Super Bowl Prop Bets
From the shrewd to the ridiculous, you can put your money down on just about any situation
The one thing I didn't do during my year in Vegas was stick around for the Super Bowl. Instead, I went to Indianapolis and saw the New York Giants blow out the overmatched New England Patriots. At least, that's what I remember having happened. Although I've moved out of Sin City and retreated East, I wanted to go back and spend one Super Bowl weekend in town to experience the electric energy and wondrously woeful decision making that goes into the heaviest-bet contest in American sports.
That starts today with this deep, deep dive into the world of Super Bowl prop bets. For the uninitiated, casinos around the world (like the LVH, whose list I'll be working from in this piece) produce hundreds of "prop bets" or "exotics" that allow you to bet on events that are, at worst, tangentially related to the Super Bowl. How slim can the relationship be? Oh, you'll see. And if you're just overwhelmed by seeing any sort of line, I'll be explaining the different types of bets along the way.
I went through the prop bets for last year's game,1 and while I didn't publish the bets that I ended up making, I took the safest bet on the market and saw it lose for the only the sixth time in Super Bowl history. But more on that later. If I have one basic strategy for betting props, it's to try to bet against what I would imagine a drunk idiot coming to Vegas would bet two hours before gametime. Of course, I also have to make sure that I'm not the drunk idiot when I'm placing the bets. I'll post a list of the props I took on Twitter this weekend.
There's no way I can go through each of the hundreds of different bets that the LVH offers, so as I did last year, I'm going to try to highlight bets in a number of different categories that might interest you both in terms of your take on the outcome of the game and the various different categories of minutiae surrounding the contest.
Five Prop Bets for a Close Game
Will there be overtime?
Yes: +700
No: -1000
Let's start with one of the simplest ones to understand. As a quick primer, I'll explain how these bets work. The "+700" figure next to "Yes" means that a bettor would receive $700 back in profit if they bet $100 on the event occurring before it actually happened. If you held this winning ticket with $100 and brought it to the counter, you would be handed back $800 (the $700 profit plus your initial $100 bet). The "-1000" figure next to "No" replaces the positive sign at the beginning with a negative sign; it indicates that you have to bet the dollar amount in question to win $100. In this case, if you wanted to win $100 betting against the possibility that there would be overtime, you would need to bet $1000. If there's no overtime, you would win $1100 (the $100 profit plus your initial $1000 bet).
Where it makes sense, I'll try to chip in with some logic as to whether the bet makes sense. In this case, the "Yes" bet suggests that overtime will occur 12.5 percent of the time, while the "No" bet suggests that the game will end in regulation 91.7 percent of the time. Eagle-eyed readers will note that those two figures add up to 104.2 percent; that 4.2 percent is the vig that Vegas takes from the bets. To estimate what the "true" probabilities are, we have to adjust for the vig, which reduces the "Yes" probability to an even 12 percent and the "No" probability to exactly 88 percent....
...Five Prop Bets for a Big Niners Win......MUCH MORE
Grantland followed that up with "All the Prop Bets Fit to Print" today:
From overtime to Madonna's hair, there are plenty of opportunities to throw your money around on Super Bowl Sunday...Finally, the guy who first exposed me to Grantland, former MarketBeat and WSJ Online Poobah, Mark Gongloff with some, ahhh, different, prop bets:
StockRay Virtual Market Lets You Bet On Obama, Kim Kardashian, France, For Some Reason
Hi, there, do you like things? You know, things. Different kinds of things, like President Obama and Kim Kardashian and...uhhh...France?
Well, you're in luck because now you can express your enjoyment for those random things at a new virtual stock market called StockRay, which has recently gone live.
I may end up wasting a lot of time on this, but then again I may soon wander away from boredom. It's still too early to tell. StockRay says it is a New York-based startup founded by a couple of guys, "Treymour and Matt," who graduated from Harvard "a few years ago." So obviously we'll be talking about an IPO in five years. Or not! It depends on how much more engaging this thing gets.
One thing that makes me want to do more with it is that I desperately want to short the vastly overpriced Black-Eyed Peas. But I just got started and don't have enough fake cash to borrow Black-Eyed Peas shares, which recently traded at nearly 24 fake dollars.
So I bought 20 shares of Yoga to start off with and am slowly building my portfolio. Yoga seems underpriced to me at $9.83. Obviously the market doesn't have a lot of liquidity just yet, because my purchase of 20 shares of Yoga a little while ago seems to have helped jack up the price on the day.
So I've been searching for other random things to buy -- and what's available is super random, from Atheism to Downton Abbey. There is even a thing called White Collar. I don't even know what that is, but it is down 3 percent on the day.
The most actively traded stock appears to be Beer, up 44 percent on the day. Since buying Yoga, I have also bought shares in Gun Control and Stephen Colbert (both value plays)....MUCH MORE
