The Super Bowl bets are in, and as of Sunday morning Vegas bookies have made the Seahawks vs Patriots Super Bowl a “pick ’em” game. But does having the Super Bowl betting odds equal for both teams mean Vegas will be any worse off than it was in 2014? It could.
Those 50/50 Super Bowl betting odds certainly indicate fans are split between who they think will win. In fact, it wasn’t until Vegas started seeing “big, influential money” on the Seahawks that moved the Super Bowl to a pick-em against the Patriots. Prior to that, the Pats were favored by up to as much as 5 points and as little as one point.
With that big influx of Seahawks-sided cash, the game went from competitive on the field to competitive off the field. Last year an influx went in the opposite direction, with fans expecting the Seahawks to lose to the Denver Broncos.
That ended up favoring Vegas at the end, when the Seahawks won the Super Bowl and fans lost their money. This year the Super Bowl bets seem to indicate fewer people are betting against Seattle, and with both the game and the betting money being a split, Vegas may not see the same win for the house.
Not that Vegas will cry too loud. According to the Nevada Gaming Control, the state’s 187 sports books won just more than $227 million from sports bets in 2014, an all-time record. The total amount of sports bets placed last year was $3.9 billion, also a record.
Football accounted for the lion’s share of that income, with sports books winning $113.73 million on a total of $1.74 billion in football bets. Those figures reflect both college football and pro football.
Of that $113 million, a record $19.6 million was won by the sports books on Super Bowl bets for the Seahawks vs Broncos game. With most of the bets placed going in the Broncos’ favor, Vegas loved Super Bowl XLVIII. In fact, Super Bowl bets were a large part of why people lost more in sports betting in 2014 than ever before.
Now that the odds are a wash, if fans follow suit and even their bets, Vegas may not make as much money in the Seahawks vs Patriots Super Bowl. With that said, if the total amount of Super Bowl bets is higher than last year, even that lower winning percentage could nab the Vegas sports books more cash.
That’s a big “if.” As of Saturday night, reports out of Vegas indicated that most bets were going in favor of the Patriots, though the pro-Seahawks bets tended to be larger. Though The Wynn and Stratosphere indicated they had the Patriots favored, most books were rooting for the Seahawks.
