Congratulations to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in adding a second NFL title to a franchise that entered the league in 1976 as an expansion team. They went 0-14 that season.
You should also congratulate quarterback Tom Brady for laying claim to his seventh-career Super Bowl title since being selected by New England in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL Draft.
As dominant as Brady and Tampa Bay’s victory was, Las Vegas sportsbooks are still at the top of the list when it comes to Super Bowl wins. In what has become the biggest single-day betting event of the year, the books once again came out on top against the bettors.
Soon after that game was in the books, the Nevada Gaming Control Board released betting figures for sportsbooks on a statewide basis. In what has been a rough patch for land-based casinos and sportsbooks across the state, those numbers were far better than expected.
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The overall handle for the game was $136.1 million. This figure refers to the total amount of money in sports wagers. The revenue generated from that handle for Nevada sportsbooks was $12.6 million. This equates to a hold percentage of 9.2.
The book’s hold is the difference between the money paid out on winning bets and the money collected plus juice (commission) on losing wagers. Anything above five percent is good. The 9.2 percent hold is a rather impressive figure.
The betting handle for this year’s game was actually down 12 percent from last year’s figures. The $154.7 betting handle in Nevada for Super Bowl Sunday in 2020 was the second-highest ever in the state.
Yet, the books make their money off the hold which was much higher than initial projections. Mike Lawton is a senior analyst for the state’s Gaming Control Board. He released the following statement concerning this year’s numbers:
“Overall, considering the difficult operating environment Nevada sportsbooks were facing, these figures represent the fifth-highest total all-time for Super Bowl betting volumes since Nevada has been recording these figures. That being said, the Board is very pleased with these results.”
The US sports betting industry as a whole has been on an incredible run since last July (unlike these teams that have lost the Super Bowl in a big way). As more and more states open their boarder to legal sports betting, the monthly handle is exploding behind a high rate of growth.
Nevada is clearly the most established market in the country with heavy concentrations of land-based retail sportsbooks in Las Vegas and Reno. The state continues to post some impressive volume numbers in online betting through mobile sportsbook apps.
In comparison, New Jersey books took in $117.4 million in bets on the big game. They walked away with a 9.6 percent hold to generate $11.3 million in revenue.
Overall, the Garden State has been shattering monthly records for its total sports betting handle, winning as hard as these teams that won the Super Bowl). While it is projected to take over the top spot in the US when it comes to legal sports betting overall, Nevada once again proved that it is still king when it comes to betting on the biggest game of the year.