Super Bowl betting: Insider outlines doomsday outcome for sportsbooks

The Super Bowl usually serves as the largest gambling festival of the calendar year, with billions of dollars pouring in through all the various sports betting platforms for wagers on the final football game of the NFL season.

With such an immense handle, it’s hard for the sportsbooks to have a losing day. However, executives at MGM believe there is one particular outcome that would leave a sizeable dent in their company’s checkbook. According to John Ewing of BetMGM, his coworker, Tristan Davis, a Senior Manager at BetMGM, has said that a narrow San Francisco victory would really be the worst-case scenario for their sportsbook.

“San Francisco winning by one point would be the worst outcome for the sportsbook allowing Niners futures and Chiefs spread bets to all cash,” Davis said, according to Ewing.

The 49ers have been in the mix for a Super Bowl the last several years, and per this tweet from Ewing of Davis’ quote, it appears bettors have a pretty large chunk of change invested in a San Francisco Super Bowl on season-long future bets, meaning most of these bettors took the Niners to win it all long before the Super Bowl round of the playoffs. 

Meanwhile, even with San Francisco favored, many bettors may have simply taken the 49ers on the money line rather than have to worry about them covering what is currently a two-point spread.

In fact, sports betting expert Ben Fawkes reported earlier in the week that the three largest bets on Super Bowl 58 at the time had all come in on the Niners money line. The largest sum was a $1 million bet at -120, while the next two biggest bets were each for $500,000, placed with Ceasars and DraftKings Sportsbooks. Both of those bettors took the bet on -125 odds, which would pay out $900,000 if they win.

But a San Francisco victory by just one point also satisfies the Kansas City spread. It’s vacillated around two points in favor of the Niners but has never dropped below 1.5 points. So, if the Chiefs were to lose by just a point, they’d still cover the point spread after they’ve gotten more of the public money against the spread — which would be bad for the sportsbooks.

And since there’s plenty of potential one-score outcomes, the people behind the sportsbooks will be holding their breath hoping that exact situation does not unfold.