Sports bettors dream of weekends like this. Conversely, sports books dread them in the worst possible way. And to the dismay of the latter, this weekend saw the shit really hit the fan.
College football and NFL action last weekend saw arguably one of the biggest weekends for bettors in recent history. Live parlay tickets abounded as winners from Saturday’s college football games spilled into the next day into the NFL. And to the chagrin of the books, those live parlays – worth 40-to-1 and higher – with astronomical payouts went into Sunday a game or two from cashing it handsomely.
And when the NFL games conclude, the results, according to LVH SuperBook vice-president Jay Kornegay, was downright ugly.
“It’s a little rough right now,“ Kornegay said late Sunday afternoon. “We had a lot of liability left over in parlays from Saturday that carried over into today.”
It appeared, according to SportingNews’ Micah Roberts, that a lot of books on Las Vegas faced similar conundrums, the result of getting beat down on Saturday and having to face the growing possibility of facing bigger loses the next day stemming from parlays that covered both college football and the NFL.
While Kornegay acknowledged that he didn’t have the same threats of getting punched in the gut from those mammoth parlays, his book still felt the sting of getting bum rushed by bettors, so much so that he even admitted to being anxious of how the NFL games would play out early in the morning. “We felt like we were in a hole before the day even started,” Kornegay said.
Kornegay’s ‘feeling’ quickly turned into reality when the favorites went 6-2 in the 1 p.m. games, highlighted – or “low-lighted” – by the Saints covering the spread as 1.5-point favorites with huge money from bettors on the Saints side, including some that were part of huge parlays from the previous day’s college football action.
Although the two 4 p.m. games went the way of the books, the Sunday Night Football showdown between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cincinnati Bengals, one of the marquee games of the weekend, saw the books take one last beating from the public.
Fortunately for the books, the week’s NFL action ended on a somewhat positive note, albeit by way of the back-door. Thanks to the Detroit Lions scoring a meaningless touchdown in the waning seconds of their Monday Night Football game against the Chicago Bears, the Lions covered the 6-.5-point spread, thus lessening the blow of what has been a really, really tough weekend for Vegas books.
