Betting the Super Bowl only seems like a good idea

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This story appears in ESPN The Magazine’s Jan. 25 Place Your Bets Issue. Subscribe today!

Gambling on the Super Bowl is very fun. And one of the many joys of the biggest day on the American sports calendar is the hundreds of Super Bowl prop bets posted at Las Vegas sportsbooks.

But I would also not recommend gambling on the Super Bowl to anyone I care about. Because, as someone who foolishly moved to Vegas for a year, I can give you the informed scoop on how to pick the right side of a bet — and lose anyway. If your dream on Super Bowl Sunday is to stand in a crowded Vegas sportsbook as everyone else in the room cheers, here’s your chance.

Generally, if you’re looking for a prop bet with an edge in your favor, you’re going to want to look for a boring, low-return outcome with a strong likelihood of winning. I did just that for the second Super Bowl matchup between the Giants and Patriots at the end of the 2011 season, when I saw the odds for and against a safety taking place:

WILL THERE BE A SAFETY?

Yes +900

No -1300

The “yes” bet pays $1,000 ($900 profit) on a $100 wager, but the odds are not in your favor. A +900 bet on “yes” implies that a safety will take place 10 percent of the time, while the -1300 wager on “no” suggests that there won’t be a safety 92.9 percent of the time. (You might notice that these odds add up to 102.9 percent; that 2.9 percent amounts to the casino’s vigorish, the profit it hopes to lock in if it can get equal amounts of action on both sides of the bet.) As we’re looking to evaluate this bet from a bettor’s perspective, the goal is to figure out whether a safety is more or less likely to happen than either side of the line.



Source : ESPN