every year. Everybody’s talking about it.”
But Sherman apologized in advance if he didn’t talk too much about the topic, as he had to spend 12 hours a day for two consecutive days early last week to complete a 35-page vote of supporters announced by Westgate last Thursday.
“It’s hard work, no doubt,” he admitted. “But when everything is said and done and we get to this point now, we have a great sense of accomplishment because we know how popular they are and how much everyone enjoys them, even though it’s a very boring process.”
The process of predicting possibilities actually started long ago last week. Sherman said he and his staff had already entered players and numbers from the Carolina-New England Super Bowl into the computer about two weeks ago. When Denver beat the Patriots in the AFC Championship, Sherman came in Monday morning to replace all New England players with the Broncos and collect all the statistics.
Last Tuesday and Wednesday, Sherman and Randy Blum, another superbook supervisor, met at Ed Salmons’ manager’s house from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sherman said the trio made numbers, created and considered new and unique offerings, and sometimes participated in passionate discussions about where numbers should be, with the help of “a lot of pizza and beer.”
Sherman said, “We’ve been working on this for a long time, most of the time around 80%. Our numbers are close enough, so there’s not much discussion, and we move on.” The book added that it increases the prop betting limit for the Super Bowl from $1,000 to $2,000. “But sometimes we really have a little bit of information back and forth and we have to make our case for why there’s a number and explain why.”
Cornegei is also a big part of the process and has been connected all day. This year Sherman’s wife, Christie, put it into practice and devised one of the wildly popular cross-sport bets at Westgate on Thursday night. Rory McIlroy is over par in the fourth round of the Dubai Desert Classic Open (+0.5, -170) compared to the Broncos” defense’s Super Bowl numbers (-0.5, +150).
“They’re very creative, and Jay and his teams have done a great job with props for the last 10 years,” Baccaro said. “It’s really benefited all of us. I wouldn’t be surprised if our prop handling was around 40 percent this year. It jumped a lot because it was about 25 percent two years ago and 33 percent last year. It’s just something that keeps increasing.”
Offshore, BetOnline Sportsbook Brands Manager Dave Mason expects Super Bowl prop betting handles to be around 20%, and says the book will offer more than 300 varieties by the start.
Books outside the city are not limited to bets placed on actual stadiums, so they can be much more creative and go far beyond the realm of sports. Last year, BetOnline featured a prop called “Shall I Show You Katy Perry Crack?” on its halftime show, and it received tremendous action with mainstream media attention.
